So, in case you haven’t heard, the main reason that Matthew has absconded for two weeks to Kansas with the kids is so that I get some solid time alone to learn how to animate. Why do you want to animate? you may ask. Go on. Ask!

Okay, so here’s the deal – you might already know that our book Ten Thousand Stories was bought by Chronicle Books, to be published this fall. We are very excited about this. Part of the publicity and marketing of a book these days is apparently having a book trailer. Like a movie trailer, except for a book. There are lots of them out there, and clearly the awesomeness of the book trailer is directly correlated to the success of the book. Unfortunately, we are small potatoes and our budget doesn’t include paying for book trailers. So, we thought we could make our own, with the slight hangup that we don’t know how to animate.

We planned out a relatively simple (we thought) animation: it would start out with me and Matthew introducing ourselves and the book. The book would be in the background with its pages slowly flipping while a counter counted the number of flips above it. We would explain the mechanics of the book, and wax poetic about how we loved it, and then note that the pages were flipping too slowly. Then Matthew would whip out a guitar, I’d whip out some drums, and we’d rock out to some heavy metal as the pages started flipping really fast (a blur!) to get to 10,000. That was pretty much it.

Here’s the song we were going to use. It’s a valentine’s day love song by our friend and Bobbledy musician Drew Bunting. Turn up your headphones and rip off your shirt sleeves and get ready to rock. (For those about to rock, we salute you.)

kisses

It makes me laugh every time I hear it.

So, clearly the first challenge was figuring out if I could make the pages flip. After hours and hours of training in Adobe After Effects on Lynda.com (if you ever need to learn how to use any software, it’s a great site that you can get monthly membership for $25 and learn how to use pretty much ANYTHING), I was able to put together this:

Wow! I did it! So, on Tuesday I was feeling full of confidence. That really was the tricky part. Now all I had to do was a simple animation of me and Matthew, and DONE!

Well, let me tell you – there is no such thing as a “simple animation.” There are a million things to think about. How fast should this be moving? How much should it jiggle? How big should it be? Where should the light(s?!) come from? Where should the camera be positioned? How far back should the backdrop be? Is this piece affected by the lighting or not? Does this piece attach to the next or not? Do they move at the same time or at different times? Do they rotate at the same rate or not? Where does the music start and stop? Does this follow a straight path (no! It shouldn’t!) or does it wobble a little bit, to look less stiff (yes! It should!). How much of a wobble? Too much? Not enough? Why does it look like it’s flying on a magic carpet? How many thousands and thousands of days is this going to take me?

This is the test animation I did, and it TOOK. ME. FOR. EVER.

All of this is to say that when we get on the phone this afternoon with our publicist, I’m going to have to tell her that there isn’t going to be a book trailer, unless she’d like to wait until 2017 for it. In a rare moment of sanity, I have decided that this is just one thing I do not need to do.

The good news is, this should mean that in the next 5 days I will hopefully get ahead (ahead!) on some of my other projects I’m supposed to be working on:

1. An ad for Bobbledy Books we’re going to run in a magazine (yeah, I know!)
2. The album art for the Bobbledy Books year 1 CD
3. Prepping files for the year 1 CD
4. Auction items
5. Email newsletters (1 to new subscribers from AWP, 1 to our entire list, 1 to Bobbledy Prompt subscribers, 1 to Auction item subscribers)
6. The next Bobbledy Book (it’s about a dragon)
7. Some illustrations I promised a friend of mine that were supposed to be “done in April”
8. Idiots’Books mailings (thanks to all the Ephs who have ordered posters!!) (but now I have to pack them)
9. The next Idiots’Book
10. Probably ten other things I’ve forgotten.

The lesson here is admit defeat early, so that you can take advantage of all of the time you’ve saved by actually failing, instead of succeeding in a hobbled, half-assed, totally laughable fashion.

Or, perhaps, the lesson is to always model your work after this:

Mmm, mmm, toasty indeed!