The Unbearable Lightness of Book Trailers

Book Trailers. Here at Cautious Train, we have recently begun to build book trailers as one of our services. Take a look here to see what we mean. The research and competition-spotting for this particular segment of our tiny company has been an eye opener to say the least. But, before going any further, take a look at what we have so far.

1: John Connolly's "The Killing Kind" - John was very kind to let me use the permission on his book for this one and he even watched it himself, which was nice. This is the current flagship of our Book Trailer operation and it'd be great to know what you think of it - comment back on our Youtube or Vimeo :)

2. And then along came the completely made up "Orbit Runner", which came about as a test subject for a trailer style. I liked it so much that I turned it into a full trailer, complete with space scenes, smoky movie text and blockbuster straplines. Actually, all that's missing (I know I know, one of the things) is a movie-guy voice over. If you have a movie voice, then get in touch and we can lay down an audio track to die for.

 

So that is what we have so far and I can hear you all screaming "but what, oh Cautious Train, are you up against?" Well, to be honest, it varies. There are some eye-searing awful ones (and as we slowly move upwards in this chimaeric industry, we don't want to offend potential customers, so we certainly won't link to them) and some really quite clever ones, albeit with budget and celebrity-kudos.

Hold on hold on. Chimaeric. I was trying to get across that it was a many-headed beast, ravenous for blood. But likable, if you got the cuddly head. Ummm... let's kill this analogy before it gets out of hand. -stab-

Ahem. A good place to get a gauge of the recent book trailers is the Moby Awards, where they have the best of, but also the turkeys of the year... lets hope we eventually fall into the right category there :) There's an awful lot of deviation in the medium of book trailers at the moment and there are a lot of commentators talking about finding the right balance between book, film, trailer, live action etc etc. And I agree, it is a minefield. A bad trailer could happily backfire, possibly causing people who were passibly interested and might have picked the book up (or sucked it on to their ebook shelf) to be put off completely. 

But then again, it is a cheap method of marketing... (drumroll) at least it is if you choose Cautious Train! But clicking the links above will demonstrate a fair range on what is happening. As it stands, it's a blossoming industry, squatting between films and books like some strange weed twisting to get some sun.

So I'll write more as Book Trailers develop on Cautious Train.

Take care. Read books. Watch book trailers. But above all, be Cautious.

Tom of Cautious Train Productions.

Boiled down and packaged pretty

Quick video picks for the week, so here we go:

1: The Solipist - absolutely beautiful experimental piece that I've been wanting to put up here for ages, and now the time has come! Wonderful and consuming.
http://www.shortoftheweek.com/2012/03/05/solipsist/

2: Mega Man Dies At The End - Adding to the VIDEO game blog hangover, here's a little machinima piece that, well, as soon as you saw the title either you love or hate it.

That is all, bit of a self-geek out really, but hope you enjoyed,

Tom of the Cautious Train.

VIDEO games, part 2.

Spreading out from the first VIDEO games blog and holding tight to the analogy of two media continents converging, let's take a closer look at the strange islands that are appearing between these two vast mediums. There is a precedent being set by the true juggernauts of the gaming world. These huge franchises have the finances to greenlight non-traditional marketing (having ticked all the mainstream marketing avenues many times over) and this is where the interesting experiments happen.

First up, we have the Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 trailer:

When these live action game trailers started appearing, I was at odds with the idea of promoting something without a reference to the original medium. But then again, you barely know it's a McDonalds advert until the jingle catches you unawares. The Call of Duty franchise is all about the multiplayer and the interesting angle here is that you, as the player, are fully represented. The trailer isn't aimed at the recruitment of new players, it is deliberately playing into your canon knowledge as a Call of Duty fan and making that into, effectively, a short film.

We have a beginning, middle and an end. Characters are forever changed by their experiences. Big shot actors. Unlimited FX budget. AND it is showcasing the player experience. The contact area for involvement is huge.

Even further into this idea of player as character, as boundaries between the two are broken down, is the release of the next "There's A Soldier In All Of Us", the Call of Duty Black Ops trailer, which goes a step further, spawning it's own island chain that is spreading towards us as the user, rather than standard audience:

Or what about the Mass Effect 3 Live Action trailer?

It's a great showcase of world building and this is where the current power of cinema lies. Once you move away from the direct player experience and into the realm of side story, cinema can flex its traditional muscles. But are we relegating film to the banalities of the cut scene?

