Friday Fun, Other Work & Brilliant Tutorials

If time permits, we like to experiment and learn new techniques on Friday’s. Posts shared here include our own tests, work for other clients and how to’s tutorials from the best in the content creation community.

Friday Fun, Playing With Screencastify

Experimenting with Screencastify for using screen grabbed footage in a simple video.

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Screencastify is a Google Chrome browser extension which allows you to record your screen, face, voice, and more. We wanted to see how well it performed and can recommend it as a very useful tool since you can download and convert your recording into HD footage afterwards.

The only minor problem we had (and likely a config issue at our end) was that the audio was being picked up from the main speaker, so sounded poor. You can download this browser extension at https://www.screencastify.com

As a test, using Screencastify, we recorded the google search page for the wizard of Oz and titled our video ‘Google Easter Egg for the Wizard of Oz is simply awesome’. No more than 3 hours was spent on producing this video which went down rather well within the Reddit LBGT community.

To see this easter egg in action, simply visit Google and search ‘Wizard Of Oz’. A similar easter egg exists when you search for Thanos.

Song: If I Only Had A Brain. Artist: Judy Garland / The Munchkins. Writers: Yip Harburg, Harold Arlen

Video & Facebook Ads For DD Allen

DD Allen’s new ‘free to download’ promotional single ‘Seattle Lights’ is a richly textured immersive affirmation that rock music still has a long way to go.

DOWNLOAD FREE – DD ALLEN – SEATTLE LIGHTS

The brief for this Facebook Ad was to create incorporate clips of footage, for the most part, filmed on a smartphone.

These elements were rotoscoped into the generic album cover artwork to create the slide effect and movement. In total three separate versions of this FaceBook Ad was created, each with different call to actions. ‘Out soon, download now and stream on Spotify.’

The version you can see here (peppered with a BoodleBobs presentation style) we share with clients to illustrate what can be created within a day’s work.

Song: Seatle Lights Artist /Writer: DD Allen. Website www.ddallen.com

MORE ANIMATION WORK WITH DD ALLEN

Motion graphics & animation for ‘Bad Love’ EP by DD Allen

Created using a combination of character animator for the hand and after-effects for the animation, the most difficult element to create was the growing vines.

Stay on brand in terms of styling was the explicit brief for the animation and only use the elements found in the layered .psd photoshop file.

An organic lopping approach was taken for the first animation cut, where base elements such as backgrounds were repeated in 30-second cycles, with different effects such as a Kaleidoscope applied on upper layers such as the hand and overlays.

The video shown here is in fact a director’s cut, where light bleeds are brought in. The actual version used was an entirely different monochrome cut with enhanced reds in the heart symbol.

20″ FaceBook & Instagram Video Ads

Different social networks have different specifications. 1200 x 1200 was the requirement for FaceBook & Instagram video view pane. A creative brief of falling rose petals in front of the record cover. To add ambient movement the layers were separated with a very slight zoom effect on each separate layer.

Animated Background for Live Gigs

An animation loop was decided upon, since the team wanted to just press play and then forget about the video. The central point of focus is the main logo on a similar grey background to that of the recocod cover’s background. The rotating star was built in 4k and is a mixture of an animated graphic and solar flair effect within After Effects.