Dragon winds are hot, dry winds which blow suddenly, strongly, and unexpectedly against the prevailing winds. They are taken to be signs of ill-omen and bad fortune. In the Low Countries they are more explicitly called dragon’s breath, and perhaps that’s why, in the crag villages of the Killorn Peaks, they are believed to be the sulfurous breath of the Red Maiden, the most-feared of the eighty-seven fates.

Loremasters, however, trace the origin of the term back to the tribute flights of the tyrant dragon Cinderheart. It is written that he possessed wings of crawling magma and that the terrible heat swept forth by the beating of those wings could be felt for miles as a harbinger of terror.

The last of this sequence of video trailers I’ve made recently, this trailer for The Murderer’s Tale by Margaret Frazer is also my favorite to date.

Of course it helps to have great material to work with. (Most authors would die to have a review quote like the one from Detectives in History that you see in the trailer.) But I feel like it came together very well. Let me know what you think.

For our next trailer in this series, here’s the book trailer I made for Margaret Frazer’s The Boy’s Tale.

This was my first effort with the full version of Animoto. It’s probably a little too long, but I felt it was important to credit the review quotes and Animoto’s text limit forced those credits onto separate frames.

A couple years ago, I reviewed the disastrously bad X-Men Origins: Wolverine. I concluded by saying that, unless they got Bryan Singer back, I wouldn’t be fooled into seeing another of these movies.

Executive Producer Bryan Singer

Story by Bryan Singer

… well played 20th Century Fox.

The previews also looked good, but I still waited for the reviews. And when the reviews came back positive (the film is currently reviewing better than Thor on Metacritic, and I thought Thor was a pretty good flick) I decided to take the risk.

And I’m really glad that I did.

Not only is X-Men: First Class better than X-Men Origins: Wolverine (a very low hurdle to clear), I think it may be the best X-Men movie they’ve made. It’s not perfect. But it is very, very good and I recommend checking it out. (Particularly if the only reason you’ve been holding back is because, like me, you were so bitterly disappointed by X3 and Wolverine.)

So, in my opinion, that’s two good comic book movies out of two so far this year. And I’ve got my fingers crossed for both Captain America (which looks great in the trailers) and Green Lantern (which will either be amazing or painful).

(Tangentially, I’ve seen a lot of industry “experts” claiming that X-Men: First Class is having a poor box office turn-out because Wolverine isn’t in it. Well… no. It’s having a poor box office turn-out because the last two movies in the franchise sucked and sucked hard. You can’t just bounce back from that. I think the only way they could have avoided a poor opening weekend for this movie would have been to get Bryan Singer back in the director’s chair and prominently advertise that fact. Frankly, I’m surprised they weren’t plastering Singer’s name all over the previews. I had to go digging to find out he was re-involved in the franchise. It would have sent a very clear “sorry about the last two films, please give us another chance” message to the audience.)

Continuing this sequence of “video trailers recently produced by Justin”, I have a book trailer for The Outlaw’s Tale by Margaret Frazer. This one is a little crude, since I was basically test-bedding the Animoto platform as a tool for quickly generating these things. (I’m still using it occasionally, but unfortunately it proved to be too limited even after you paid for it.)

You may also want to check out the book trailer The Bishop’s Tale that I shared back in April if you haven’t seen it already. I also provided the voice of Sir Clement Sharpe for that one.