Lottery

So I''ve been MIA on here for a while. Not that I think that anybody noticed, but just in case you were wondering what I've been up to I thought I'd give you an update on what's been keeping me so busy. I spent most of March working on a set of commercials for the Kentucky Lottery. These are the alternate cuts that are slightly different than the ones on air. Here they are:





This one looks like continuous shot, but it's actually 4 different takes. Can you tell?



The actor in this spot kept looking around. It looked kinda odd, so we put a fly in.

Tagging Spots

A couple of weeks ago I did a post about a TV spot I do for the Cincinnati Zoo. Lest you think my job is always that exciting, I thought I'd tell you about what I did last week: I tagged spots for Fazoli's. What is "tagging" you ask? Well, someone else edited a commercial, and at the end they left some empty space on the screen. It looked like this:


My job is to "tag" that commercial with special text for about 40 different markets that are running the commercial. So if you live in Lexington, KY you'll see this:


I know it's exciting, but please try to contain yourselves, folks. After that, we send them out and the TV stations air them, and people all around the country say "Hey, it's 10:30 and I'm hungry, but Fazoli's is still open so let's go find one of their 15 area locations locations and get some food!"

Giraffes at the Zoo

I was going to make my first post be all about how it was my first post, but that seemed kinda boring, so I'm making it about something - what I worked on last week.

For those of you who don't know, I'm an editor at red echo post, a video post production company in Cincinnati. Last week I worked on a spot for the Cincinnati Zoo to promote their new giraffes. It was a challenging but very interesting spot to work on.

The giraffe in the first and last shots was originally in front of a clear sky background. I keyed it out, applied an effect that creates the outlines, then composited all 3 back onto the new background.



The middle shot was composited from 2 different scenes in much the same way, except that the platform and the people had to be motion tracked to the background so that it looked like it was part of the scene. For that I had to enlist the help of Scott, our 3D animator - he has better tools and a better brain for tracking that sort of scene. He tracked the separate elements, then I composited them back together.