Creating a movie...

... or how to put together a book trailer.

Over the last few weeks, I've been raking through our hundreds of Highland landscape photographs to find the most atmospheric ones. And those without any sign of modern trappings. Sadly there are often houses, power cables, telephone poles, and other daily signs of present day. As I'm not about to embark on editing photos, I had to dig deep.

But I was lucky. I found a few stunning sunrises & sunsets, glistening lochs and gloomy mountain scenes. Then the search was on for the main characters, and a few choice 'items' of historical use. I browsed a number of stock photo sites, all with different - sometimes extortionate - price scales. Of course the 'free' pics were never suitable. Funny that!

Finally I decided to go with Dreamstime where I spotted a couple of excellent shots - one of a pistol, the other of a 'Highland' shield & sword, a hut, dagger, and two characters that 'fairly' resemble Rory and Catriona. Pleased with my choices!

So yesterday I spent the best part of 7 hours putting it all together, using the new version of iMovies. The programme is great for using videos, however, if you use stills - like I did - you need to save a sequence of photos as a project, export to desktop and then import back to the programme. Only then can you upload them into the project, sequence by sequence. Hugely time consuming but once you sussed it, that's it. Easy peasy! ;-)

So, the trailer is nearly complete. More a teaser than trailer but hubby and I like it. It appears our preview audience likes it too. Time to finalise it methinks!

Watch this space!