Book Trailers? Communication students partner with Disney
to design previews for kids’ books

Entrepreneurial and innovative: the two words Suzanne Harper, BJ ’79, BA ’80, uses to describe the partnership between Dean Rod Hart and the College of Communication and Disney Book Group. Three years ago, Harper, an author and former magazine editor in New York, met Hart at an event and they got to talking. They discussed plans for a new digital media building (the Belo Center for New Media is set to begin construction in the parking lot at Dean Keaton St. and Whitis Ave. in April 2010 and be completed within two years) and the desire of New York publishing companies to work more actively in digital media. As they continued talking on multiple occasions, Harper began to develop an idea for a partnership between the University and New York publishing. 

Fast forward to January 2008 and Nellie Kurtzman and Andrew Sansone of Disney Book Group sit in a campus studio discussing book trailers with 19 students. Book trailers are movie-style previews used as online promotional materials for books. Up to this point, they have mostly been slideshows with a voice-over or on-screen text, but through Harper and Hart, Disney Book Group partnered with The University of Texas at Austin to give these students an opportunity to take this marketing innovation to the next level. 

The students had been chosen from a large pool of interested applicants for a course taught by Department of Radio-TV-Film lecturer Bryan Sebok, an obvious choice for the class made up of RTF and advertising students given his background in new-media research, production and marketing. Kurtzman and Sansone gave the students three manuscripts of children’s books, and Sebok then divided them into three groups of half RTF students and half advertising students — a group for each book. 

They spent the next 14 weeks analyzing movie trailers, creating a concept pitch, which was delivered to Disney by videoconference, shooting the scenes and doing post-production work to turn the footage into a trailer. 

“It was really hard to work backwards,” senior Lauren Zaffaroni says, adding, “One of the biggest challenges for me was I wanted to put every scene in the trailer.” Unlike with a movie trailer where the production crew already has a movie’s worth of film, the groups had to plan ahead for which scenes should be in the trailer. “It was really interesting in pre-production trying to concept when you have this novel — this 200-page novel — having to turn that into a minute,” senior Leanne Amann says.

Once Kurtzman and Sansone weighed in on the concept pitches, the groups got to work casting and scouting locations. The class partnered with St. Stephen’s Episcopal School to cast younger actors from their theater department and then shot many scenes on their campus. They also worked with three graduate students in the Butler School of Music to compose scores for the trailers. 

The groups had only a week to shoot the trailers, which, though in the end were only one minute long, were edited down from hours of footage. Disney provided each of the groups with $1,000 to fund their trailer. “Having a budget was a new experience, instead of having to produce it ourselves and get donations,” Amann says. “It helped the production quality.” Her group put the money toward renting equipment that would produce a professional look, like a camera that shot in HD and had a 35mm adapter. They also used some of it for food, which she said kept cast and crew in high spirits during 13-hour shoots. 

With the groups made up of people from different backgrounds, each member had a defined role with the concept pitches and production. Different skill sets were needed at various stages, bringing forth numerous leaders. “It was really interesting to see the cross-fertilization between these members of different departments who normally might not work so hand-in-hand together,” Sebok says.

In the end, the groups created three professional-quality promotions for the books: “Deadly Little Secret” by Laurie Stolarz, which targets teenage girls with a suspenseful romance, “Science Fair” by Dave Barry and Ridley Pearson, which chronicles cool kids and Star Wars geeks who must come together to stop a terrorist plan to take over the world at their elementary school’s science fair, and “Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One Before” by David Yoo, which follows the story of an awkward Korean-American high school boy who falls in love with the most popular girl at school. 

Kurtzman says she chose the three books because they each needed a marketing push and there was enough variety in them to appeal to different types of students. “When you’re marketing books, you have a very limited budget on a lot of projects,” Kurtzman says. “With this new way of promoting books, you can get zillions of hits.” The benefits to working with a University over a production company, she says, are “your filmmakers are much closer to the audience you’re trying to reach. They’re much more open, and they’re not charging you by the moment.” 

Disney Book Group plans to launch the trailers on YouTube and social networking Web sites sometime near the books’ fall publication dates and “pray for a viral hook to them,” Kurtzman says, referring to the phenomenon where a video gets passed around the Internet through blog posts and e-mails. The verdict is still out on the future of book trailers, though. Kurtzman thinks they are “an answer that publishing has been looking for,” but adds, “I don’t know that we’ve really narrowed it down to what it needs to be yet.” Some of the students agree: “When I watch a trailer, I want to see the visuals once again. I’m looking forward to watching a film, not reading a book. So it’s quite the hurdle you have to jump over,” senior Clayton Boyd says. 

Discussion groups on the Internet also have raised the issue of what a trailer might take away from the reader. Choosing an actor to portray the characters in the book, some say, limits readers’ creative freedom to envision them differently. Sebok doesn’t think this will deter the medium, though. “I think that ultimately, the book trailers are targeting reluctant readers. Reluctant readers aren’t going to say, ‘I don’t want to read that book because I know what the main character looks like.’ They’re going to look at the book trailer and say, ‘That looks really cool. That looks like an exciting story. Let me go explore that.’”

— Rebecca Fontenot (BJ ’07), assistant editor, The Alcalde

— Photo credits: Santiago Forero