The Prize at the Bottom of Box: Multimedia and Fan Fiction. Do you YouTube?

This thread is great. Nice to see I'm not the only one who does all this stuff.

I tend to center my projects around whatever my 'main' fic is; in other words, whichever I'm putting most effort into. This is bad of me, as my other fics tend to get ignored in the process, but oh well. >.> My main fic at the moment is Deceptions, so all my stuff is for it.

Actual media:
Obligatory cheezy trailer (Technically contains spoilers for the fic... I guess. XD)
Cover Art (small)
Cover Art (large)

Aside from those, I have an Itunes playlist specifically for this fic, and I've got everything from 'deleted scenes' to timelines to charater motivation articles to random notes saved in seperate .rtf documents for later useage. I'm also working on a website, whenever I get bored. Oh, and I like to photo-manip things like clothing and hairstyle changes (as you could tell from the covers), and I tend to sketch out designs and maps of the locations I'm using.

For the new topic, I make my trailer(s) in Windows Movie Maker 2. After much trouble that consisted of moving various versions of Movie Maker around from the computers in the house until I finally got the right one installed and working after mine crashed.

My youtube account is here, though there's little on there (and even less Star Wars-related) since making anything longer than a trailer makes my computer squeal in agony.

 

How do you find the youtube trailers for fanfic? Without a direct link, I get lost there a lot.

I don't do trailers. I have a hard enough time with having to do cover art for the Archives stories I've written. Photoshop is evil.

 

you can navigate YouTube with a keyword search--try "fanfic" + "starwars" or other similar combinations.

 

I've never made trailers -- since most of the pieces I write are drabbles, trailers would be redundant -- but once upon a time, I did make cover art for a lot of my Doctor Who stuff. Most were in the style of the BBC novels, but I did make some to look like the earlier Virgin Missing Adventures and even a couple of the old Target novelizations. I also did covers for a few series of round-robin stories, for which I used different styles. But then I lost my access to Photoshop, so I was forced into retirement.

 

I have zero skills in this department. But this is like the perfect thread for me to give a major shoutout to Ophelia who made the coolest trailer for my story.

She rocks my socks!

Edge of the Darkness Trailer.

I had nothing to do with the greatness of this trailer. This is all her awesomeness.

 

You're right, that is a nice one. Good work, ophelia

This is a great idea for a thread. I know there a lot of trailers out there with some serious talent behind them.

I made a trailer for my year-and-a-half WIP, Recognition. I had never done any sort of multimedia project before like that and had zero experience doing video-editing, so it was both fun and quite a bit of a learning experience. I reccomend it to anybody who has some extra time and interest; it was definitely a blast fooling around with.

Recognition Trailer

Let's see some other trailers, folks! I love checking these things out.

 

I'm glad you liked it, Leona

Yup, it's Holloway. I always had an idea of what I wanted Kaeso to look like, and more so than the actor himself, that picture was as close as I could get to the image in my head.

 

I love anything that helps me better to see the author's vision so I love the cover art and trailers. The level of talent around here never ceases to amaze me.

As for my own forays into the realm of multimedia:

Cover Art:
Slipping Into Darkness (done for Ani-maniac)

Child of the Suns

There are no Children Here

Crimson Knight: Inquisition

Decoy Front Cover

Decoy Back Cover


Trailers:
Decoy Teaser Trailer

Crimson Knight: Inquisition

 

Very interesting thread. I use especially images to get some more details on my characters, and often I use actors which have visual likeness to my OCs. That I throw together with photomanip'd stuff, and ta-da!

Aside from photomanips and cover arts, I am also deeply indebted to my buddy DarthKuk, how's been working on pencils sketches for some of my characters already, and now we're sitting on a pretty big project on my main OC, Ronan Barec.

And although my stories are probably not even quality enough to "deserve" so much media, I really love detailing out my stuff, aside from the fun it is to effect photoshop sk1lls.

