Recent Work: ROOMS fiction promo-the making of a hallway

 Here's a web promo/trailer I completed recently for a novel called Rooms.

 

The plot revolved around this huge house at Cannon Beach where the rooms were always mysteriously changing, revealing things to the main character. For the title reveal, I wanted to have this "rushing down a hallway and through an open door" kind of shot.

This was my first attempt at building an interior in 2.5D space in After Effects and it's by no means perfect! But it was really fun to experiment with. I basically built the "walls" from scratch in photoshop and threw up some framed pictures, with are simply images of old frames with some black and white screen grabs from archival public domain footage.

I added some dust particles to give the shot more depth and of course the lighting in after effects did wonders. The hardest part was getting the timing of the door opening with the tracking of the camera.

It was a good first step into this kind of thing which I hope to do more of as projects dictate. Incidentally, the author saw the edit above and felt it was too dark, so I replaced the hands going under the water with a shot of a canvas that "paints itself" in the book, and tweaked the music:

Angel's Den book promo film

This is a book promo for a historical fiction novel. Much of the story takes place on the Lewis and Clark trail, and involves the journal they kept along the way so I tried to tie those elements in visually. The graphics were created with layered photoshop files and camera moves in After Effects.

For the titles I wanted to try and give it that Masterpiece Theater vibe.

When I create these I'm usually given an unedited manuscript and maybe some marketing copy. It's usually the manuscript that gives me good ideas for the copy points that become the titles for the piece. The visuals are usually created from stock photographs that I modify in Photoshop, or if I can't find something suitable I'll go out and shoot things myself.

The fabulous music is by Eric Haddad.

Deliver Us From Evil Fiction promo

For this web commercial I decided to tell the story with typography and let the colors, graphics, and sound get across the vibe of the content. The entire story takes place in the Appalachian mountains during a snow storm.

Finding music for these pieces is always a challenge and I just couldn't find anything I was happy with for this one. I discovered that I had Apple's Soundtrack on my machine and I didn't even remember it was there (I believe they discontinued it). So I used loops and the various tools available with that software to create the music. I think it turned out okay.

The icicles on the last title were an after thought. Maybe too over the top but I like it.

Once in a Blue Moon Book promo

This was one of those projects that after I took it on, I wasn't really sure how to pull it off. It was sort of a romance with comedy thrown in here and there so I went for a kind of whimsical feel.



The drawings were done quickly with an old sharpie, and then scanned in and "painted" in photoshop. I then used them as layers in After Effects to create the scenes and do camera moves in 2.5D.