Week Nine, Assignments One and Two

Assignment One: Done.  Interesting articles.  Most of the trailers I've seen have been on TV, not on the Internet (I don't click ads as a rule, except by accident) and I usually don't watch ads on TV -- sometimes I don't find the remote in time to fast-forward past them. 

The trailers I've seen weren't nearly so objectionable as the ones these writers are reacting against -- though the production values are usually pretty low, about what you expect from a high-budget local-TV commercial.  There are exceptions, though, which I'll talk about a big, below.

Assignment Two: I watched the Official Trailer for Stephen King's latest, Joyland ... but sadly, it was in Polish.  So apart from commenting on the production values (decent-budget TV-commercial-quality), I don't have much to go on there.  Stock shots of an amusement park, with proper "fun/scary" sound effects, followed by Polish voice over probably saying "Joyland, the latest horror-thriller from the master of horror-thrillers, horror-thriller-master Stephen King.  Available in WalMarts in Warsaw, Lodz, and Gdansk.  For everywhere else, there's Amazon."  It seemed like an adequate trailer.  I give this one a five on a ten-point scale.

The trailer for James Patterson's Maximum Ride looked good, at least in the small window on a 13.2-inch monitor, lots of CGI  of wing-sprouting angel-creatures soaring around a Gotham-like cityscape, but not movie-quality.  The "acting" consisted of meaningful glances between angel-like things but they were mostly flying, not emoting.  I give this one a six.

The last I watched was for John Green's hyper popular The Fault of Our Stars and it made so little an impression I don't remember a thing about it.  Wait, I'm gonna go look again, brb.

***

Okay, teen-actors on a playground,  "sensitive" music and quotes go by, and a heart monitor beeps.  A tragic teen love story?  Gee, there's never been anything like that, EVER!

I know, that's heretical, and I really will read it one day -- it can't be bad, if my daughter loves it so much, at least that's been my experience with most books she loves (except Twilight, and that was just a phase).  The trailer was quick and evocative, though it didn't really make the book look too appealing to a Green-novice (I was just going to say "Greenovice" but didn't want to confuse anyone unnecessarily).

Whether book trailers are of any use is probably not debatable -- it's a "modern" form of advertising, and books have been advertised by their publishers since Daniel Defoe's time, if not before.  How effective they are -- whether they're worth the expense to the publisher -- is between the publisher and his bottom line.  My guess is that they MUST help fuel sales, or we wouldn't be seeing them, especially for books by new authors.

And not very useful for RA, I think.