SIMULATE News: Filming a Book Trailer

Instead of writing a post apologizing for not blogging in forever, I'm going to give you peoples a very quick overview of what's happening in my writing life (which, coincidentally, has very little to do with writing.)

My WIP, SIMULATE, is currently in its third draft. For me, this means that I'm taking last year's nearly completed, 83k manuscript, and re-working it. Adding a bigger plot, changing scenes, taking some elements out, adding others, changing characters... it's basically a new novel. And it's always changing. I thought I had it figured out a couple weeks ago, but then I got some cool new ideas so I have to fit those in, too.

But what I really want to talk about is an exciting new project I've started with some friends. We're filming a book trailer for SIMULATE! It so happens that one of my good friends loves filming (she's going into a film program at university) and a lot of my other friends are actors/actresses, so I have the perfect people to make a trailer.

The style of trailer we've chosen is similar to the trailer for Veronica Rossi's UNDER THE NEVER SKY, which has various shots done as if the book was a movie. However, instead of having dialogue in the shots, we're just having the narrator do a voice-over for the whole trailer. So, it's sort of a cross between a more traditional book trailer and a movie trailer. I've been disappointed with a lot of book trailers I've seen recently, so I wanted to create one that would draw me in to the story.

We've filmed two days now, a total of about seven hours, and probably have about half of the footage that we'll need for the trailer. Since one of my friends who plays a main character is leaving on Saturday to go perform across the country, we had to hurry and do his scenes today. Even though we had to work quickly and try to adapt (filming a futuristic book trailer in little ole PEI isn't easy), I think everyone involved had fun. For instance, two of my friends got to do some epic fight scenes, which I really enjoyed. It helped that one of them managed to cut his arm on a tree branch, so we had real blood to work with... (don't worry, it was more of a scratch than a cut!)

There was one awkward part, though, where two of my friends had to kiss. We had to have the scene, since it's really pivotal in the book, but since one of my friends is dating (someone else), and the other has never been kissed, we made it a stage kiss instead. Still, they had to do it about ten times, which easy could have been awkward, but they were great about it. Even though they didn't actually kiss it looked real, which is what counted. Plus, afterwards my female friend got to really slap my guy friend, which definitely made up for the kiss. :)

Basically, that's what's happening in the world of SIMULATE. I'll try and post more often about the writing process, since this type of editing is new to me, and as soon as the book trailer is up I'll let you know!