and I didn’t realise what I was getting into. I was enamoured of all the book trailers of the Young Adult books that I’d seen on YouTube, and I wanted one, too. I’d emailed my publisher and they’d refused, so I thought that it was time for me to take matters into my own hands and to do one myself.
Naturally, I wanted something beautiful and painterly, like this:
Night Light from Qing Han on Vimeo.
But due to time and budget constraints, and the fact that the animator that I’d commissioned to do this has a day job, we couldn’t do something painterly and she had to temper my expectations. If I wanted to do something like the above video, it would take a year and probably buckets of money. I am not made of money, and this is only possible in the future when someone makes a transmorgrifier or something. Also, working with lots of colour was more challenging and would take more time. Duh, right? We were working with a timeline of two months to get everything done, including the sound, but all I wanted was the visuals first and I’d think about the sound later.
I really wish I hadn’t done that, and I wish I had known a little more about video editing. I also wish I had looked into appropriate sounds and music for the ideas I had, instead of thinking about it later, when he footage was done. But I’m getting ahead of myself, because I had to write the script, first. So, I wrote it down, laid out the directions, and my animator storyboarded it for me. She let me have a look at first, and I okayed it after some questions. I didn’t think of myself as very fussy, so this was relatively quick.
Then, she animated it, keeping me in the loop of what the progress was like, and it was pretty good, considering that something that was done at the last minute, and that she sacrificed her time to do this for me. Then, I showed it to my significant other, who complained that the trailer was supposed to be more like a teaser and not like someone spelling out the synopsis for them. So, I asked my wonderful animator to make the changes, and everything was fine.
This took about a month to do.
After that, I had to do sound. And let me tell you, putting sound in a video is freaking expensive.
I’m not going into the numbers, here, but suffice to say, I realised that I couldn’t buy and slap some stock sound effects and music and call it a day. Nope. I have to buy royalty free music, cut it, and look around. And let me tell you, searching for royalty free music is a pain, especially when music libraries conflate Japanese, Chinese, Burmese, Indian and basically all Asian music into this category. Traditional Chinese music is different from Indian music, mind you. So, I gave up. This had to be done by people who have mad skills, so I asked my publisher if they knew people, who knew people, and so on.
Turns out they did, so I liaised with two companies, and picked the one that seemed super enthusiastic about the project. Kudos to you guys from 101 Studios.
And this is where I sigh in despair, because although the sound was impeccable, the voiceover wasn’t. They had gotten an American lady to say it, and while her tone was great, she could not say Chinese names. I actually cringed when I heard the voiceover. I’d wanted a Chinese person who could say Chinese names, and so, I made an effort to be more specific this time. By then, it was about two weeks to my book launch, and I was panicking.
So, the sound guys used someone else, but to me, it didn’t seem any better. I figured that I would just stitch the sound together and screen it at the conference.
Here’s the thing: I did not imagine how difficult it would be to get appropriate sound, racist categories notwithstanding. I also wondered why the company chose to pick a white voiceover, when her voice was highly unsuitable to begin with. I should have made myself clearer for sure, but such an unabashedly Chinese book warrants a Chinese voice, especially when there are Chinese names in it.
TL;DR–racism there, everywhere you go, and people have internal biases. Nonetheless, I’m so very glad that I have such a cool trailer.