Its been sometime since I've last done a sweeps piece that required so much time and effort, But Elex Michaelson's social networking piece needed some spice and came to us for some graphic magic. Elex originally approached me with some basic ideas with showing off the websites, fly ins, him in the profile.. good stuff just needed more umphf. So i thought I'd throw in the idea of a green screen shoot, he didnt quite picture it then.. but now after its done.. i think i've swayed him to think more outside of the box for his standups. hehe
Here is the entire clip that I worked on.. in total it took about 3 days to shoot, prep and composite.
First off I got a little carried away with the Twitch plug in for the transition ins for the myspace and facebook logos.. but I think a 3rd one would have over done it LOL.. The first part shows how you can customize myspace pages, so i grabbed a couple screen shots of peoples pages, some friends some just cause of the dramatic color change.. you'll notice the first one is Edric's profile, then Paramore's, and the last one is the Mindzalike with the half nekkied ColCol and Julz. lol..
The stand up was so long that I had to create movement just for the sake of visual appeal.. so that why I made the facebook logo transform into a frame to hold the page it self.. it was a great transition to break the standup and go a little dynamic by putting him in the profile pic then scrolling down to the wall where I threw in Angie hitting on Elex on his wall.. I put Angies name there because shes the editor of this package, so I thought it would be funny to add that easter egg.. "How are YOU doing?".. BTW, that was my facebook profile page.. i chopped it up and recreated some open spaces so i can do the wall effect, and increased the profile picture size so I can fit the video in there.
After the transition out, i centered Elex on the screen to prep for the photo montage.. in the photo images you will see, a very young Scott Buzo (AM Director), my bud Jay Kantor, Rob and his awesome handlebar mustache, Erin Bossen (Mykiel on San Diego Living), Jayne and her peace homie look, and our friend Candice from Canada. Pretty much Stephanie ran through as many profiles as she could and pulled tons of pictures we can use for this piece.. especially for the last effect..
The photo gallery, originally I had envisioned a more 3D-ish wall with some persepective cool lighting, photos flying at you being built on a profile gallery page.. but I was running out of time (I would have a few more extra hours on this if I hadn't worked a split shift on friday thanks to dipshit part-timers) But with the time i was given I was somewhat happy with the first effect I tried.. I usually, when compositing, do a couple of rough drafts and see what I like best and work on that effect, but with the time crunch I had to just get it done.. Steph pulled the pics I threw them in the project..
To get this effect I just created the first movement and placement which is on the lower left corner of the screen, and just duplicated it 3 more times to get a tower of 4, and one of my favorite shortcuts in AfterEffects is the Hold OPT-Drag/Drop to replace a clip.. so all I had to do was duplicate the same photo change the Vertical Position for the ending keyframe and drag and replace the photos with new ones.. once thats done duplicate the 4 and adjust the horizontal position.. and once everything was in place and timing out i just staggered the start times of the keyframes to have them look like its randomly uploading a picture to the gallery.
Its actually fairly simple to do, especially when you know the shortcuts LOL.
There are a ton of pictures on that wall, from pics of me now, and pics of when i was skinny, Edric, Julz, Michelle, Jayne, Stephanie, Juryel and some very odd japanese candids, and pretty much everyone who either worked at the station or still works there.. if you had a myspace or facebook.. and you were friends with us.. we stole your picture. HAHAH..
Once again my brain was fried.. even after I finished that piece.. I had to design all the elements for that nights show and I was 2 hours behind and had to catch up on daily work to be done.. uggh.. but getting the creative juices flowing is well worth the effort in the end.. i get a sense of satisfaction when i finish.. not like web, once i finish.. theres another fire to put out.. =/
Heres the entire sweeps package, you'll notice they gloriously show Stephanies Myspace profile, and they actually search ME on Linkedin and Google.. which is why you'll see my name pop up through out the package. haha.. I didnt do it.. they just wanted to make a point that when you join linkedin your linkedin profile gets bumped up when someone googles you.. which is really odd because I just started that profile back in august, and never really log into it.. and it surpassed alot of my other social networks.. haha.. i might have to do some clean up if its that easy to google me.. lol..