On the flip side of all of this are the future gen consoles, where we'll have our real time faces mapped onto the characters and the (multiplayer) gaming experience will step up a notch. These boundaries are only beginning to blur. If we're not sure how to categorise Jonah Hill playing you, then hold on tight. Like I said in the previous VIDEO games blog, we are living in a golden age of gaming, but we are at the beginning of it. Yes Elite was great and Silent Hill was scary, but in the next decade or two, we are going to see a wild synthesis of film and gaming, where these islands we're talking about are going to become landmasses and become stranger, bigger and more labyrinthine.

Stay Cautious.

Tom of Cautious Train.

Keeping your fingers on the pulse...

It's only in the last year, since the conception of Cautious Train really, that we have truly begun to embrace and familiarise ourselves with social media - Facebooking, Twittering and diving headfirst into the blogosphere. Now we thought the hardest part would be finding decent and read-worthy enough content to keep our own blog updated with. This has in fact proven a challenge, and only time will tell whether we are truly blog-worthy bloggers. But worst still is the feeling we've missed so much.


I stop by www.indiewire.com on a regular basis, but only of late. I know I'm only, like, 15 years behind the times! I'll be there, poring over fascinating blogs from industry stalwarts like Peter Bogdanovich (http://blogs.indiewire.com/peterbogdanovich/) and Ted Hope (http://blogs.indiewire.com/tedhope/), and all I can help thinking is where do I start?? I mean these blogs go back quite a way, with so many juicy updates, that I'm left feeling like I've come late to every party and I'll never catch up. And that's just indiewire for crying out loud.


I've only just started "listing" on Twitter and I already follow in excess of 40 blogs, most of which I haven't even had the time to explore yet. There just aren't enough hours in the day for all this super relevant, engaging, informative content. Now I'm not normally one for gushing, but how do you deal with getting through this bounty of brilliance? Don't get me wrong, there's a lot of nonsensical trash out there (sometimes I'm baffled as to how Kim Kardashian has in excess of 12million Twitter followers and Werner Herzog only 25k). I come back to this time and time again - Ted Hope's term "super-abundance". Example: how to set yourself out as a truly noteworthy filmmaker amongst the digital millions out there with an iphone, pirated copy of adobe premiere and a Youtube channel. But when it comes to wading through the super-abundance of crap to find what you really like to watch, read, follow, engage in, I find this a little less daunting, because I know what I don't like. But when I whittle down the super-abundance, I'm left with an abundance...of brilliant f***ing things I want to look at all day. How do you navigate without constantly feeling your missing something?


My memory also fails me repeatedly in this respect. Sometimes I feel I have the short term memory of a trauma victim. Now, if my memory serves me (hmm), there are no significant head injuries in my history. But suffice to say, if I don't instantly bookmark a page, and dawdle away from it, it's wiped from my brain within minutes. I'll read lots of lovely articles, watch gorgeous videos, and the next day half of them are gone. If I don't talk about them, share them, then and there, then there isn't a hope I'll ever mention it again. It sounds drastic, but it's really not a medical condition. Perhaps too much Super Mario and not enough Brain Training on the Nintendo DS.


As with this and the previous "anti-populist" blog entry - this is all beginning to sound a bit "from the psychologist's chair". I have to ask, myself and anyone one else reading, how does this "need to be in the know" reflect on the personality? And why can't I be happy with the content I'm finding now, and look forward to all the future findings? Why am I always looking backward, discontented? It's probably why I have a hard time starting anything new. How do you keep up with the curve, and catch up on what's already happened? What I'm really asking for is a time machine, photographic memory and an 8 day (minimum) week. Simple.


Sara

VIDEO games

Video games. Not computer games, or consoles or anything else, but video games. Video, meaning film and cinema, meaning a visual medium where we are taken up in to a story and then delivered to a satisfying conclusion. Yet the term “video game” itself is slowly decaying to a retro way of thinking, those hulking 80’s units are to be found on sticky-floored amusement arcades, or found lurking in bowling alleys.

However, the “video game”, a synthesis and middle ground between content and viewer has, in the last five years, become a multi-billion dollar industry and continues to happily outgrow the film industry. We are finally living in a golden age of gaming, where graphics and processors have caught up to the imaginations of the developers and the game purchasing public. We can theoretically render anything we want, from atoms, to apples, to galaxies; and then throw a flashbang at it. But the storytelling has fallen behind. We have been treading the same old ground.

