A couple of weekends ago I found myself between edits and decided, well, gee, now I could try making a book trailer for Back to Lazarus. Because I have nothing else to do on a Saturday.

Sort of like when I spent a day sewing a pleather vest and holster—literally by hand with a needle and thread—for a Halloween trunk-or-treat instead of finishing my master’s thesis or preparing for my upcoming thesis defense. The sewing put a crimp in my typing the next day, but I did have an hour or so of living the Serenity dream (Firefly—cowboys in space), so it was worth it. 😜

The jury is still out on the book trailer.

In addition to choosing the least profitable use of my time, making a book trailer had another thing in common with sewing a vest. Both times (and yes, many others), I didn’t have a clue what I was doing!

The vest planning was something along the lines of, hmm… cut a big head hole, and then maybe I should gather (hey—isn’t that a technical term) the vest together into a couple of seams (who says I’m not a pro?) so it sort of has a shape. And I can poke holes in it and lace it up the sides with some shoelaces. (I had the boots for dressing as a pirate—whole other story—but how I ended up with shoelaces in Hawaii is beyond me, which is another reason the procrastination seemed meant to be.)

The book trailer planning went about as far as, hey, didn’t my computer come with iMovie?

I posted a rough cut to Facebook to get some feedback (thanks to everyone who checked it out) and make sure it would actually play. Then I made the mistake of organizing the files on my computer (one of my other favorite methods of procrastination).

The lesson: once again, I can fumble my way through something and get a finished product without having a basic understanding of the fundamentals.

Like, how and where a project‘s clips are stored (both apparently also technical terms, with the answer being, not in the thing I saved).

After resurrecting the sound came the question of how to get the video onto my website, or anywhere else.

We’ll skip my “deprecated browsers” (how is that not an insult?) and other issues attempting to upload to Youtube. And, without further ado, I present The Back to Lazarus Book Trailer…