How to Carry Bigfoot Home Turned a Debut Book Into a Festival Film
How to Carry Bigfoot Home is a 2015 animated digital trailer created in the United States to promote Chris Tarry's debut short-story collection of the same name, using hand-crafted animation and original sound design to position a literary work as a cinematic experience rather than a conventional publishing advertisement.
The campaign launched in April 2015, one month after the book's publication by independent nonprofit Red Hen Press on March 17, 2015, as noted by redhen.org. The trailer carried the tagline "Help a monster's dream come true," a line that distilled the collection's thematic preoccupation with fantastic creatures — dragons, Bigfoot, and other monsters — navigating worlds that feel recognisably human. That tonal precision was not incidental. The campaign's core objective was to signal the literary register of Tarry's fiction to a readership that might otherwise overlook a debut collection from an independent press, using the visual and emotional grammar of film to do what a jacket copy alone could not.
In the United States, independent literary publishing occupies a commercially precarious position alongside major trade publishers, and debut short-story collections face particular discoverability challenges. The animated trailer addressed that challenge by operating across the boundary between book marketing and short-form film. The single digital media asset was distributed online as a promotional tool, but its ambitions extended well beyond conversion. The campaign earned selection as a film at the 2015 Whistler Film Festival, as documented by clapboard.com, a distinction that reframed the trailer as an autonomous creative work rather than ancillary marketing material. Clapboard Score: 61/100. The campaign stands as a rare example of author-led creative production — Tarry co-directed and contributed to sound — transforming a debut book launch into a cross-disciplinary media moment.
Chris Tarry's collection faced the structural headwinds that define independent literary publishing in the United States. Red Hen Press, the Los Angeles-based nonprofit that published the book, operates outside the marketing infrastructure available to imprints at major commercial publishers, where television spots, national retail co-op placements, and substantial paid media budgets shape a debut's visibility. For a short-story collection — a form that historically sells in smaller volumes than novels — the challenge of reaching readers is acute.
The strategic rationale behind the animated trailer was therefore rooted in format disruption. Rather than competing with better-resourced publishers on their own terms, the campaign displaced the conventional book trailer — typically a slideshow of static imagery set to royalty-free music — with something closer to a short animated film. This approach borrowed authority from cinema, a medium that carries cultural prestige and shareability that literary publishing rarely commands at the debut level. The Whistler Film Festival selection, as documented by clapboard.com, validated that strategic bet: the trailer was evaluated not as promotional content but as film.
In the United States, the publishing market represented the largest single national share of the global book trade in 2015, accounting for approximately a third of global publishing revenue according to data cited by authorearnings.com and tachyonpublications.com. Within that market, independent presses competed against vertically integrated publishers including Penguin Random House and HarperCollins, whose marketing resources dwarfed those available to Red Hen Press. The animated trailer's festival positioning offered an asymmetric advantage: a credentialed creative object that could travel beyond the literary press circuit and reach audiences who encounter new fiction through cultural programming rather than bookstore browsing.
The animated trailer for How to Carry Bigfoot Home was co-directed by Chris Tarry, Carson Ting, and David de Haas, with Ting serving as art director and illustrator and de Haas as animator, as documented by clapboard.com and chairmanting.com. The convergence of those roles — writer, visual artist, and motion designer working in close collaboration — produced a piece whose creative coherence reflected the unified sensibility of a small, committed team rather than a fragmented agency production pipeline.
Carson Ting's illustration work gave the trailer its visual identity. The imagery drew on the thematic material of Tarry's stories — fantastic creatures rendered with warmth and a degree of melancholy — to establish a tone that is playful without being juvenile and strange without being alienating. That balance was essential. Short-story collections about monsters risk being miscategorised as children's literature or genre fiction; the visual language of the trailer needed to signal literary intent while retaining the accessibility that animation affords.
Sound design was credited to Shawn Pierce, Chris Tarry, and Davie Lawrence Goldman, as noted by clapboard.com. Tarry's presence in the sound credits alongside his directing and writing roles underscores the degree to which this was an author-driven production, with the creative originator controlling the work across multiple registers simultaneously. The result was a trailer in which music, voice, and image operated in genuine alignment rather than as independently assembled components. That craft integrity is likely what distinguished the piece in the eyes of the Whistler Film Festival programmers, who evaluated it on cinematic rather than marketing criteria. The campaign contains a single media asset, as confirmed by clapboard.com, making the economy of that asset's execution all the more consequential.
No verified sales performance data, audience reach figures, or conversion metrics for the How to Carry Bigfoot Home animated trailer are publicly available. No published sales lift, revenue figures, or audience measurement data for this campaign have been identified across redhen.org, mastersreview.com, openlettersmonthlyarchive.com, or any other accessible source. That absence is consistent with the nature of author-led literary campaigns, which rarely commission formal measurement infrastructure.
What is verifiable is the campaign's festival outcome. Selection at the 2015 Whistler Film Festival, as documented by clapboard.com, constitutes an externally validated measure of creative quality assessed against film — not marketing — standards. For a single digital asset produced without a disclosed agency and distributed primarily online in the United States, that selection represents a structurally significant result. It extended the campaign's reach into a programming context — festival audiences, film press, industry attendees — that no conventional book trailer could access.
The structural effectiveness of the campaign also rests on its tagline precision. "Help a monster's dream come true" performed dual duty: it communicated the imaginative register of the fiction and it addressed the reader directly as a participant in the book's fate, a framing particularly well suited to independent publishing's reliance on community-driven word of mouth. The campaign's Clapboard Score of 61/100 reflects genuine creative ambition within a tightly constrained production context, with the festival credential serving as the most durable evidence of that ambition's realisation.
The animated trailer is a 2015 digital campaign promoting Chris Tarry's debut short-story collection of the same name, published by Red Hen Press. Co-directed by Tarry, Carson Ting, and David de Haas, the piece used original illustration and sound design to market the book as a cinematic experience, earning selection at the 2015 Whistler Film Festival.
The trailer was co-directed by Chris Tarry, Carson Ting, and David de Haas. Carson Ting also served as art director and illustrator, as documented by clapboard.com and chairmanting.com. Sound credits were shared by Shawn Pierce, Chris Tarry, and Davie Lawrence Goldman, reflecting a tightly integrated, author-led creative team.
The campaign was published in the United States in April 2015, approximately one month after the book's release by Red Hen Press on March 17, 2015, as noted by redhen.org. It was distributed as a single digital media asset and subsequently selected as a film at the 2015 Whistler Film Festival, per clapboard.com.
The animated trailer was selected as a film at the 2015 Whistler Film Festival, as documented by clapboard.com. This selection distinguished the work from conventional book marketing by subjecting it to cinematic evaluation criteria. No additional award recognitions for the campaign are publicly documented across available sources.
The How to Carry Bigfoot Home animated trailer holds a Clapboard Score of 61 out of 100. The score reflects genuine creative ambition within a constrained independent publishing production context, with the Whistler Film Festival selection serving as the most externally verifiable indicator of the campaign's creative quality and reach.
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