Tool for creating a clever book trailer

One of my students recently wrote and self published a contemporary novel that he offers for sale on Amazon.  Like most students, he is on a tight budget.  So, when it came time to create an animated book trailer, he used the free web tool xtranormal Movie Maker.  I won’t link to my student’s trailer in this blog post because it contains a few cuss words, but really, the movie is quite clever.  The site allows the user to choose character avatars and settings.  Then the user simply types in the dialogue, and the site converts the package into a movie the user can upload to YouTube. My student chose two characters from his book and created a movie from a piece of dialogue from the book.

Documentaries as research

I must admit that I am a big fan of documentaries, which can be great informers of historical events.  Recently I found a rich source of free documentaries on the web. DocumentaryZ  is a portal for documentaries on a variety of topics, including biography, science, health, military, and history.  At the history link, I found videos about U. S. and World history, including a great documentary on the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, which yielded some useful information for a post Civil War novel I’m working on. The site has a search bar, but when I entered the term “Lincoln,” I only got the one result.  Nevertheless, the site could be useful for a researcher who prefers a multimedia approach to historical research rather than straight print.

Use Google Alerts for Research

Is there a topic, person or location that you frequently search for when you are writing?  Create a Google alert for the search term.  When your search term appears on the web, Google will send you an alert to your choice of email or RSS feeder. 

Think this isn’t useful to a historical researcher?  Think again.  Most local newspapers carry columns from historical societies.   I entered a regional search term into Google alerts, and I regularly receive emailed links to articles written by local historians.  It is true that Google alerts might be more useful if you were, say, trying to keep up with the news on your favorite athlete or monitoring a developing news story.  But every historical researcher knows that the best info sometimes comes from unlikely sources.  As a historical researcher, cast your nets wide and see what you can haul in!