We often think of creativity as something that comes to us in a moment of divine inspiration, but working within the creative industry you quickly realise that whilst those moments do occur, the majority of time it’s about ass-in-seat, ‘forced creativity’.
Generating creativity at will is a skill. Like all skills, the more you practice, the greater the skill becomes.
So the rules are simple: each week (very busy schedule permitting) we take the weekly free stock footage clip from pond5’s newsletter, think of an idea with a video marketing angle for our campaign, set the timer to 60 minutes, and then get to work.
The first thing that struck me with the original jellyfish clip was the depth of the image. Straight away I knew I wanted to play on that and have any copy or logos to be sat at different depths. The second thing was the pun-based wordplay.
The original video is particularly great at giving us internal markers for depth of field. The middle plane of jellyfish are in focus – this is where our copy will sit as we want it readable – then we have smaller, blurry, jellyfish further away – a great place to put the logo, and large, blurry jellyfish close to the camera. Perfect.
To really sell the depth, it wasn’t enough to just blur the logo and text appropriately, we also needed the jellyfish to interact with the graphics. Either passing just behind the copy and over the distant logo, or passing over the front of the copy.
To do this we duplicated the footage and rotoscoped a few relevant jellyfish. Rotoscoping effectively means drawing around an object, which creates a mask that separates that object from the background. Then you move that mask at the same rate as the object/jellyfish.
With all the jellyfish rotoscoped and their video layers placed over or under the text or logo layer. The video was shown around the office.
The consensus: more could be done to show the logo is in a different plane (and not just low res).
So some movement was added using the camera tool. Start with the logo in focus and the copy out of focus, then immediately zoom out and throw focus from one to the other. The movement was the icing on the cake and really added some dynamism to the video.
Time on the clock: 57 minutes.
Scroll back up and check out the final product
