In the world of marketing, [Chief Marketing Officer of Poptent] Neil Perry says, “a 30 second spot might cost on average about $350,000, not including talent.”.

No wonder companies like Amazon or LG  even after buying a few of the video contest entries still feel like it is coming away with a steal.

In my previous blog post about video contests I had thought about estimating of the cost that it took to create a commercial spot to completion. I don’t think I would’ve ever been able to guess that the amount was sky high.

So when it comes to winning, both business win and those talented creative types lucky enough to score a prize win. Just about everyone comes out a winner…oh wait except for all those who spent hours and hours toiling over creating an entry only to …not win.

In many of their videos, there seems to be an unmistakable feeling of warmness in color.

Wanting to see if I could capture a similar aura, I took out my camera and went shooting around the house.

Although this was originally just going to be a few tests, I ended up creating a piece. What do you guys think?

Daddy, I know what I want for Christmas/Birthday/gift receiving occasion/normal day!

(click the image to play the video…you know you want to)

After all the parents in the United States and their children see my advertisement on TV, I can only hope that a Kindle is exactly what they want.

As anyone who hasn’t been living in a cave for the last few years will know, the Kindle is Amazon‘s flagship book reader. (It even appears on their front page). Marketed as being able to hold a ton a books, glare resistant due to its E-ink, 3G and WIFI capable(non yet released as of this post), among others, the Kindle seems to be a very slick cool device. Heck I’m starting to wonder if I need one as I type this up.

Most people are at least somewhat aware of these features though. When I created my Kindle Video entry, I wanted to take somewhat of a different route different route, portray a not so often heard story of Kindle.

I knew that I wanted to have books behind infinite white, a technique used many times by Apple to portray a clean image and product. Aside from my initial artistic design, I did not know what else to include in my ad.

Then I thought about how when a person reads a traditional book, they are magically transported to worlds of dungeons, dragons and other spaces of fantasy and history. If reading from Kindle is supposed give a similar experience, why not craft a 30 second spot presenting how Kindle brings out the wonder of reading books?

As I continued to stare at the white, it began to look a lot like drawing paper. I then realized that I could even put use the free space on the white to draw what a reader was imagining as he/she read. Although, I was never very good at holding a drawing pencil to a blank piece of paper, I did remember many little girls who were marvelous at it though. It was at that point that the ad in its full came to me. I could demonstrate the power of a little girl’s imagination during reading through grade school styled drawings and maybe even give them a little animation or two. And when she realized that she wanted to take way too many books with her, the magic Kindle would fly in for the rescue.

On more of a technical note, I will admit that I was slightly intimidated and very impressed by some of the entries packing CGI, cool shots from expensive cameras, and other complicated animations. Nearing the deadline without any sort of way, and with only  bunch of drawings that could be outclassed in complexity by the work of a preschooler, I remember debating whether to continue or quit. I was lucky to get a little boost from experienceislearning and implement her drawings as a replacement for these ones.

There is definitely a sense of cute which emits from this piece in particular.

Now just imagine if every 11 year old felt the same and wanted one after seeing my ad on national TV? Would that be too much to ask for?

I am Odysseus hear me roar!

Forget about even reaching that cup of tea, I'm not entirely sure if I have joints to bend my arm.

Imagine what you would think if you saw them in a movie? Oh wait, I almost used them as very fancy animations in my latest video.

I even managed to work in a scene of someone getting hit by an automobile!

Click to Play Video

I wish I could say that I was hired by Johnsonville, a company specializing in the production of sausages that just burst with flavor, to make this but I was not – at least not yet!

Until the companies start to look for me, I believe that one of the best ways to develop a reel to show,  is to enter lots of these little video contests.

And with internet video becoming ever so important, it is now crucially important for all websites to have a cool video to greet customers.

Why not just hire an expert though?

After calculating the costs of labor, catering, actors, equipment, grip, electricity, yada…, the cost to make a commercial in most instances is not a cheap affair.

Hoping to lower production costs, these companies often hire free lance videographers to produce a pretty sweet product.

or…

They could also create a video contest and dish out 1000 bucks to the kid who makes the best video. By giving away an arbitrarily low amount of money, the company now has not one but a selection of videos to choose from.  And some lucky kid now also has enough money as  buy a new Nintendo! Everyone wins in this situation! YAY!

But thankfully for these opportunities, I gain a valuable chance to practice the art of film making. Of course the monetary incentive is also always nice.

