This project was really against the clock, getting the whole thing ready in 6 days in time for the hotel launch, and having to work the whole thing, from scratch!
I began by scrolling through hundreds of photos of the location, and all the branding material, and slogans. I was told the client was a big fan of the style of Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, so I bought and watched that a few times, which gave me quite a few ideas for cut screens, and composite examples.
The next step was to story board the whole thing, just roughly sketching out what shots I wanted and where, with text and slogan ideas.
Then I began selecting the final photographs to use from the library provided by Mandy, who also directed the whole project, and offered Photoshop and editorial support, and then I sliced and diced them, removing the models from each shot and painstakingly painting in the backgrounds, in 2 cases having to totally build a section of helicopter from scratch! Check out the example below:
It didn’t have to be 100%, as the model would still be sat on top of the scene, and animated to pan slowly from one side to the other – the focal point staying on the model, so as long as there wasn’t a gaping hole in the background, it was all good! Given more time I would have spent longer on these though, I just noticed the rotor blade is on the wrong side of the tail!
Then the process of animating each, getting the timings right, the fades, and the tones – making sure models didnt fade out too soon, revealing the background image behind.
My favourite scene was the helipad shot (top of the page) where I removed the LONDON text, and moved it down into shot, and faded it out slowly. Its a simple style, but I really think it looks a lot like something from Sin City, and its a shame I couldn’t quite achieve this effect on the other shots in the time allowed.
The video was then installed at the hotel, which was a day of my life I would rather not repeat, logging into servers, renaming remote monitors, and many other things I don’t understand. Sadly my macbook was the only thing that could connect to the server so I had to hang around all day, but I did get a mighty expensive breakfast out of it, so its not all bad!
The video was developed for a system that feeds it to various monitors around the hotel, but you can check out an embedded version here in your browser, not for you iPad and iPhone users unfortunately. Maybe one day…