I'm having a new giveaway called "Who Wants to be in a Children's Book?"
Win a chance to have you or your child be painted into my next book, just join my Facebook Page to see the rules and enter.

Here's the first part of the "making of" process, well after the initial part of asking Seamus, Mark & Chris from Screen Novelties if they would make the trailer and then getting over the shock and disbelief when they said they would. We started off with a storyboard which I drew. You can see here it's a bit longer than the trailer ended up being and this is even a much edited version from what i first had in mind.The goal was to make it 30 seconds long which came from Simon & Schuster, they (and other publishers) have indicated that 30 seconds is the ideal length for a book trailer, it's what places like Amazon and other outlets they have for it prefer. I do think in general shorter is better, but i found 30 seconds to be a bit too short, i think 40 or 45 would have been perfect. Of course that would have been significantly more work and as you'll see by the end of the "making of" it was a pretty major undertaking as it was and we barely got it done before the book came out anyway, so all's well that end's well.
A big part of the process at this stage was editing the board in Final Cut with sound to it and editing stuff out to get close to the time we wanted, also before even starting the board or conception of what the trailer might be i talked to Seamus, Mark and Chris about what would be possible in terms of the number of shots, puppets and sets they could build.

So here's something very exciting I've been working on for a while and have been waiting to share and it's finally time. It's the stop motion book trailer for THE GREAT LOLLIPOP CAPER! Made by the incredible and super talented guys at SCREEN NOVELTIES with a lot of extra help by Joe Schmidt (and i mean really a lot of extra help by Joe Schmidt which I'll go into later when i do the "making of" posts). I've been dying to work with Screen Novelties ever since I first met them a really, really long time ago. 
I've been such a huge fan of everything they've done, when they agreed to make this trailer for me I really felt like I won the lottery. I love this thing so much and loved the whole process of making it, it's one of my very favorite things I've ever worked on in a long list of favorite things I've worked on. I'll be doing some behind the scenes "making of" posts to show how long and involved the process was. Thank you Screen Novelties, you are the best!!!
The video i could imbed here is a little small, to see it larger and in more glory go here

Q: Where can you go to see Molly Ringwold, Carol Burnett, Jon Klassen, Lemony Snicket, Oliver Jeffers and many more of your favorite personalities reading books?
A: The Los Angeles Times Festival of Books on April 20th at USC.
Q: Will Dan be there reading his new book THE GREAT LOLLIPOP CAPER on stage and chucking Caper Flavored Lollipops into the audience?
A:Yes.

If you're not doing anything on Saturday come to the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books at USC and watch me read my new book THE GREAT LOLLIPOP CAPER. I will almost certainly forget what i was going to say on stage and pit out my shirt. Don't miss it!

I'm just gonna go ahead and say it. People who work out in playgrounds when children are trying to play there are a little weird.