Giant Ant Media recently completed trio of videos for Sierra Wireless' new product, the Overdrive Pro 3G/4G mobile hotspot router.
The production was quite involved, starting with the building of a small camera rig where a Canon S95 was mounted on one side of a piece of pipe, and a wooden block — a stand-in for the Overdrive Pro device — mounted on the other. The concept was that for the entire video, the Overdrive Pro would appear right in the middle of the frame as the camera moved through each scene. Giant Ant's lead on the project, Shawn, shot pieces of video, edited it together, printed-off screenshots of each frame, then passed the hardcopy printouts off to Morgan to trace over in a rough line-drawing style. Those black and white drawings were then scanned back into the computer, painted in Photoshop, then assembled as an image sequence and brought into After Effects for compositing and fine-tuning.
The last step was that I created some music and put in some sound effects to create a rich audio environment and to add some weight and life to the onscreen action.
Here is another spot for the Canadian Cancer Society that I did the music for. It's quite different from "Gift of Hope", but because it was produced in such close proximity to that one (the same month) I thought it would be cool to use similar (but not identical) sounds while I still had them kind of bouncing around my brain. Also, because this was promoting the annual Relay For Life, it needed to have a quicker pace to try and motivate people to get involved.
No, not Firefly, Joss Whedon's short-lived sci-fi series. This Firefly is a soon-to-be released product from a major software developer here in Vancouver, the details of which I most definitely cannot tell you about.
But I can tell you that Giant Ant Media, my extant employers produced the promotional video to correspond with the product release, as well as a shorter "trailer" to go with it. Below is the music for that trailer, which I later retooled for the promotional video as well.
The client brief was something "epic", like from an adventure movie. I think the music heads in that direction, but to be fair the trailer is for a software product, not a major motion picture, so a bit of restraint was shown in the sense that it has as more lighthearted and playful theme in the piano part - a bit more "commercial-y", which is sort of what this piece was.
I've been downtown here at Giant Ant Media pretty regularly since early March working with them mostly as their in-house music producer. The first big project that came down the pipe was this one for the Canadian Cancer Society. They had their big gala/fundraising event at Hotel Vancouver and wrangled Giant Ant to produce a video to anchor the evening and remind everyone why they were there.
The concept for the video was to hear from families who have members dealing with cancer, who have lost loved ones, or who have successfully beat the disease. Instead of seeing photos and videos of hospital beds, doctors' waiting rooms, moments of hearing good news, hearing bad news, it was decided that using illustrated and animated elements against a stark white background while hearing the families' words could convey the kind of emotion that 'real' images might not be able to.
The approach to the music was really about underscoring the interviews, and keeping the textures light but using a lot of bell-like tones and plucked strings in higher registers to stay out of the way of the dialogue. Nobody wanted the music to be too "on-the-nose" either in the happy parts or the sad parts, so the one constant was to keep a sense of "hopefulness" to it.
Hope you enjoy the video, feel free to leave your thoughts in the comments.
Monday, October 17, 2011 at 02:13PM