Sunday, May 18, 2008

Movie -promo making made simple


It's not rocket science really. Short film making is a matter of "stealing licks" to quote Donald who left a message some time ago.

An area of short form making that is a heightened form of visual arts in itself is promo making.

If you've watched Wimbledon or Match of the Day on BBC1, it's the bit that wraps up a programme.

In many cases it stands alone, whilst in others it's used as an arc in feature films and docs.

It's emotional and artistic narrative tells a story without the use of voice clips and with Arts School film makers will often translate to commercial directing.

Ridley Scott - Gladiators, Tarsem, who directed the Fall, and Tony Kaye behind American History X all emerged from an artistic perspective of film making via commercials.


Looking at Promo Making


I'll be cutting a promo pretty soon from shots I took jogging one morning in Chicago.

The promo on Viewmagazine.tv features quite a few of those shots plus a couple I cribbed from Robb's camera at VisualEditors.com. The key to that promo was driving through town with Robb in order to ID shooting locations.

Chicago is a city made from film sets and in fact quite a few have been shot there e.g. Blues Brothers.

I'm told it was also the inspiration for The Matrix - the Wakowskis are originally from Chicago. The Matrix is also a film worth studying for visual promo narrative as is the grunge like Se7en.

Like many a film makers, I started out storyboarding particularly in teams, but if you work alone as I might do, then I have pretty much storyboard with the camera of direct a shot for someone to capture me on, as I did with Robb.

Mike Jones at Digital Basin an insightful article on promo making if you want to read more otherwise I'll post my short pretty soonish

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