MOTION BRAND PROMOTION
** At the bottom of this page is my free BOLOGNESE SAUCE RECIPE ** You may download it and make some delicious and nutritious Italian sauce! BUT, you have to read the backstory to my project first - That's the deal! Thanks and enjoy!
My sister owns an Italian Cafe in Pittsburgh
and one day she sends me this random text : "Hey, so I have this promotional thing we're going to do for March Madness and we need a meatball animation and I want you to do it! It's gonna be GREAT!"
Me : Thinking... Meatball Animation... Meatball Animation? ....Meatball Animation. WTH?
"SURE." I text back, thinking she's just riffing nonsensical stream of thought wacky business ideas.
"Okay, GREAT!" she texts and the thread ends. That's it. Finito. No details. Just Meatball Animation.
Time passes. I'm secretly hoping my sister doesn't really need moving meatballs, because while I want to help, I know nothing about a concept, deliverables, content, etc. but I know that (1) You need an infinite amount of energy to keep up with my sister (2) She probably has zero assets to work with (3) I have little bandwidth to crank out an animation "in my spare time", for free but (4) I'm a good brother so
------ I'm going to wind up doing it anyhow ------
A few weeks pass by and March looms so I'm thinking the meatballs aren't happening - the kitchen is in effect, closed. But then, like any good client, I get THE LAST MINUTE PHONE CALL.
Sister : "Hey Brother! I wanted to talk to you about this meatball animation! I'm so excited! This is gonna be GREAT! So here's the deal... we are having a meatball making contest for the public. People are gonna make meatballs, and we are going to have a panel of judges judge the meatballs head to head, and the winning meatballs move on to the next round! Isn't that GREAT!? It's like March Madness - but Meatball Madness! This is gonna be so cool! And guess what!? Aunt Di is going to be one of the judges! Isn't that hilarious! So great! So great! I can't stop laughing just thinking about it. So what do you think we should do for this animation?"
Me : Silence
Me again : More Silence
Me, finally : "Soooo is this like a promo type of animation to get people excited about the event?"
Sister : "Yes! Exactly! This is gonna be great! But what do you think we should do?"
Me : More Silence as it occurs to me that there is no plan
Me again : More Silence as I let that sink in.
Me, finally : "Flying meatballs in outer space."
Sister : "YES!! Oh my god, Oh my god. That's freaking hysterical!"
Me : "I'm thinking fade up with some sort of awe inspiring music... kinda Gregorian Chant like... then looking up to Space... the Universe... THEN - flying meatballs. Meatball Madness Title... Date ... fade to some sort of tag line.
Sister : "YES!! Oh my god, Oh my god. That's fantastic! So do you think we can have it like... next week?"
Me : Silence
Me again : More Silence
Me, finally : "Umm. Sure."
Sister : "THIS IS GONNA BE GREAT!! Okay... I gotta run. Talk to you later! Love you!"
My achilles heel. There's this thing about me. I like to solve problems and get creative with whatever is on hand. For instance, I would crush the show "Chopped"... Ted Allen : "In your basket you have - Shortfin Squid... fresh Kohlrabi... instant Bulgur Wheat... and... stale Devil Dogs. You have 30 minutes to create a spectacular main course for the judges. Good luck to each of you." That's totally my jam. In this case, I literally had nothing though in my basket. Not even the stale Devil Dogs. So I started scouring royalty free sites looking for inspiration with loose ideas pinging around my noggin. I knew I wanted someone gazing into space and I wanted to slow it down with some grand music in the intro. Things needed to seem serious to start - and grand - like the opening scenes of space movies with the vast expanse. I also needed some sort of animation of earth that I could manipulate - I'd know it when I'd see it. And I needed a rotating 3D meatball. THAT I wasn't going to find and I didn't have the time or patience to make a sphere in 3D and deform it and spin it and skin it and render it with an alpha, yada yada yada. But then it dawned on me - a royalty free asteroid or meteor or something like that could work and would be out there on the web somewhere... floating in internet space if you will. I just had to find it. It took a little time to find a round one (not an oblong asteroid or blocky / sharp one) that was spinning and was free, but I found one. BUT, it was gray. I realized gray meatballs would not attract customers. Most people tried to erase their memory of school lunch meatballs, so I knew I would have to colorize and tinker with hue and saturation and mess about in After Effects, to make them delectable but that was doable.
The bolognese recipe notwithstanding, I'm generally one of those people that doesn't use recipes. There's a sign by our stove that reads : I dont need recipes, I'm Italian. That's a little bit like how I work. Can't teach it!
Anyhow, I had my basket of ingredients and I just hit the ground running - importing, editing, adjusting, effecting, playing, listening, watching, rewatching, rewatching, rewatching, rewatching... If you've edited before, you follow ;). About 10 hours later, I had a finished product. I enjoyed playing around not just with the various music tracks and effects and editing, but with the speed of how meatballs might move through space and how the velocity would change in subtle ways, even adding some sauce that sprays out in zero gravity, easing out in time, and a subtle bump and reverberation when a meatball hits the name of the cafe, "Sprezzatura" and then Sprezzatura reverberates and shoots forward softly like it fired an imaginary thruster (that's my favorite part). Because I know my sister's (client's) humor, it was quite fun to work on and I wasn't concerned ultimately that it wouldn't work out. At the end of the promo, I even borrowed a tag line from one of the best Sci-Fi horror / thrillers ever made, and tweaked it to make it silly. See if you can figure out that piece of movie trivia. :)
And NOW, you may enjoy the Bolognese recipe!
