Sunday, February 4, 2018

My Author to Screenwriter Journey




Starting the Process
In 2012 my daughters made a book trailer for my novel Marquel.
The girls worked with industry friends to hire a name actor.
Eric Roberts was our choice.
But before they could hire him, they had to prepare a book trailer script, agree on the length, location, story board, actors, crew and budget.
My oldest daughter Marquel played the character Marquel in the book trailer. My youngest daughter Blair directed her sister and Oscar-nominated Eric Roberts, who portrayed Zach Manning.
Marquel Skinner as Marquel, Eric Roberts as Zach Manning
 
Blair Skinner, Director
The book trailer was to jumpstart book sales, make the Marquel novel relevant and serve another purpose.
It would be both a book trailer and a movie trailer. Finding readers and eventually film funding.
As with any group project, we split into two teams.
Team Book Sales (me) and everyone else in Team Film.
I’ll admit, I was in both teams.
The original Facebook page was named Marquel The Movie. A little confusing. But hey, we were all excited, expecting the book trailer to go viral, sell hundreds of thousands of books and create a demand for the movie. As they say, begin with the end in mind.
The trailer released to two-thousand-ish views on Youtube in the first months of release. A major success to us.
The Marquel The Movie Facebook page, however, had little more than 100 likes. Our friends were talking on our private Facebook pages, through email and going to the Youtube page.
Within a year of the trailer release best selling author/screenwriter Lee Goldberg found us (on our Youtube page) and said, “Best book trailer I have ever seen.”
We were elated!
Even if book sales were few to flat, I was seeing new reviews on Amazon and other bookseller sites. Confident it would grow in time.
But the question our followers kept asking was, “When is the movie coming out?”
I figured if Team Film wants to make a movie, let’s go! Let’s do a Kickstarter.
Everyone said to me, “Whoa. Kickstarter!? The first order of business is you need a script. A really good script!”
All right, I said, “I’ll write a movie script.”
But how?
Next week - How I Decided To Do It

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