Breaking Down a Promo Video

By Drew Ravani in Media.

The Streaming Media West 2008 promo video below was a project that started with the brief “make a short promo video to highlight the keynote speakers, location, time, and benefits of attending the Streaming Media West 2008 conference.”

I wrote a script for the client – about a page – with the voiceover in one column and the visual elements in the other, listed out with their transitions. This got a client approval, and then I went to work making parts for the video. The script is an invaluable tool – second only to great storyboards – but a step I would absolutely not go without. It took about 45 minutes to develop after thinking for a few days (we call this “wool gathering” in the South) and looking at various inspiration pieces as well as doodling a bit. This is an important part of engaging the right brain for me as I tend to get wrapped up in linear thought – besides, its fun to explore what your brain can cough up when you give it space to do it.

I started with a concept focused on a modern Western theme with a sunset and sunset color palette coupled with the red black and white of the Streaming Media logo. I wanted to illustrate movement and actual location and people in an interesting way.

I drew a sunset in layers using Illustrator CS3 on a Wacom Intuos 3 graphics tablet (a pretty indispensable tool in today’s design environment) – mine is a honking big surface to doodle on and I love working with it – it could only be better if it were a Cintiq 21” tablet/ monitor that allows you to draw directly on the screen. This was the opening that gave me a Western theme to start with – and when I lived in California, I always felt that everything had a “gold-kissed” feel about it – whereas here in New York, it seems more of a burnt umber/ochre/and grey environment dotted with colorful bits and bobs.

I had some other elements that I had filmed at the previous Streaming Media West 2007 event – some great footage of the CEO of Bittorrent, footage of the speakers we filmed, and some plates of the conference center in San Jose that I filmed with a Letus 35mm Extreme adapter, Canon FD lenses, and an HVX200. This b-roll saved me from having to create the entire thing as an animation - a big help in delivering this video in a short time.

Building the elements came in phases – and all were assembled in After Effects CS3 using mostly stock effects, with the exception being Trapcode Shine for augmenting the Sun rays in the opening piece. Peder Norby – THE guy behind Trapcode has been making After Effects more interesting for many years now and much is owed to him for creating these low cost high impact tools for artists. Mad love, Peder. I met Peder when he had loooong hair and looked like a sleepless zombie standing on a tradeshow floor hocking his wares. Now, he looks like a CEO of a European software company. Go figure.

The audio was created entirely in Logic Pro – almost entirely in response to the need to avoid problems with Brightcove’s strict music licensing policies (since I made my own audio, then they couldn’t moan about it and yank the video). I thought a clarion call to watch the video should involve a trumpet call followed by a drum groove and this was pretty easy to glue together in Logic. I then recorded our own Matthew Schwartz for the voice over (he’s got a great grit to his voice coupled with excellent diction and he takes direction well). That was then layered into the Logic project where I tweaked his voice over and the music tracks to come together by panning and adjusting the volume and timing of elements.

I then exported the audio to the After Effects time line and set markers on the audio for certain pieces of video that I wanted to start or stop on certain moments in the audio. This was the most annoying part of the whole process as After Effects has no provision for live playback of audio short of doing a RAM preview. The audio and picture sync work flow has always been its biggest weakness, so I knew the devil going in – but I still don’t like it though. I would love for audio to be scrubbed so I could easily time out events to sound queues. Even an ultra lo rez proxy playback would help in this case.

Once everything was synced up it was time to switch the whole project over to 32 bit processing in After Effects in an sRGB profile with a gamma of 2.1. This was done to give it a standard color profile that matches most monitors out there and to get the most out of my color. After doing a quick check to make sure all was hunky dory, I rendered out an Animation Codec version in full 1280X720 rez and then dropped it into compressor for the internet version. Voila! Done.

Drew Ravani is a ScribeLabs Producer/ Cinematographer/ Special Effects Geek. He has been making stuff for people to watch for over 10 years.

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