I haven't created or mixed my own music for my fanfics, yet, but when I'm writing, there's always quality soundtracks from Hans Zimmer, Howard Shore, John Powell, John Williams, etc. running, that at the same time inspire me as they set the right mood. Maybe I should start assigning tracks to special scenes or something, lol. As for trailers, I must say I'm pretty impressed by what I've seen, but I stray back from trying it myself, because if I do animated stuff, I want it animated and in motion, not just "image slideshows"... (that's just for me, I don't have problems with what you're doing)

So, here's some of mine: (I hope you don't mind my abusing this post as some sort of "index" for my story art? )

Covers:

Honor Guard (photomanip'd artworks)

Runner (photomanip'd stills)

Pariah (photomanip'd game render)

Wallpaper:

Rage of the Shadow Warriors - Teaser Wallpaper V1 (featuring Gladus Tite)

Rage of the Shadow Warriors - Teaser Wallpaper V2

Character Art (links on characters direct to full bios)

Ronan Barec
- Ronan - profile artwork (photomanip)
- Holocam snapshot of Ronan (photomanip)
- Ronan in his former armor (coloring of a lineart by Ryan Benjamin)

Gladus Tite
- Gladus in his full suit of Mandalorian armor (inks and colors by me, pencils by DarthKuk)
- Gladus versus two Yuuzhan Vong (pencils and inks by itmon, colors by me)
- Gladus's face, closeup (photomanip, same as Pariah cover)
- Shady holocam surveillance still (photomanip)
- A beardless Gladus contacting one of his clients on the holo (photomanip'd game screenie)
- Gladus, holding a Twi'lek Peace Brigader by the neck (scene from WFSAM, photomanip'd game render)

Altair Jiriad
- Altair - flattened to the ground by an explosion (photomanip'd SG: Atlantis still)
- Altair and his son Skira (coloring of a lineart

 

That's some pretty impressive art work, CF. I especially like the Honor Guard cover.

 

Edit: Not sure why my computer keeps double-posting.

 

These are all amazing

All I have are some character artworks based off some photos. Much tweaking and touching-up later, I came up with some graphic novel style representations of my major characters. I'll just dig up the links...

Detective Tadgh Maitland
Detective Jeanice "Keys" Keyston
Directing Officer Taban Maitland
Director Iqbal 'Despot' Despotov
The Mystic. Bad guy. Or is he?
Tadgh holding a rifle

And perhaps a teaser for a character not yet introduced?

Kayleh. Mystery woman.

well that's about the extent of my stuff. Hardly exciting, but I like them. I've put in a couple of requests over at the Fan Art forum, so we'll see what happens! I'm all in favour of cross-media convergence, hehe.

 

SilSolo actually did a gif of an E-wing transforming into the Transformers character Thundercracker for my fic Decepticus Rex.

Really more than meets the eye...

 

Thanks Bale, glad you like 'em.

Futon: () I like that style. It really reminds of film noir graphic novels, and it's indeed a rather original style for character art, and that although the technique behind it is rather simple.

I've been wondering... who's the actor behind Tadgh? I can only figure out Sam Jackson as Despot and Hugh Jackman as The Mystic. It's cool to see others are using the likenesses of actors or other real-life persons as templates for their OCs.

 

Ahh, CF, glad you enjoyed them I have a list of the models used - the results may surprise you

Tadgh - Michael Biehn (Think Terminator and Aliens). The one of him with rifle is practically a straight replication from a publicity shot from Terminator, but it fit so well that I couldn't pass it up
Taban - Jeff Licon. I think he was one of the Brothers Garcia, or something.
Keys - Claire Danes. But about 10 years older.
Despot - Sam Jackson. Got it in one
The Mystic - is actually a portrait of Al Pacino hidden behind a top hat

And Kayleh is Amy Acker, who played 'Fred' in Angel.

It's like a fanfic version of 'scene it!' hehe.