In Darkness Bound

When you’re trying to sell a book in a crowded market you have to come up with all sorts of ways in which to draw attention to it without incurring such costs as to make the attempt economically irrational. There aren’t a lot of free venues for promotion left out there in the Internet and many of those that do exist are limited in scope and in the breadth of the audience they reach. Moreover, those one might logically avail oneself of often have onerous restrictions that pretty much preclude using them as a means of solicitation. Most forums, for example, won’t allow an author to announce his/her book to others in the forum, this being seen, apparently, as a commercial transaction and a violation of the forum etiquette. I speak from experience.

 

I’m still working on ideas to develop awareness of my novel, but progress has been slow and unbearably frustrating. I find myself depressed by the entire process and find myself faced with the prospect of never selling more than a handful of copies. A bitter pill to swallow, considering how much time and effort I invested in writing my book. Still, the game isn’t over yet.

 

One idea I struck upon was having some sort of ‘trailer’ for the book: a brief movie-like promotional of clips edited together that would give people a visual impression of the novel. A picture, as they say, is worth a thousand words. Of course, I could never afford to hire actors and build sets or pay skilled people to create the sort of fantastic CGI effects that would really impress and do the novel justice. Nevertheless, the idea stuck with me, so I decided to take a crack at animating a few brief scenes from the novel.

 

Now, I’ve always loved animation—have always had a real passion for it. That said, I’ve never actually done any, and have never had any sort of training in it whatsoever. Nor do I have any of the software designed for that sort of thing. The best I could come up with was an old drawing program called Painter Classic and a great little piece of freeware I found called ImageToAvi. The latter enables you to take still images and compile them into avi files, one of the key components in producing an animation.

 

As you are probably aware, a film is basically just a series of still images, each of which varies incrementally from the previous one, so that when you run them at speed you create the illusion of movement. I first became fascinated with this fact in the sixties when I was a kid. Back then there was a period when one of the cereal companies was including flipbooks of scenes from hockey games in each ‘specially-marked box.’ As I recall there were blue and red ones (blue being the Leafs and red being the Habs); and though each one constituted no more than a couple of seconds of film, I thought they were fantastic. I didn’t even really know much about hockey and didn’t watch it at that time, but none of that mattered. All I cared about was the mechanics of the things, the fact that with these small collections of stacked and stabled papers you could produce a moving image. That initiated my whole obsession with animation, and even after all these years I remain devoted to the art form. There was even a time when I seriously wanted to be an animator, but I just never thought I had the artistic skills for it and abandoned the notion.

 

To make my mini-movie trailer for In Darkness Bound, I drew on what I knew about animation and used the limited means available to me to craft a series of scenes which I then edited into one package using a standard video editing program. Each scene was made of ‘cels’ that I created in Painter Classic, drawn using my old Wacom Graphire Tablet. I made the cells 640 by 480 pixels and used various techniques to achieve very limited animation. The paint program was not geared for animation, but by using the ‘float’ and the ‘scaling’ options it was possible to manufacture the illusion of movement in various ways. Airbrushing, fading, and tedious ‘one cel at a time’ drawing helped to generate other effects.

 

Using this process I manufactured slightly more than 3300 cels, for a total running time of two minutes and seventeen seconds. I hope to expand it later, if I have time, but I confess that I’ve already spent far more on this than I probably should have. Not that I didn’t enjoy doing it, but the process was fraught with frustration at times, largely because of balky software and the limitations of the tools at hand. Nevertheless, I hope anyone who views the trailer of In Darkness Bound will at least come away with their curiosity piqued; and maybe if I’m lucky this will actually generate a few sales.

 

I’m keeping my fingers crossed.

 

One thing I got out of this little project is an even greater appreciation of just what goes into making an animated movie. It’s sad to think that the traditional cel type of animation has pretty much gone the way of the dodo. Disney closed down its feature film cel animation studio in the US, though it still has overseas studios producing direct-to-DVD features and television material. Most ‘animated’ features that appear in theaters these days are computer animated creations. Television remains one of the few bastions of old fashioned animation, though even much of what appears on the tube is produced using sophisticated software that pretty much bypasses the old acetate cel process entirely. With Harmony and Flash an episode of a given show can be created in the computer without ever having to resort to the long and tedious mechanics of animation that existed in the past. It’s cheaper, faster, and allows animators to create visuals that would have taken months to have achieved the old way – if they could have been done at all.

 

There’s a lot of amateur stuff out there on the Internet that puts my effort to shame. However, most of those people have more robust tools than I at their disposal and many of them have been making their own little features for years. This is my first effort, so I hope you’ll take that into account when you watch it. Maybe one day I’ll have more time and better equipment to create something a little more polished.

 

There’s no recorded dialogue or sound effects for the trailer, but I did mate the images with some music that I feel has just the right sound for what I’m trying to convey. If I ever do expand the trailer I may try to include some sound effects and dialogue to give it that extra punch. Until then, happy viewing!

 

If you want to leave any comments about the trailer or any other aspect of this website feel free to do so in the Guest Book. I hope to hear from you.

 

Lindsay H.F. Brambles, Ottawa, 2007

 

For optimum viewing of the trailer your best bet may be to go to YouTube to watch it. Just click on the following link and you should be taken to the video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CjISBJbQCqQ

 

 

To watch the trailer here just click on the movie poster above, or right click and use the 'Save Target As' option to download it to your computer. (Be forewarned, however, that I'm informed that even with a highspeed connection this can be slow.)