Now to explain the contest:

Make video explaining how Johnsonville (sausages) will remarkably improve your “…ville”

And there are four ville’s you can create videos for:

1. Friendsville: Eating these sausages with your friends makes the day just so much better.

2. Familyville: Eating these sausauges with your fam…

3. Eventville: Eating these sausages at the event…

4. Locationville: I’m sure you’ve gotten the point…

When I first saw this video contest, I knew that my video would ultimately include one thing – one of which had absolutely nothing to do with any of the villes.

Before you begin to jump out and tell me this is the wrong way to go about doing things…

I know…I know…

But this time Andrew Kramer’s car hit effect took precedence.

As film makers we all have our special effect glee laced moments. Peter Jackson loved special effects  as a child! Look where he is now!

So intense that now I can't find my hand

The clip always looked less than stellar to my eye. The freeze frame however, magnifies all those imperfections and places them right there for the eye to study.

I knew that my body was only projecting a shadow only for half of the clip.In fact, I only put in a shadow for half of the clip.

In fact I’m not even sure how that happened… This was my first foray into frame by frame rotoscoping and if you don’t know what that is…well… imagine the work that had to be done to make those light sabers in Star Wars glow, and no they didn’t actually have “light saber” glow sticks on set.

I was saved by having most of my body  behind a green screen.

Judging by my large grin, being in front of a green screen must be hilarious!

As it wasn’t practical to extend the small green screen beneath my feet, the parts of shot in which my feet touched the ground and chairs… had to be traced out…frame by frame.

After that exercise in tedium, I am fairly happy about my work.

And I hope the contest organizers feel the same way and make me a lucky kid!

As I’m sure you know, there are plenty of things of things to micro-manage in a movie.

I distinctly remember a video on Youtube shot from a balcony of over looking a street. And that street just happened to be the set for one of the scene’s in the first Transformers. We all make fun of Michael Bay for his “awesome directing” but I am kind of impressed how he managed to turn that seemingly chaotic road of a set into an explosive and exciting scene in movie. I don’t think I even know how to begin if I stepped onto that street.

More recently, I went to the movies and saw Nolan’s  Hollywood Blockbuster yet mind-twister Inception.

The movie revolves around planting an idea in someone’s mind and then deceiving them into believing that this idea originally developed internally. Positioning this idea into the mind as if it were self-conceived however would require traveling three layers deep into the mind – with each later being represented in the movie by a radically different setting and world.

Although each of these settings is radically different, they are at the same time all  connected. When the gravity goes out in one layer, so does the gravity in another. More than just playing with the physics, Nolan manages to weave this control over many of the details in the movie. Maintaining this high level attention, as many directors know, is no easy feat.

I shot a film last year which attempted to blend together a student’s real life dilemma with his metaphysical world. When it was played before my mind’s little movie theater, the discoveries that he made in his fantasy world  visually affected his real world life -even quite impactful at times. The multiple realms were supposed to blend together but they never did in the final cut.

Even if the script is amazing, it takes real skill to imagine it into celluloid or in my case…digital video. A director needs to be able to spin together all the weaving which includes everything from capturing inspiring  performances by the actors to the crafting a stimulating and entertaining story (I already have enough issues sometimes just finding actors for roles).

But I guess when you’re a big shot, it all gets easier (to find people who want to be in your movie at least…).

Instead of just slapping it onto Craigslist with a few generic stock photos of our car, not only taken from a variety of mundane angles but framed by things like the side walk and the trashcan, I decided to make this:

[Vimeo 13349138]

As far as those generic photos go, they can make even that brand new race car look like your grandma’s old jalopy. In fact the Saturn, before we bought it, did used to belong to a grandma who drove it once a week, just not my own.

In direct contrast, I wanted to turn our last two generation ago Saturn into a sleek species of “fine” American Engineering.

To do this, I made sure almost never to show a passive angled shot of the car.

The Final Shot just reveals everything that the car is not.

The Saturn is ready to explode from 0 to 60.

I didn’t exactly want the license plate running wild on the internet so I replaced it with “SATURN SL1″. There are probably a million different ways to do this but I dropped the clip into Adobe After Effects and then used a really crude mask to cover it up. And by really crude, I mean really crude.

Instead of using complex measures and other whatchamacallit blurs, I drew a rectangle over the text in the original plate and then matched up the colors using the eye dropper tool. If you look carefully you can notice the outline of the mask in the original license plate. I also couldn’t quite feather it since when ever I tried to blend in the edges, it would also start to blur out the gold nut. In retrospect, I probably could have just put another layer of video with slightly different masks to solve that. Then using a license plate font, I then wrote in the text and matched up the colors once again using the eye dropper tool.

