A Quiet Week in Lake Wobegon

Ahoy, Cruisers! Alice here.

Well, as you can tell from the subject, not much has been going on. At least, not much in the blog category of our lives. That's right: it's coming on to finals week, and the three of us have suddenly remembered that we actually do have other classes to worry about and thus have all been total gestresst--so stressed, in fact, that I can't even speak English properly anymore. Mensch.

I do, however, have a new and improved version of the book trailer to show you. This isn't the final cut, but it's pretty darn close. We've fiddled with a few things in this version--changed the font, changed the pacing, changed some pictures--and all in all we're happy with how it turned out. Just a few more things need tweaking before we're done! Total done! We shall keep you posted.

Technological Difficulties

Alice here. I hope you all enjoyed reading Lindsay's idyllic recounting of our video trailer experience because the followup tale is slightly more harrowing. Are you ready?

About two hours after class ended--so after about four hours of working on the trailer total--we were just about done: we just needed to fiddle with a couple of photos and export the trailer! Sarah and Lindsay headed out and left me in charge of the finishing touches. Little did they know what would ensue. . . .

First, half of our photos disappeared. I'm not quite sure why. They were displaying perfectly, and the next time I ran through the trailer they had been replaced by greenscreen. This was a source of great confusion to me, but, as a veteran Windows user, I simply deleted and reinserted them, and all seemed to be well.

Next I had to render the video. For those of you who aren't video editing whizzes, this just means--well, I'm not quite sure what the technical definition is. Sarah could probably tell you. Basically, before you've rendered anything, the video runs really choppily and skips and is generally unpleasant to watch; rendering fixes all that and makes the video ready for production. So it's something that really must be done. When I told Premiere Pro to render the video, though, it got about 5 percent in and stopped.

OK. I told it to render again. Three percent this time.

I moved the cursor right to the part that needed to be rendered, then asked the program to render again. It got through about ten seconds before stopping. So I proceeded to render the video in five- to ten-second chunks, all the way through.

With that finally finished, I told Premiere to export the file. This normally takes a bit of time--far longer than the actual length of the video--so when the progress bar disappeared after about thirty seconds, I was suspicious. Sure enough, when I opened the exported file, our video ran until just about "Girl dumps Boy" before cutting out. Not a very auspicious ending.

I'll spare you the details. Let's just say it was about 1:45 then, and by 2:30 I had at least six partial versions of the video exported. The computer lab assistant had no ideas, and nor did I, so I left to get some much-needed sustenance, intending to relocate my efforts to a computer in another lab.

Unfortunately, after I got to said other lab, I realized that I didn't have all the files that the video needed. I would, essentially, have to remake the entire trailer. No thanks.

The computer we had been working on, which had all the files we needed in the order we needed them, proved more than a little difficult to reclaim. During my time spent waiting, I came up with a list of possible problems and solutions to fix the trailer and make sure that exporting ran lickety-split. Thus armed, I loaded the file, hit "export," and prepared to do battle.

It ran through it all on the first shot. No problems. I will never understand Windows.

Book Trailer Round Two!

Hi! Lindsay here:

After a long, hard day of work on Thursday, we have what we think is a very close version to a final book trailer. Hooray! We started working on it in class on Thursday, but when class time was up we weren't ready to abandon what we had got going, so Alice and I stayed behind because we didn't have classes for a while. Sarah skipped her class class to stay and work--sshhhhh! She is dedicated! Plus it was fun.

As I mentioned in my very first blog entry, I have no experience with filming or editing. This project is definitely a learning experience for me. On Thursday Sarah was in the driver's seat for a while and then she asked if I want to try. Doing my best to contribute, I said YES! Our work was the repetitive stuff of plugging in Janna's stick figure drawings (see earlier blog post for a glimpse of these in their early stage) and adding the titles and pictures that we mapped out in our book trailer outline a few weeks ago.

My favorite drawings were Janna's stick picture of pink tasks, boy dumps girl (tears), and boy comes crawling back. Don't they all!

We had to resize each picture and center it in the movie Premiere Pro software. Then we added the title to each picture. This part is actually very easy if shown the proper way--and, of course, with two experts beside me.

One of my favorite add-ins to this book trailer was putting in actual pictures from Janna and Graeme's trip to match what idea we were conveying. For example, Janna demonstrates her taking on "pink" tasks with pictures of her sewing, cooking, and doing dishes. My most favorite are the pictures of the animal life and locals on the islands she visited.

After all the pieces were put in order, we edited how long each clip gets shown on the screen and cut it down after we read it out loud. Sarah felt goofy reading the text out loud in slow-mo to make sure viewers will have time to read it before another thing comes on the screen.

As the background music, we have Janna's song called "The Rock Song" that she wrote the lyrics to and a friend sang at her wedding. It was the perfect background music and the perfect sentimental touch to display her and Graeme's love story. I even learned how to fade a song out instead of having it stop abruptly. More pleasing to the ears. :)

All in all we think it is a good second draft and pretty close to ready. We got the video under two minutes which is perfect time for a book trailer to be.

Stay tuned for more updates on the book trailer. :)

New Flyer and an Early Sample of the Book Trailer!

Sarah here, with a quick update:

We have redone our flyer (yet again), and have two new versions to show you. We're now up to three various flyers. Which one do you like best? Let us know--send us an email or leave us a comment!

I have also put together a very rough, very simple example of part of our book trailer. A lot more work will go in to our book trailer, and it will be amazing when it is finished! But here is our work so far!



That's it for now! Don't forget, Janna is coming to the Garfield Book Company tomorrow at 6:30! See the previous blog entry for further details.

Janna Begins Work on the Book Trailer

Hello, Cruisers! (I, Sarah, have decided to name all you fans of The Motion of the Ocean Cruisers. It makes sense.)

Sarah here, posting on behalf of Janna. Last Tuesday, the whole gang met at the Garfield Book Company to discuss our plan of action for this blog and for the book trailer that we are creating. About two hours later, we had everything spelled out beautifully.

Janna has now begun the work on our book trailer. Because we were conversing via email, I have chosen to do this blog entry in email format. Janna is emailing in green, and I am emailing in blue.

At the end, I have attached for your viewing pleasure the images and videos that Janna sent to us for her preliminary work. Remember, the finished product will feature a lot more content, including narration and music!

- Sarah Wise

To: All

I played around with capturing me deleting/adding items (hearts, smiles, etc) all at once (instead of drawing them line by line, which appears pretty slow on screen). It's easiest for me to just screen capture me drawing the stuff, but if that is too hard for you to work with, let me know. Not sure how good I need to make these on my end and how much editing on your end will help.

- Janna

To: All

Janna,

I think this stuff is great! I personally love the videos, watching the stuff get drawn in. To cut down on time and to keep it more visually interesting, we could edit the videos to start with stick figures already drawn, minus their mouths (which create facial expressions).

For example:

We start with two stick figures with no mouths. The narrator explains that they meet, and the smiles pop on. They fall in love, and the hearts appear in the air. They break up, and the tears come.

- Sarah

To: All

Yay! Glad you like it! I absolutely understand what you're saying about the smiles, etc. Brilliant idea. I'll work on it tomorrow.

- Janna