 Hi, I'm Justin Anra. This video is a behind-the-scenes look at the decision-making process for my Dust of 100 Dogs book trailer, which I hope you've seen. I'm a big fan of books, so my first decision in making the trailer was which to choose. I ended up making that decision guided by what I wanted my trailer to look like. I decided pretty quickly on using LEGO because I enjoy building with LEGO and it would make the project feel less like work. But that also limited me. I could do a pretty good trailer about fighting robots, or Vikings, or space explorers, but I hadn't read any great books like that recently, and I didn't really have the pieces to make something people had a strong vision of in their heads already, which ruled out my comics collection. What I had read, and had the tools for, was a great pirate story, A.S. King's The Dust of 100 Dogs. I knew from the beginning I wanted the trailer to do three things. Show the two timeframes linked by one character, give the title some context, and let the viewer know this is a treasure hunting adventure story. Even though the story bounces between the 17th and 20th centuries constantly, I figured that would be too confusing for a short video, so I started in the 90s, jumped back to pirate days, then came back to the 90s at the end. Then I wrote my script. Because I was using LEGO, I could use one head to link Emma and Saffron, and switch out her hair and costume depending on the time. One big decision was whether to show that Emma the pirate dies. It might seem spoilery in the trailer, like I'm giving a lot away, but it happens right in the prologue so I didn't feel too bad, and without that bit it would have been really hard to explain the 100 dogs from the title. The middle chunk of my script, dedicated to showing off the story as an adventure, basically just had the note, show cool pirate stuff. I briefly thought about doing the whole trailer in stop motion, but quickly realized that would be way too much work for the two weekends I had to shoot and edit. So I set up LEGO action scenes and took piles of pictures. Having lots of pictures of the same scene, but with different light and depths of focus, made it easier to make it feel a bit more movie-ish and less slide showy, since I could rapidly cut between images within a scene. I recorded my script using a good microphone, making several attempts at each line. Then I put all my pictures and narration into iMovie, found a creative commons song on the free music archive, and started editing. And that was pretty much it. If you're interested in the more technical aspect of putting the pictures and sounds together, I've made a couple of other screen casts for that. Thanks very much for watching, and if you know a really good robot fighting novel that needs a trailer, let me know. Thanks.