Now, the film purists among you, the vast majority of whom will have clicked back on their browser as soon as the words Video Game came up (shame on you), are shouting and stamping about the validity of films and games being mentioned in the same breath. But then again, I bet they haven’t climbed a Colossus.

There have been a handful of games that have boldly attempted to be the first to bridge the gap between these steadily closing media continents. I’m sure you’re naming some of them in your head right now. The cleverly realised Heavy Rain is perhaps the most fully-fledged, the enigmatic old school Myst was an early adopter, the various GTA’s and the eagerly awaited Mass Effect 3, to name a few. But where are the borders? Some films, or particularly the DVD releases, are built to house multiple endings, so we are sculpting the experience right there. Is that not a video game, in its purest sense?

After all those years of wishing for a weird cinema where you can choose what the hero does (but you’d have to move seats, or even screens, right? I’ve thought this through a few time and it just doesn’t work, let the dream go), video games have marched up and grabbed the idea by the throat. I think we’re still waiting on the true breakthrough video game, but it’s on the way, and then perhaps the dwindling film industry will wake up and wonder where the revenue went.

Ah well, maybe caution is the best approach.

Tom, of The Cautious Train.

The Space Between

Hi, this is Tom of the Cautious Train here. I'm here to kick off our ongoing trawl of content, dredged from wherever we happen to wander to.

• First up, Bear 71, which is coined as a "20 minute, interactive documentary", but comes out as something a little more haunting than that. Cleverly constructed cartographic layout, combined with well pitched voice over and inserts make this a real recommender-er. It's a full page loader, so you'll have to click the link.

• Second up, this was found on a short video hunt, and I wasn't sure about it at first, but strong ideas and fluid execution have made it a welcome rewatch.

• Third and certainly not least, because this has been doing the rounds for a long time now, comes the magnificent reimagining of the Shining trailer. Yes, I know you're sat there saying "Yes I've seen this, and yes I'll watch it again," but this isn't for you, this is for those out there who have happened to skip past this gem. So hopefully that is you and you're wondering why this might be so good. Well, here we go. 

Well, lets leave it at that for now. More content is being sorted, pruned and chosen as you read this, so check back soon for the next upload.

Stay Cautious.

Why do we reject the "popular"?

Maybe it's just me, but I'd be interested to see if I'm not alone. A thought struck me the other night while watching Rosemary's Baby: why have I not seen this before? Not because it's the best film I've ever watched (a ways away in fact), but it's a seminal piece of film history, and I waited 25 years before sitting down to it. Now this may not seem excessive at first, but on reflection this is not the first piece of pop culture I've abstained from. And it's been, I'm ashamed now to admit, a conscious effort.

I watched the Godfather parts one and two for the very first time last year. Up until this point I had rejected them out of hand as overhyped and underwhelming...without even knowing the storyline! Now, in my opinion, HBO's The Sopranos is one of the best, smartest, slickest and most entertaining series I've ever had the pleasure of indulging in over and over again. Only now do I realise it never would have happened without the Godfather. In fact, on finally succumbing to the imploring of those near to me to give it a shot, I fell so much in love with the Godfather that I fought sleep, tooth and nail, to watch parts one and two back to back. I come off hypocritical, but lately I'm as baffled as the next guy as to what motivates me towards such prejudice.

It happens across the board with pop culture favourites. As long as I can remember I've (terribly strong word) hated Led Zeppelin. This mostly comes down to the fact that the world and his wife thinks they're the best band in living memory. Now I wouldnt go that far, but (and please don't tell Tom) the more Zeppelin songs I give the time of day to, the more I come round. 

I'm a terribly stubborn individual, who at times doesn't react well to authority. It seems, in this case, "the authority" I'm battling against is mass consensus telling me to believe the Godfather films are the best there is, and Led Zeppelin are the most influential rock band of all time. While I'm not required to buy into that exactly, I guess I need to open my mind, be less precious (and pretentious maybe) and assess things on an individual, independent basis...and ultimately make up my own mind. If I hadnt, I'd never have watched the Godfather. It didn't change my life, but I'm happier for having experienced it.

Its really not an attractive quality to judge a book by its cover...

...even if that cover is someone telling you what you should like.

What about you?

Humbly,  

A stubborn (but growing) Sara-aboard-the-train.