Advertisement Production Ideas

Idea Generation & Initial Plans and Proposals:

The initial idea for my advertisement production was to assemble the contents of the book cover by stop motion. The idea was that various drawings or cutouts of items which are found on the book cover, move towards each other to finally create the image of the book. I wasn't too convinced about this idea so then I got to think about the Unique Selling Point of the book [The Encyclopedia of Hollywood; An A-Z Guide to the stars, stories, and secrets of Hollywood]. What can one read about in the book? What would make people interested in buying and reading the book? The book gives concise information about Hollywood artists, films, jobs, equipment and also technical terms; all having to do with the film industry. I continued to think about this concept and finally came up with a story which I was happy and satisfied with.

I wanted to bring out the message that the book has a lot of text and that every piece of information is brief so the initial idea was to have a person impersonating Marilyn Monroe for a few seconds, then a person with a clapperboard, someone writing a script, and so on; various people impersonating Hollywood stars or doing jobs related to the film industry. Throughout all this, there would be text on screen displaying various terms which have to do with the particular scene at that time. In the end, these graphics would all fade into a shot of someone reading the book.

I continued to develop this story after speaking with my lecturer and I finally decided on the final proposal. There will be 9 actors all impersonating different Hollywood stars and who, at the same time, are doing jobs related to film. For example, someone impersonating the Godfather whilst writing a script,  someone impersonating Charlie Chaplin whilst playing with a clapperboard, etc. I still kept the idea of the text passing by as graphics as I wanted to bring out the idea that the book has a lot of text.

Identification of message:

I think that the message is clearly depicted in this advertisement proposal. Since each scene will be very brief (6 seconds or less) it will send the message that each bit of information in the book is also brief and that it contains a lot of different information. Furthermore, the graphics on screen tell the audience that the book has a lot of text in it.

Content & Style:

Scene 1: "The Godfather" writing a script
Scene 2: "Mary Poppins" getting makeup out of her bag and gives it to a makeup artist
Scene 3: "Charlie Chaplin" experimenting with a clapperboard
Scene 4: "Elvis Presley" using different microphones, including a boom mic
Scene 5: "Walt Disney" drawing Mickey Mouse which is then transformed into an animation of Mickey Mouse
Scene 6: "Audrey Hepburn" holding an Oscar statue in her hand
Scene 7: "Laurel & Hardy" cutting film reels and joining them to give the idea of editing
Scene 8: "Marilyn Monroe" standing on a Hollywood Boulevard star
Scene 9: Person reading the book

The style is as entertaining as possible since we see various Hollywood personalities. Furthermore, it will be humorous at some points especially in scenes 3 and 7.

Relevance to audience:

I think that this advert will appeal to its target audience. It is short, fun and entertaining so that one wouldn't be bored watching it. Furthermore, it depicts the message clearly and hopefully the audience can understand it.

The Social Network

I have recently watched 'The Social Network'; a true story about the birth of Facebook directed by David Fincher. I really liked the way in which the story is portrayed through editing; it goes back and forth from the story as it happened to two different lawsuits - the story as it was told during the lawsuit between Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and the Winklevoss twins, and the story as it was told during another lawsuit between Mark Zuckerberg and the co-founder of Facebook Eduardo Saverin. However, a behind-the-scenes DVD also comes with the film and it was very interesting to see how they worked behind the scenes, how they rehearse and also the actors' point of view about the whole production. Apart from all this, the fact which I found most interesting was how they, in a certain sense, "made" the Winklevoss twins. They couldn't find the twin actors they needed so instead they hired two different actors, Armie Hammer and Josh Pence, and they replaced Josh Pence's face with Armie Hammer's face using CGI. Here below is the section of the DVD which talks about this.

http://nymag.com/daily/entertainment/2011/02/social_network_winklevii.html

I further researched this on the internet since the DVD only gives brief information to try and understand further this technique and I found the following article;

In ‘The Social Network’, Actor Armie Hammer Played 2 Twin Brothers, Dubbed By Zuckerberg As “The Winkle-vi”

Although it was Armie Hammer’s face on both twins, it was not his body. A model named Josh Pence (also extremely tall)  was acting in each scene that was shot, right next to Hammer. Afterward, Hammer’s face was superimposed onto Pence’s.


