Brave Squish Rabbit – Book Trailer

Only a few days now until the Brave Squish Rabbit launch. Three to be precise. Our household is bursting with rabbity books and madness. Busy busy. Lots to do.

Like:

• Baking carrot cup cakes
• Making fairy bread
• Cutting out sparkly stars
• Threading carrots with twine
• Warming up my illustrating fingers
• Ironing my dress (I never iron … that’s how special you are to me)
• Practising my talk (ie. writing my talk)

But before I get back to it, I wanted to hop by for a special something. I’ve mentioned a couple of times that I’ve been working on a little animation for the book … and it’s finally done. Click below to see the Brave Squish Rabbit book trailer. Hope you like it!

Stop Motion Animation-ing

It’s now official. There is a second book in the Squish Rabbit series. The files have all been sent to the printers. As we speak I’m awaiting the first unbound print proofs from my publisher. Somewhere in the last few months my second book even found itself a name…

Brave Squish Rabbit will be released in September this year.

And there was much rejoicing (mainly from those close to me who are likely sick of me in stressed illustrator mode, where I spend a lot of time doubting myself, eating cereal and not sleeping). The National Library of Australia is the first to have it up on their site, with a hilarious description that goes something like:

Squish, a little rabbit who is afraid of nearly everything, ventures into the night during a storm to find his friend, Twitch, who he fears may have encountered chickens.

With a new book comes the need for a new book trailer, so I’ve been toying with a few ideas. For my first book I learnt an entire new animation and editing program in order to make the trailer, and it took a good month of experimenting to create something I was happy with. You can see the product below, which has just passed 2,500 hits on YouTube:

Not one to make it easy for myself, I really want to do something different for book two. Inspired by a few clips I’ve seen recently I decided to try my hand at stop motion animation. I’ve had to do a bunch of research in trying to determine the best program to use, and have just downloaded a trial version of iStopMotion. This morning I had a go at making my very first halting and oh-so-very-B-grade stop motion video.

I’m still not sure how I’ll make the book trailer in the end (my aching back votes a firm ‘no’ to stop motion) but feel free to check out my attempt below:

I used a funky freeware tune composed by Mike Vekris (I think I was referencing some Peter Gabriel-style Sledgehammering)

Stay tuned to see how it all evolves…

Book Trailer

For the last month or so I’ve been rabbiting away on a secret little side project. It took many hours, much experimentation, some laughter, a little cursing, and the learning of an entire new computer program. But mostly it was a lot of fun, as it involved watching one of my little characters come to life. And today I’m ready to release it.

To celebrate the upcoming launch of Squish Rabbit in Australia (29th August), check out the video below if you want a sneaky peek of my first ever book trailer:

Or you can watch in on Vimeo here.

A huge thanks to the amazing musician Richard Grantham for the score, and also to my publishers (UQP and Viking / Penguin) for their support.

Hope you like it…