The music had to be playful and light, with a couple little hits to accompany the animation. Here's what I came up with!
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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.
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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.
Vision Critical: Firefly Trailer by redpilot]]>
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.
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Giant Ant did an amazing job with this, and for us video geeks out there, it was shot with the RED camera, which explains the quality. Put a bunch of photogenic kids in front of camera like that, light them nicely, have them deliver a message about our impending doom and you got yourselves a great video. I'm exaggerating about the doom part - this video conveys an entirely hopeful message. We have at least until 2012, right?
To hear some more music, head over to the conveniently titled page, Music.
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