It’s been a bit over a year since I worked with an animator to develop a trailer for the Kickstarter Campaign for A Tiger’s Tale volume 2. I learned a lot over that process and was fortunate to work with a passionate and accomplished creator who brought a lot of his own vision to the project. You’ll have to visit aTigersTale.com for more details on that project. I only mention it for context about my appreciation for a good animated trailer. Like the one below…
Subscribers to my MUSEletter may recall that I’ve been observing this campaign’s development for some time. As someone who’s been actively tracking trends in crowdfunded self-publishing I’ve witness a few high-performance-self-publishers move past comics towards more prestigious projects; an encouraging turn of events. As part of my ongoing effort in deconstructing successful campaigns I’ve been fortunate enough to sit in on conversations about their development. That’s why you should check out Event Horizon right now!
Short History: Stephanie and I both found our works in the same anthology a number of years ago. Speculative Fiction for Dreamers: A Latinx Anthology features her award winning short story Jean. We bonded over a mutual adoration of The Phoenix of Marvel Comics’ X-Men and have continued to cross paths via a number of comics/publishing related zoom calls, panels and discord conversations.
This is what she shared with me about that trailer –
Here is the storyboard I had made.
The real journey is: I was trying to figure out how to come up with a video. I’m a visual person, and found it easier to make my own video first. This wound up being CONCEPT based, and is my Kickstarter video. It gives you concept, stories, then WHO and what. It was meant to show just a professional to make a new one. But I and others really liked it, in a homemade way. Still, I needed one that was story driven with more effects. It’s a high end book and deserves more skill than I have for that objective. I looked at prose companies. Not impressed, and higher priced.
I had a Kickstarter I backed in my mind whose video I loooooooved and I backed them based on the video. Since I was a backer I went to their page and humbly asked them who they used. They happily shared (their campaign is like a year or 2 old). I got in touch with Comikaze Trailers, and when I described the project and sent him my video, he let me know he never did prose before, and (the rest of the story you have) but that’s why I hired him.
He said, ok give me a storyboard. Shit ok. It challenged me to figure out what really was the cohesive sell in a shorter time frame in a collection of stories (not a novel) to get people to be like: oh, that’s interesting let me find out more. What was the thread, not in concept, but in actually storytelling that I had crafted in words? My prose sang back to me in my head from some stories and I assigned comics that matched, even though they are taken from different stories. I first tried to find standard templates and formats for how to deliver the storyboard and got frustrated and said fuck it I’m doing it simple. Who cares if I don’t follow a template. I used powerpoint to pdf. He was really happy with its clarity he said.
Author/Publisher: Stephanie Nina Pitsirilos
Cross the Event Horizon Now!
You can find Comikaze Trailers on Facebook