Word is, the two worked together for 10 months, learning to emulate each other in, especially, movement. An acting coach was used. They trained together also, so as to create as similar physiques, as possible.

Actor Armie Hammer and Model Josh Pence

According To Director David Fincher, Using Twin Actors Was Preferred…

CGI was a last resort, but they couldn’t find two twins who were also actors, that fit the breakdown.  The real Winklevoss twins are 6’5″, Olympic athletes, intelligent, and well, clearly ‘WASP’-y.

The Real Winklevoss Twins (Getty Photo)

The director insists that he didn’t use all this CGI wizardry just for kicks. “For a long time, I held out for this idea that we were going to find two 6’5″ 220-pound scullers who were going to be able to act,” he laughs. “So we looked and we looked and we looked and finally, probably about four weeks out from shooting, I just said, this is crazy. We’re never going to be able to get [it]. We need an actor. We need one person to play two people.”

Many Actors Find It Hard To Watch Their Own Performances.

How do you think Armie Hammer felt, watching two of himself, acting onscreen, at the same time, in The Social Network?

Actor Armand Hammer As A Winklevoss

The Social Network Used A Unique ‘Twinning’ Technique

…Interesting that director David Fincher winged it some, as they filmed. That’s in the article below too.
‘Benjamin Button’ was also directed by David Fincher. That’s a film that also included some tricky CGI, enabling Brad Pitt to age backwards, onscreen.  That film had a lot more money to spend on the special effects, besides a different CGI goal. Creating the illusion of twins, apparently, was an easier task.
Here’s how it was done, by a special effects group called Lola:


Surprisingly for anyone who knows the tech behind the Oscar winning work of Benjamin Button, Director David Fincher’s previous film, Lola ended up producing perfect twin face replacement in ‘The Social Network’ without a single HDR sample from on set. In fact, while it might appear after Benjamin Button face replacement was ‘solved’ , – the approach taken on this film was actually technically quite different.


Before we investigate why, one needs to understand the two processes. ‘Benjamin Button’ worked primarily on having an actor’s head replaced with a fully digital version of Brad Pitt’s head. A digital version based on Brad Pitt’s performance but fully rendered in 3D. HDRs were taken on set not in just one position but through a range of positions. Brad Pitt was scanned in an ICT Lightstage allowing for a near infinite range of lighting environments to be recreated and derived from the sampled Lightstage session. The HDRs from the set were then used to produce a frame of Pitt’s real head with the correct HDR lighting.

Actor Brad Pitt As Older Benjamin Button

In parallel a scan was used to make a very accurate digital head and this was animated to match the performance of Brad Pitt delivering the lines on a special set. The digital animated head was then composited over the scene but not before it was compared with the Lightstage sampled image of Brad at the same lighting point. This way the final compositors had

a) a digital animated ‘aged’ Brad Pitt

b) a sampled Brad Pitt but computed or dialed in with the correct lighting – side by side.

Of course the old head had to be removed and the background patched, but the effect was breathtakingly real and rightly earned Digital Domain and the other companies (like Lola) that worked on the visual effects a well deserved Oscar and massive industry wide respect for spanning the so called “uncanny valley.”


For ‘The Social Network’, Lola’s approach was actually quite different. The problem in The Social Network was to have twins on screen played by the same actor. This is a problem that has appeared and been attempted by almost countless vfx artists since visual effects entered film making, Dead Ringers, Multiplicity, The Parent Trap, Adaption , The Man in the Iron Mask, Hot Fuzz etc, and with the exception of Matt Lucas as Tweedledum and Tweedledee in Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland, – these rarely involved attempting face replacement, (and even then Alice is a special case due to costume).


…The solution was not to replace Pence’s head with a digital head matched with HDRs and animation to Hammer’s performance. Instead it was to map Hammer’s face onto Pence’s face.
In the words of Lola VFX supervisor Edson Williams, David Fincher worked all this out, ” a lot of this was his idea, the basis of this technique was his, it was his fundamental idea to project on to geometry, my job was just to simplify it, he did everything he could to help us, apart from shoot HDRs ”

Steps for face replacement:

Stage 1: Pre-production The actors Pence and Hammer train to both move and look alike. Gym work and acting training produced two body shapes that matched the close similar physical presence of identical twins.

