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.