Saturday, July 28, 2012

Creating Your Own Digital World



Y'know, I've been writing stories for a long time. But during all that time in creating larger than life characters, I never really focused on marketing them.

When I did decided that they needed to be displayed by some kind of media, I chose podcasting with my eye firmly on book trailers for the future.

Now, book trailers, I've found, can be done a number of ways.

Kelly Corrigan, writer of The Middle Place, did a six-minute public reading and put it up on youtube. It gave you a preview of the book and it got over 150,000 views.

Some have resorted to inter-cutting music with titles but with no voiceover. I've seen this done numerous times. I think Amanda Hocking has done this a couple of times.

But Scott Sigler, a regular on podiobooks, really opened it up when it came to hiring actors to act out a movie trailer version of the book.

While I would love to do the same thing I have a few things holding me back. No budget, no actors and no time.

So I began thinking, "Man, if I could only design everything like that game The Sims 3, it would be prefect."

I had worked with the game a couple of times, building sets and making short films of my family for my own amusement. I also got a hold of the PC game The Movies and toyed around with that.

Then a couple of years ago, I stumbled upon Moviestorm. It looks to me like they use the same physics engine like the last two games only this one is specifically for people who want to make short films or trailers.

So all of a sudden, it seems possible that in the very near future, I'll be creating Book Trailers made from digital characters. I used to love building sets, seeing all the pieces come together. I just hope they look as good as I imagined them.



The video above is the technical stuff.

Just look what happens when all the ingredients come together as someone recreates Jekyll and Hyde using this software.

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