Stage 2: The two actors simply acted out the scene with Pence wearing dots on his face. “Fincher described the effect as the ‘hockey’ mask”, explained Williams. As the plan was only replace the face, hats and head bands were used to provide a clean line for Lola.

No one from Lola was on set for the twin’s scenes and no HDRs or special measurements were taken. (Although Fincher is extremely CGI savvy and one could argue no Lola VFX presence was needed).

Stage 3: Lola worked based on just the principal photography and any on set texture photos and production stills to recreate the lighting of the set, as it would appear on the face of Pence as he acted. “We just had the final principal photography, but nothing shot for us, we did have a lot of reference shots – just because Fincher is very thorough” points out Williams. This CGI lighting would need to animate, if say Pence walked past a door or window. At this stage a scanned version of Pence (not Hammer) is used to check accuracy. “We just recreated it roughly, we just built a simple mockup, it was just a general look of the environment”, adds Williams.

Pence’s real head is object tracked primarily in PFtrack. In a perfect world the real Pence and his digital double would match perfectly in lighting and orientation. Once this match was achieved that head is discarded – but the lighting design is used in the next stage and the object track was kept.

Stage 4: This lighting information obtained from 3D was used to program a rock concert

style DMX lighting board. Actor Armie Hammer was then filmed delivering his performance sitting in a chair filmed with 4 Red cameras. To obtain the correct eye line a back projected 30ft x 12ft screen was placed in his eye line and a projected dot was animated to move – providing the correct eye line position.

This was also derived from the 3D animation done in stage 3.” We would break down the quicktime of the performance frame by frame, and control the lights, …we had a bank of 12 lights around him (Hammer) ” says Williams, but he points out that at this stage there was some flexibility. “You had to be pretty good, but if you got within 80% you were doing pretty good, you actually had a surprising amount of leeway”. That being said it is still an art to match lighting “Michael Watson helped me most with the lights, he’s worked with David Fincher in the past, he is very Red savvy a very good cameraman, he helped me the most with matching the lighting”.

Stage 5. The four Red cameras are combined to produce one full face texture mask, with the Red captured performance with the correct lighting from the DMX panel – but the orientation of Hammer’s head during the performance is unimportant as this moving textured mask is now just a disembodied 3D texture.

Stage 6: A scanned version of Hammer’s head is now carefully animated to match the 4 camera filmed performance. The digital animated head is hand animated to do this, but the animator has the action filmed from 4 angles to reference. Josh Singer was the Lead 3D artist. The digital head needs to animate to match the performance but it does not need to be lit in a CG sense as it will have the combined 4 camera RED texture map projected on it.

For example if the digital Winklevoss twin smiles – the CG face moves to match the smile – but the subtle skin texture creases and lighting all come from the live action projected performance. Interestingly while the cg nose and ears need to align to the projected texture, - the mouth was not internally modeled, the mouth was just a flat surface that the interior mouth texture was projected on to.

Stage 7. The original Pence head PFtrack is now applied to the animated – texture projected digital Winklevoss face. This provides a moving – correctly positioned, correctly lit, very real face mask.

Stage 8. This face mask is now integrated with the original background plate. In some cases this meant mesh warping the body double’s ears, “as Arnie’s ears were smaller, and that’s more of a traditional Lola kind of thing, we do that in traditional flame work”. They did not ever need to use digital hair, “we used the hair of the body double” says Williams.

Then the team remove any elements such as Pence’s chin that tended to be slightly longer than Hammer’s chin. “we did do the last 15% in the comp”, he adds ” we were able to get pretty close with just the 12 lights and the DMX”.

Stage 9; This comp was then beautifully and very accurately color graded to match the on stage multiple RED performance to the exact lighting of where Pence’s body was in shot. While the technique would get the artists most of the way there, subtle differences would still need to be adjusted, shadows or highlights added (some shine or spec highlights were rendered digitally using standard CG approaches).

