Student Video: Divorce Done Easier

Video book trailers are becoming very popular and most authors have no experience with video at all. So, this is a potentially profitable skill for anyone who considers themselves pretty creative and can learn the basics of either using PowerPoint for their video or Camtasia Studio.

The book trailer below was just created by one of our students, Doug Green from www.DougGreeneMedia.com. Doug’s background is photojournalism, so he loves working with photos whenever he can. We think he did a terrific job on this trailer for one of his clients. Notice how well the video flows, the emotion he conveys with just the photos and text on the screen, and how he uses the pan and zoom feature in Camtasia to provide the movement across the photos.

After reviewing the video, I asked Doug to just answer two simple questions:

1. What did he think went right during the video production and

2. What went wrong

Here are his replies. You’ll see my comments in parentheses in bold.

What Went Right:

1. The client left the entire video up to me after seeing the book trailer for my own book. So I went ahead and scripted it, came up with the story arc, and the words used on the slides. (It’s always nice when the client gives you free reign to be creative-but always remember to create a storyboard for their approval prior to putting a lot of time into the video-MS).

2. Music – There are 3 specific sections to the video including 1) what happened: Marriage goes bad; 2) Work the pain: Divorce sucks, 3) Solution: There is a better way. I found music on VideoBlocks to go with each section. (Music can be critical in providing the emotional backdrop for a book trailer. Spending extra time on this step is worthwhile-MS).

3. Words – I thought up the words for each of the slides, gave them what I thought was reasonable time, and coupled them together in Camtasia 8. I then had the client look at this and she liked it. (Notice how simple the words are and how just a few here and there tell the complete story-MS).

4. Images – Used a few images that she had, but mostly scoured online for them. Found many via Pixabay (free!) (Great choice of images and Pixabay is someplace new to me. I’ll check that out!-MS).

So, all in all it just flowed together. I kept plugging away at it a couple hours/day.

What Went Wrong

1. I’d have to think about this. but maybe the amount of time it took. Between planning, scripting, creating the wording, finding images, editing some of them in Photoshop, during various renders, deciding on transitions, etc. – I probably have close to 12-16 hours into this. (That is not an unreasonable amount of time to put into a project like this. Just document your time so you can be sure to charge appropriately for your efforts-MS).

2. In retrospect I think I could cut down on it some – esp. in finding images. I need to find a better outlet for securing great images quickly (I like Dreamstime.com. The prices are reasonable and they have a large selection-MS).

3. This was all done in Camtasia (no PowerPoint whatsoever). Not sure if I could do it any faster in PowerPoint or not. I find 99% of the transitions I need are right there in Camtasia. The idea of doing them in PPT, pulling them into Camtasia – and then having to go back into PowerPoint again if I want to make changes – just seems like an unnecessary step to me. But maybe there are some tricks in there I don’t know?(I was surprised at first to hear that he did this in Camtasia, but then I remembered all the zooms and pans – easy to do in Camtasia – very hard to do in PowerPoint. I see no reason not to do the whole thing in Camtasia. MS)

If you have any comments for Doug, please leave them in the comments section and again – if you would like someone to create a book trailer for you, find his portfolio at DougGreeneMedia.com.