As if my method wasn’t rudimentary enough, I then proceeded to motion track the license plate to alleviate the problem of a few slight bumps caused by the strong wind during my day of filming. I realize now, I could have just used a still from that video clip and then extended it without playing with the motion tracker for 30 minutes. You must realize from my discussion, that the picking of things to track isn’t quite second nature to me yet. After an eternity of undos, I finally got a result like the one you can see above.

Hit that Gas Pedal! Kaboom!

The color correction was done using a combination of “Ultimatum” Magic Bullet Look’s preset as well as Final Cut Pro’s own Three way Color Corrector. The Ultimatum preset adds a vignette around the edges of the video focusing our attention to the centersof the frame. I also wanted to boost the Greens and Yellows while darkening the image a bit and I think I was pretty successful in achieving a more aggressive image.  Whether Matt Damon will get in one of these in his next movies still remains to be determined though.

The blue smoke was stock footage that I dropped in. In its original state, it fumed out like smoke normally does…slowly and all over the place. Masks had to be placed around the exhaust in order to get it to look as if it were firing out from that pipe. Of course the blue smoke hasn’t quite reached the velocity that it needs to properly convey the raw power of the car but who is going to notice in the clip’s half second duration. As Andrew Kramer of Video Copilot fame has graciously taught us all, you can increase the feeling of power by addling a screen shake with the wiggler and then using motion tiles to fix the problem of their being black space around the clips edges. Because I added only a pint sized one, the clip probably gives out mixed signals.

Unmatched in... what class?

With these titles, I wanted to go for that rugged feel. When I saw Andrew Kramer using this exact background as well as doing a tutorial explaining how to get text to zoom in, I felt perfect. As the background was originally blue, I first changed the color and then darkened it. I cannot exactly remember what font I used.(my memory is already starting to fade and it has only been a week). I do however remember following the tutorial, there was a ramp on them…

As you have by now probably noticed. Throughout the commercial, the viewer is only treated to bits and pieces of the car rather than the automobile in its entirety. Action directors have been giving us bits and pieces of a scene in rapid succession to make it seem as if there was a lot more “action” going on that plausible possible for decades. Sometimes that car is already pretty damn hot, lit on fire, flying off a cliff…you should get the point.

Perhaps one of the few shots that reveal much of the body in a straight angle is the slow motion one.

Slow Motion can make anything look cool...Just ask Michael Bay

Despite shooting the video in 60 frames interlaced or 60i, there simply weren’t enough frames in the video to avoid that slight blur from the frames being drawn out to a crawl.

I shot it using the interlaced mode on my camera, de-interlaced using JES Deinterlacer.

While it certainly did look kind of cool having a bit of 60 Frame Progressive footage, I had to conform it to 24 frames a second like the rest of my footage. I then imported it into After Effects and Time Remapped it as best as I could. If I remember correctly, I believe that I also used the key frame assistant to create an exponential relationship between the key frames on the time remap.

The result is a nice piece of slow motion footage. And if you’ve ever seen Michael Bay getting the Mail you’ll know that slo-mo can make even the most mundane tasks a lot more impressive.

Call it false advertising if you will but, after one my sister’s friends saw the commercial, she replied, “This commercial makes me want you car.” Another even thought the commercial was real.

While it was a pure ego boost, I do regret to say that no one has bought the car yet. Of course I haven’t exactly gotten it onto Craigslist yet, but that’s another story.

Before it is too late, BUY THE CAR! IT’S HOT STUFF!!!

If only I was a large production company with a large enough budget for many things like cameras and well of course gas.

I am rather, just another small person out there trying to make videos.

Anyone who has made a lot of videos will inevitably begin to wonder one day: How do you make money making videos?  As a college student with an unpractical major (media studies), and only another year of school left before having to face the harsh realities of supporting himself, I often find myself pondering just this.

The answer is a simple one: These people undoubtedly need a reel to showcase how they have been spending their time “video-ing.”

Though this is more than just a reel, I’m also hoping that it will serve a dual purpose as one

My dad often says you should always write down how you did something if you spent more than 5 minutes trying to figure it out. With each of these videos requiring hours and hours of my precious time, it might be wise to give his advice a go.

At least in a year when I’m out there looking for a job to supplement the cash flow my burger flipping one, I won’t have forgotten how I did that green screen effect or what not.

Oh and if you know anyone who wants to hire a videographer, please do drop me a line.