“It is really interesting how different their faces were tonally, as far as colour correcting, I mean two guys standing next to each other, Arnie’s face was always a bit more magenta.. it looked a bit odd when you AB’ed with the original body double but when you look at Arnie standing right next to him – it matched… it is pretty interesting how people look different in the same light”.

This approach was used for some 20 shots in the film, Lola did a further 90 odd shots, which included traditional split-screen work, with Hammer’s separate performances as each brother stitched together in the same frame. However, due to the film being unable to shoot at Harvard, computer screen replacements and blue screen etc , in total it had almost 1000 visual effects shots in the film.

So why did Fincher pick this route over the Benjamin Button route?

Well firstly he was right, the effect is perfect and there is no arguing with the amazing result.
The good point from Williams point of view is how much this approached allowed Fincher to work with Hammer to get a great performance, “David Fincher was being so specific (for example he’d say) be a bit more pensive on this take… he was getting exactly the performance he wanted, and the actor was only worrying about his performance, he wasn’t worried about where he was walking or landing on his mark, – he did not have any of those (technical) concerns, his only concern was delivering the line David was wanting him to recreate… it was a very controlled way to get an accurate performance”


It is William’s opinion that David Fincher does not like HDRs on set. It is no secret that complex HDR

Director David Fincher behind film camera

Sampling on set can take a fair amount of time, and perhaps more importantly break the mood and pace for actors in a very strong performance driven piece. In The Social Network it is also a less dramatic difference than in Benjamin Button. In that film the character had to age and be remarkably different than Brad Pitt in size and head proportions.


In The Social Network, by design, the actors were very similar to start with in both stature and of course importantly in age. In breaking with such a breakthrough proven method and adopting a new innovative approach Fincher simplified on set. The Social Network is believed to have been only a $50 million film vs an estimated three times that for Button…

http://www.hollywoodactorprep.com/blog/2010/11/tech-stuff-acting-as-two-different-characters-on-same-movie-screen/

MediaCast Blog; Design Proposal (Task 2b)

One of the ideas I would propose for the blog aesthetics would be a black or grayscale plain background with a striking banner. I would use the colour scheme shown below; a combination of greens and yellows which are the colours used in the MCAST logo to show that MediaCast falls under MCAST. I would also use white so that the banner stands out, creates contrast with the black background and attracts more attention. I would avoid bright colours such as fluorescent pink and yellow. This is based on the market research conducted where students were asked which colours they would prefer to see in the blog. With regards to the font to use, I would use a plain font such as Calibri so as to keep everything simple and with a most professional look as possible. As for the layout of the blog, I would place the banner in the top middle with the Navigation Bar below it. I would then place the blog posts in the middle with brief information about MediaCast on the left. Below this information there will be a link to the MediaCast forum. On the right there will be the labels and at the very bottom the Logos and Credits.

Colour Scheme:

Site-Map:

MediaCast Blog; The MediaCast Identity (Task 2a)

The Brief

This semester we were all divided into groups of 4 or 5 people. Each group will come up with a proposal for the MediaCast blog where students and lecturers can share opinions, ideas and communicate better. MediaCast is made up of all the Media students attending the MCAST Art & Design Institute, a community which is growing more and more each year. At the end of the semester one of the proposed blogs will be chosen and will be used by all the members of MediaCast.

Who is the audience?

·      Media Lecturers at the MCAST Institute of Art & Design

·      MCAST-BTEC Diploma in Art & Design students

·      MCAST-BTEC Foundation Diploma in Art & Design students

·      MCAST-BTEC National Diploma in Creative Media Production students

·      MCAST-BTEC Extended Diploma in Creative Media Production students

·      MCAST-BTEC Higher National Diploma in Media (Moving Image) students

·      Potential Employers of MediaCast members

Market Research

What is MediaCast?

