More and more clients are supplying post-houses with their own content. This is a good example of a soup to nuts commercial made completely with client provided imagery. Casual Male was running a special sale throughout the Mid-West and needed a spot with a quick turnaround time. Working with Director Scott Palmer and Senior Producer Leah Romig, Cramer received a folder of high resolution images, logos and a spec PowerPoint file on a Monday. Working with Cramer’s print department to convert the Adobe InDesign images we had a first cut of the spot on Tuesday. After one more day of revisions with Casual Male the spot was trafficked on Wednesday.
Since we had all high-resolution images, we decided to do the spot all in Adobe After Effects. We used Avid Symphony Nitris to basically import the render and lay in the final audio mix and to lay to HDCAM tape for trafficking. The spot is basically broken up into 4 distinct sections. You can tell each section by the background color change. The compositing and animation for each of these sections was done on their own and then I just made sure my 3D camera in After Effects “flew” out of each section to a blank background. There is just a simple dissolve (7 frames) between each section. This worked great because for any revisions I could just go to that section and make a new sub-comp. I had one master comp of the 4 sections that acted as a render comp. Changes were made to sub comps and replaced in the master comp.
The voice over was read by Comcast Sports Net’s Gary Tanguay. Funny side story, the scratch track was read by Senior Audio Engineer Brian Iacobucci, who has been reading scratch tracks for years. After reading scratch track for years, Brian has gained a great voice-over talent himself. When Gary came into see the final spot with the scratch track in it, he actually thought Brian was the final voice-over and that we accidentally played the wrong spot!
For anyone getting into After Effects animations I highly recommend using sub comps/pre comps as much as you can. Be organized too, if you can think about how you can make an organized top down workflow it can really help in fast turnaround times.
Barry Clegg 