'What Next? A Trailer for Fruit?' The Making of The Leopard Book Trailer
Each year Random House, in association with The Bookseller, runs a Book Video Awards competition - inviting students from the National Film & Television school to pitch and create a film trailer for one of our books. Last year, students Yasmin Al Naib and Chris Moon created a terrifying and atmospheric trailer for Jo Nesbo's The Snowman - and won! We immediately re-commissioned them to make the trailer for the next Harry Hole title in the series, The Leopard, and their stunning trailer helped the book to NUMBER ONE. The trailer itself is above (if you're not one of the 38,000 people who've watched it - do so now!) and the team blogged about the experience - read below for more... (oh, and the title of this blog comes from some of the amazing comments we've had on youtube, please do join in the discussion & tell us what you thought of the trailer!)
From the director, Yasmin
Reading the book
Making the sequel trailer to The Snowman was really exciting. We enjoyed making the first one a great deal, but this one had a different tone to it. We felt it needed a more sinister creepy unveiling. Reading the book was great to get into; it was really intense and visual, so writing a shooting script was fairly easy. I suppose what was difficult was fitting it into 90 seconds, because there was so much great material to put in there, we hoped that we pulled off an enticing teaser trailer that makes people want to pick up the book and get into it.
Coming up with Ideas
We wanted the visuals in our trailer have to be really striking, so going through the book we had to pick out the best bits we could pull off in a two day shoot, in London – and also importantly to fake Norway on a much bigger scale and with higher production value than we actually had. I guess pulling the pictures into a narrative was the trickest part, because there was so much brilliant visual stuff in the book we wanted to stick in the trailer!
Filming and Locations
Shooting the snow footage was the first challenge, but luckily it was snowing really heavily in England before Christmas, and we managed to find some really interesting locations to film. So all the exteriors were filmed just outside of London, in Swindon in half a day, and then all the other interiors were filmed at two locations in London.
Overall, we loved it. We had only locked locations three days before filming, cast two days before, and spent two mad days with a crew of about twelve fantastic people who really worked their butts off to make this happen. We dedicate this to them. Thank you to our crew on both trailers.
Rounding Up
The post production work on the trailer was completed in a one day edit, an overnight sound design session in the studio, half a days’ work on the fabulous score, and a days work mixed in there on the grade and visual effects- but really a three day total on post. And what a result!
We look forward to doing more of this kind of work in the future. And thank you for all your support!
From the cinematographer, Chris
Early on in the pre-production of The Leopard, Yasmin and myself agreed that we didn't want to fall into the trap of making the same trailer again with regards to The Snowman in 2010. Last time we focused on the snowman as a story, this time we focused far more on Harry as a character. However one thing we did want to stick with, was the idea of making it again very much a teaser trailer, full of questions, but no answers or spoilers.
The book has a very different tone and pace in many ways and we wanted to reflect that in the visuals, The most obvious change in terms of the cinematography on this one, was the jump from 16mm film to digital shooting on the RED - MX ,but hopefully maintaining the cinematic feel that each chapter is filled with. This was the biggest challenge and most fun part, to convincingly achieve single shots from many different scenes in the book, but make them feel like there taken directly from bigger full scenes in the real ‘film’. This was something we tried to employ not just in the camera set up and lighting, but also with the cast, costume, make up and production design. On The Snowman we had double the shooting days and many more impressive sets in which to film, but on The Leopard, we had dozens of scenes and locations that all had to be cheated in the same space, so we had to be far more resourceful and sneaky with the lighting and composition of the shots. Thankfully I had a truly great camera and lighting crew, so the gaffer and spark were able to be lighting and setting up for 1 and sometimes 2 scenes ahead of us in another room. The camera team were so dedicated in fact, that if you look very closely they all cameo in the final trailer.
Another way in which we tried to add some scale to the trailer, was incorporating subtle visual effects that - due to our 3 days of post production - had to be limited, but hopefully did the trick in adding some gravitas to the trailer. Again myself and Yasmin, are big believers in 'if it can be done for real it should be' but something’s due to health and safety, time or budget we couldn't achieve everything in camera. Like the ball of fire in the tunnel, the lady on the diving board, or even more subtle effects like the Hong Kong skyline in the windows. All hopefully things people didn't even notice as VFX but I believe definitely add to the final impact.
Shooting book trailers are a cinematographers dream, you basically have the challenge of trying to make every set up the money shot. The only down side with a book like The Leopard was there's just too many great scenes and visuals you simply can’t include in 90 seconds
Jo Nesbo's The Leopard is now available in Harvill Secker hardback, ebook and for the kindle. To find out more about Jo's books, events and his detective Harry Hole, please visit www.jonesbo.co.uk.