Project 2 – Peter Shanly and Mark Sanchez

Blog for Project 2 is http://shanchez.wordpress.com

You’re such a Teaser

The movie teaser is a form of advertising and design that the general public actually look for. Instead of it being slammed in our face, we seek it out. Nowadays, we here about the production and release of a movie years in advance. With the use of trailers, production companies can grab hold of their audience well in advance of the film’s release date. Teasers wet the audience’s whistle. Sometimes it can make or break the movie, but when done right, the potential movie-goer is locked in. Pixar is a prime example of creating teaser trailers that grab hold of the viewer, and their method is quite clever. It would seem that they understand that the trailer must deliver almost as much satisfaction as the movie itself. They have also built a sort of template for their trailers depending on the film subject matter. Pixar generates family friendly movies, each with their own theme, such as family, or friendship, or growing up. The film, Monsters Inc., has a trailer that takes the subject of a child’s fears of monsters in the closet and just when you think something terrible happens, a light hearted twist is applied. All of the sudden, those monsters are more human than the stereotypical creeping terror.

Some teasers hardly need any imagery at all. Anticipation is a powerful tool, which is not lost on the teaser trailer for the new Batman film, The Dark Knight. The majority of this teaser is a black screen with streaks of light. The real anticipation is created through audio. Many Batman faithfuls will know instantly what the film is. On the opposite side, there are teasers that use sound effects and visuals with almost no audio naration, such as the Transformers (2007) teaser. Both these teasers can instantly identify with a cult following. Pulling off a proper teaser in such case is both incredibly difficult and easy. Difficult in the sense that the information delivered has to live up to expectations of legions of fans. Easy in that the teaser is not intended to reveal much about the movie. Many films use teasers in order to gauge audience response while in production. The Transformers film used the release of film imagery to retrieve feedback and constructive criticism on the actual look of the robot characters.

 The teaser trailer is an artform of its own. It takes great skill to ignite facination without giving the whole film away.

Ten Second Leader – The Adventures of TEN-FOLD

This video is entitled “The Adventures of Ten-Fold”. The premise of this video is a play on the trait of the bat-signal in the Batman comics. There are two basic things happening with this video; the countdown and the reactions of the main super hero character Ten’Fold. The plot of the video is that Ten-Fold is summoned to help his city but becomes insulted by the additional summons of other superheroes, all of which have numbers for their emblems. Eventually, Ten-Fold becomes so agitated that he decides to not go out at all. The style of the video is a comic book form of art. These images are two separate photos mixed together. One is of the super hero in the setting and the other is a photo of the numbers projected on the wall. The photos are then photoshopped to have a comic book feel and placed on a single page in illustrator. The video pans around this page to make it feel like you are reading a comic book. Because of the fast pace and short amount of time for the actual countdown, dialogue was excluded. Instead, the credits were used for creating dialogue and to help explain the plot line in case there were those who didn’t quite understand the plot without text in the countdown. Overall I am pleased with the video. I would like to make the numbers more visible in and add a soundeffect to make the numbers more relevant and indicate the passage of each second.

Creative Brief

FINAL BRIEF: The Adventures of Ten-Fold

Overview

The aim of this project was to create a ten second countdown that would precede a film. The concept behind my leader is about a super hero who is called into action but find that other heroes are being called in the process, stealing all the glory. This is show through the various beacons that appear in succession. Each beacon is a number. The succession of beacons creates the countdown. The imagery is photoshopped but they all began as photographs. These images have been treated with a series of photoshop filters, namely posterization and half tone. The images are arranged on a comic book page to add to the effect. Additional captions were originally in the sequence to go along with the hero’s expressions, but the sequence moves too fast for an audience to adequately view what is displayed in each frame. There are two main elements; the beacon or countdown number and the hero.

Goals and Objectives

I want to create a humourous tone with a half tone and recapture the feel of a comic book with the obvious half tone texture. Placing the images on a page was meant to add o the experience of reading a comic book. A key issue is time with this project and warrented the removal of captions until the credits. Because it was only a 10 second movie, the images had to be viewed in precise timing, but because the images are all on a page, the video needs more movement to keep the viewer interested.

Audience

The audience for this video was really anyone looking for a laugh and those with a soft spot for the illustrated hero.

Key Message

Learn to laugh off the frustrations of life. Working with others doesn’t steal your thunder.

Content Planning

The content will consist of several photoshopped photographs layed out in illustrator and arranged using Aftereffects and Quicktime Pro.

Schedual

Jan 20 – Photoshoot hero

Jan 21 – Create hero beacons

Jan 24 – Photoshop images

Jan 26 – Photoshop beacons

Jan 27 – Build video in Aftereffects

_________________________________________

Brief 2 – Calorie Counter

Overview

  

The premise of this video is the idea of monitoring the food we eat. The video is about someone analyzing the nutrition facts on the side of a box of snacks. The viewer starts from the top reading the amount of carbohydrates per snack serving, which reads 10. Eventually the reading makes it to the bottom and there are two possible endings. First is that the fat content turns out to by 0 grams. The alternative is that when the person pans down to the fact content, his thumb is to the left of the 0g. After removing the thumb, it turns out the snack is 100 grams of fat.

Goals and Objective

I want the video to have a sense of build up leading to the end. You keep feeling like its too good to be true. The tone of the video would do well with sound effects such as a drum roll. It should make people feel the desire to be bable to have food like the snack in the video or laugh it off if the use of the alternative 100 grams of fat ending is used.

 Audience

This video is targeted to people particularly concerned with watching what they eat, appealing to theie desire to be healthy. 

Key Message

Be careful what you eat / live a healthy lifestyle.

Content Planning

The content of the video will be photo graphs of a person;s hand trailing down the side of a box. It will seem like a first person view.

Schedual

TBA

 ______________________________________

Brief 1

Overview

The aim of this project was to create a ten second countdown that would precede a film. The concept behind my leader is about a super hero who is called into action but find that other heroes are being called in the process, stealing all the glory. This is show through the various beacons that appear in succession. Each beacon is a number. The succession of beacons creates the countdown. The imagery is photoshopped but they all began as photographs. These images have been treated with a series of photoshop filters, namely posterization and half tone. The images are arranged on a comic book page to add to the effect. Additional captions were originally in the sequence to go along with the hero’s expressions, but the sequence moves too fast for an audience to adequately view what is displayed in each frame. There are two main elements; the beacon or countdown number and the hero.

Goals and Objectives

I want to create a humourous tone with a half tone and recapture the feel of a comic book with the obvious half tone texture. Placing the images on a page was meant to add o the experience of reading a comic book. A key issue is time with this project and warrented the removal of captions until the credits. Because it was only a 10 second movie, the images had to be viewed in precise timing, but because the images are all on a page, the video needs more movement to keep the viewer interested.

Audience

The audience for this video was really anyone looking for a laugh and those with a soft spot for the illustrated hero.

Key Message

Learn to laugh off the frustrations of life. Working with others doesn’t steal your thunder.

Content Planning

The content will consist of several photoshopped photographs layed out in illustrator and arranged using Aftereffects and Quicktime Pro.

Schedual

TBA