In the 2009/2010 scholastic year, the MCAST Institute of Art & Design introduced the Media courses. Since a name was needed which all the projects produced by these students can fall under and the name of each course would have been too long, MediaCast was invented. It is a play on words between the words “media” and “MCAST”. All the projects produced by Media students at MCAST now fall under this small organization called MediaCast. The MediaCast members are all the students attending the following courses;

·      MCAST-BTEC Diploma in Art & Design (Media)

·      MCAST-BTEC Foundation Diploma in Art & Design (Media)

·      MCAST-BTEC National Diploma in Creative Media Production

·      MCAST-BTEC Extended Diploma in Creative Media Production

·      MCAST-BTEC Higher National Diploma in Media (Moving Image)

Information gathered from MediaCast members

·      List of clients who have already worked with MediaCast

-      EU Publication

-      MCAST

-      PBS

-      WINK

·      Projects MediaCast have already worked on or are currently working on

-      Stopmotion animation (ND2)

-      Short Film (ND2 and HND2)

-      Music Video Production with Maltese Bands; TwoTimeShooter, Relikc and K.O.I (ND2)

-      Ident; Title Opening ‘Int Min Int’ and logo (ND2)

-      Advertisement EU Bookshop (ND2)

-      Multi-Camera Interview Techniques (ND2)

-      Sound for Interactive Game (ND2)

-      2D Animation (ND2)

-      Green Living Promotional Videos (ED1)

-      Documentary (HND2)

-      Short Experimental Film on the History of Art or Shipyards (Foundation Diploma)

-      ‘Int Min Int’ filming weekly on Mondays (HND1)

·      Sections MediaCast members would like to see in a blog

-      Updates on new films, teachers, etc

-      Tutorials

-      What is Media? To encourage aspiring students who wish to study media

-      Resource Sites

-      Personal Profiles to get to know other students

-      Forum (with comments and posts approved by an administrator)

-      Students’ Work

-      Gallery

·      Suggestions for the Design of the MediaCast blog

-      “Less is more; grayscale; blue” (HND1)

Copyright & Ethical Issues

“Copyright is a set of exclusive rights granted to the author or creator of an original work, including the right to copy, distribute and adapt the work. Copyright does not protect ideas, only their expression.” [Wikipedia]

All the work posted in the blog will be copyrighted with a watermark so that nobody copies or distributes other’s work without permission. Furthermore, nothing will be posted without the permission of the author and no extra details (ex: telephone numbers, addresses, etc) of students will be posted on the blog as this is a public website in which anyone can enter.

Confidentiality

All extra details about students or their work will be kept confidential and no work will be posted if the owner does not wish to do so; permission from the owner will be asked for at all times.

Intellectual Property Rights

“Intellectual property (IP) is a term referring to a number of distinct types of creations of the mind for which a set of exclusive rights are recognized—and the corresponding fields of law. Under intellectual property law, owners are granted certain exclusive rights to a variety of intangible assets, such as musical, literary, and artistic works; discoveries and inventions; and words, phrases, symbols, and designs. Common types of intellectual property include copyrights, trademarks, patents, industrial design rights and trade secrets in some jurisdictions.” [Wikipedia]

As mentioned beforehand, all the work posted will be copyrighted and have a watermark. In addition, the mouse right click will be disabled so as to keep the free reproduction of students’ work to a minimum.

Technical Considerations

·        The possibility of having comments moderated by an admin

·        The possibility of embedding a forum into the blog, otherwise a link will be used

·        Disabling the mouse right click

·        The possibility of commenting on posts created in extra pages in blogger

·        Online Video Codecs and Formats

-    Developers may choose to provide the same audio / video content in multiple formats, at varying quality levels, to ensure maximum playability across target audiences and target devices.

-    Mature video platforms are typically able to ingest a single video/audio file, and transcode it to several target formats, as defined by the web developer.

-    Typical target file formats are listed below. Inclusion does not imply endorsement:

-    Video

Video Technology Center (Adobe)

The WebM Project (WebM Project)

H.264/MPEG-4 AVC (Wikipedia)

Theora (Wikipedia)

-    Audio

MP3 (Wikipedia)

AAC (Wikipedia)

Ogg Vorbis (Wikipedia)

-    Flash Coverage; Flash-based video players remain the dominant form of video delivery. However, customised work-arounds are usually required to fully address accessibility issues, and several emerging devices and platforms are reducing their support for Flash.

http://webguide.gov.au/types-of-content/online-video/

online-video-technical-considerations/