Thursday, December 3, 2009

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: