Crazy week…
My fairly boring week was unexpectedly plunged into a 48-hour nonstop production thanks to a voicemail and a 30-minute meeting at a downtown coffee house on Tuesday. One of my best friends, Steve Severson gave my number to the architectural firm he works for—Leon Lauver + Associates—earlier this summer.
I was aware of this, and that he had shown off my work before (I think it’s mandatory to share links to lightsaber fights on YouTube in the workplace), for pretty much the entire summer. It was a call I was expecting at some point this year, but the big surprise was that this project would need to be presented 64 hours later, since their boss decided to wait until the last minute to give the go-ahead to put this whole thing together.
I met up with a gentleman, Lonn, who was in charge of the presentation, and Steve decided to show up since he had just gotten off work, and by doing so was put on the project and allowed to work on company time around the clock with me and not have to be stuck in the office drawing hotels the rest of the week. Basically, our Chamber of Commerce is putting up a new building and are currently selecting a firm to design it. Obviously our role then was to convince them to choose Leon Lauver (the only local firm) over the guys in Omaha and Lincoln competing for the job.
Lonn went off to write the crap out of a script for a voice-over, and Steve and I started formulating our game plan outside the coffee shop, including the decision to ask my sister-in-law (who is on one of our local radio stations) to do the voice-over…and who just so happened to drive by and see us talking, at which point she parked and we were able to ask her right then and there. She immediately called her former teacher and my former boss and booked one of the college recording studios for us at 3:00 the following day.
I then called my other former boss and requested the use of an HVR-Z1U (probably my favorite camera for videography BTW) and a camera crane. By nightfall, I had equipment at home and I was digging through Soundtrack Pro for any music track we could possibly use for the project.
The next morning began about 9 AM and didn’t stop for 48 hours. We were filming in the rain (http://twitpic.com/fc2tf), recording in a VERY nice studio (http://twitpic.com/fd8g1), which I remember them building when I used to work for the teacher of the audio program, building VFX shots in the middle of the night (http://twitpic.com/ffbwm), and then shooting even more stuff all over town the next day.
It was eventually presented BARELY on time (like, if I had clicked render a minute or two later, we would have looked bad), and Steve and I received gracious compliments; I think one chamber member had a hard time believing we were the ones who actually put the whole thing together…remember we’re both 21 and I look about 16. Another member asked me what software I used (Final Cut FTW! :) ).
Notes…
A couple noteworthy things to mention is again, the fact that we had TWO FREAKING DAYS TO DO THIS. The nature of the project also made it difficult to figure out what to show visually. It’s essentially a concept pitch…but without too much concept because we couldn’t go to them and go “here’s what we already have designed.” That’s not the point. The point is to get the job, then ask them what they want.
I had no problem going “Power Point on steroids” for certain parts originally because I had a lot of neat motion graphics in mind, and Lonn was on the same page in describing graphics he wanted to see. We even dug through Motion’s content folder and found a lot of elements we wanted to incorporate, which we wanted to do in 3D.
But that two-day schedule really didn’t agree with us (can you believe the opening VFX shot (which probably screams Andrew Kramer, I know; his tutorial saved my butt when I was having trouble :P ) actually took the least amount of time other than the voice-over recording?). We ended up just resorting to mixing pretty much every 3D Motion template available for anything that was missing fitting imagery.
I was bummed that a couple of things were shot down, such as my suggestion to have video of their drafters and architects actually like, you know, drafting things. It was my professional opinion that it was necessary and perfectly fitting, and as a result of NOT having it, we were forced to put more bullet points up which ate up valuable editing time, drove down overall production value and ultimately began to waver peoples’ attention span I think (it did mine for sure). As such, you’ll notice the Vimeo version ends a bit abruptly; it’s actually cut 4 minutes short because the rest is the boring titles that I personally find embarrassing to present :P In fact there was even one set of titles that we missed and didn’t notice until the final presentation that we just had the temporary FCP titles…doh!
Overall though it was a great experience, and I look forward to doing more work for the firm, as they have also expressed great interest in partnering up for more presentations like this in the future, albeit with a little more time to plan out and do the work ;)
Lonn and Steve were great to work with; Lonn is an artist himself so we consistently saw eye-to-eye, and as I said Steve is one of my best friends so we’ve done tons of projects together just for fun as well as for school back in the day. They were both very considerate of the process, and every suggestion or request was accompanied by “do we have time to…” or “would it be at all possible…” etc.
Definitely a client that didn’t result in any complaining from my part, other than the ridiculously tight schedule, but everyone involved was under that same pressure, so we all just sucked it up and hit the ground running. I think they particularly enjoyed being able to sip their coffee and chill on the couch as I had video going to the HD projector and onto our 9 ft screen, hehe…
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When I just want to briefly "moo" about something.
