This post was originally published at Novelicious.com and is now at WritingTipsOasis.com. WritingTipsOasis.com acquired Novelicious.com in June 2022.
Who knew that when I embarked on making a trailer for my latest novel, NO-ONE EVER HAS SEX IN THE SUBURBS, I’d end up shut in the utility room pretending to be a carrot having fake an orgasm with a welsh accent!
But let’s just rewind for a moment shall we. That was right at the end of the process, which had begun with lots of talking with my brilliant collaborator, Richard of Swainson Productions. He does the techie stuff, has great ideas and crucially doesn’t balk when I declare “Vegetables! Let’s have vegetables talking about their relationships woes.”
We’ve learnt that the key to effective trailers is to make sure it’s visual, impactful and based on a single-minded idea. So the first thing we established was that the key theme in my book is about how relationships are forced to evolve over time as circumstances change. Through a haze of caffeine we brainstormed visual and attention grabbing ways of communicating this and came up with talking vegetables! Cue an aubergine dressed as Princess Leia whose having problems with her husbands mid-life Star Wars fantasy and an ageing gentleman potato who’s wife has literally gone to seed.
We filmed for two days whilst I spent most of my time hidden behind kitchen cupboards wiggling fruit and veg on kebab sticks and trying work out how to make googly eyes stick onto pea-pods. A bizarre mixture of tedium and hilarity.
The voices were provided by anyone we could entice into our sound studio otherwise known as the utility room. My two children had no problem with being whining kid peas whilst next door’s builder, with his deep Derbyshire accent, turned out to be perfect for a sex starved carrot!
Finally Richard and myself edited the footage and it turns out it just like editing a novel. It’s all about pace and simplicity and not being afraid to cut things out. Still feel bad about cutting the sexy Italian grape short though!
This is the third trailer I’ve done now and I’ve realised I don’t just do them to help communicate I have a new book out. It’s also because I get to talk a lot, it stretches my creative mind and quite frankly I spend most of my time crying with laughing. I hope you like the result.