Making Videos

Movies, Film, and Videos have always been a serious passion of mine. While I was in my teenage years friends and I would spend countless hours planning, shooting, and editing movies with our old Super 8 mm movie cameras. Then during high school and my first year of college we were introduced to 16 mm cameras, equipment, and of course the additional film processing expense. We did create some award winning productions, however the expense dampened our spirits and abilities to continue.

40 years ago home movies were quite a novelty and relatively few people participated in the phenomenon. Today with the ease of video nearly everyone is a film maker, and many people carry a video camera with them everywhere they go, in the form of a cell phone.

Back then if you had just developed a new product and were getting ready to market, you would be putting together some type of brochure to educate potential customers on the benefits and features of your new product. Today is a whole new ball game. Instead of just a brochure, now you must design a brochure, website, and video.

No longer is it enough for a graphic designer to learn only such graphic tools as Photoshop, Illustrator, Quark, or InDesign, they must also become familiar with video programs like Final Cut, Premiere, After Effects, Flash, and Dreamweaver. They may not have to know all the whistles and bells associated with each program, but they do need to know them enough so that their design work will work with any of the additional mediums that are required.

The following are a few of the projects that I have had the opportunity to work with. The first being a video my daughter requested of me. She had been asked to the Prom in a relatively cleaver way and she wanted a cleaver way to return her response. She had chosen the song “Call Me Maybe” by Carly Rae Jepsen and wanted to do a fun video to it. We set out a plan and with help from a lot of friends and a couple of teachers the following video was produced. Click on the "Call Me Maybe Prom Response" link to see the video.

Call Me Maybe Prom Response

A few production notes of interest we used three High-Definition Video cameras. The video was edited in Adobe Premiere with some special effects being done in Adobe After Effects. The violin solo at the beginning of the song was lengthened by nearly three times to allow the visual establishment of the story to be strengthened.

Our young man was stocked throughout one school day by a team of friends and teachers, by the end of the day he had a good idea something was up, but didn’t know what.

The bumping of the cars was not staged, but it actually happened as Mitch was being stocked by our camera teams.

Overall it was one of the most enjoyable projects I have had the opportunities to do. Of course, I may be a little prejudice towards my daughter.

Roper's Knife Flier

Customer - Moore Maker

Date - May 2001

Job - Roper’s Knife Flier

Design Tools - Digital Camera, Photoshop, and Pagemaker

Design Notes:

The customer supplied the two knives and information about the knives. I had to come up with the design and layout of the flier. This was much more of a challenge than first expected. 

Shooting a picture of a knife with the blades different reflective surfaces requires a great deal of care to prevent outside images appearing on the blade. The final product is actually three different pictures of the blade merged into the one. 

The wood background, rope, and gloves were used to place the knives in a semi-real environment. The knife is designed for a working cowboy who works cattle with a rope. If in trouble the cowboy must be able to cut the rope in a moment or risk losing an arm, having his horse pulled over or worse. The knife allows for a quick thinking cowboy to grab the knife off his belt, open it and cut the rope in one quick motion.

The metal logo was created from an older logo they already used with the purpose of simulating the metal emblem placed in each knife. 

This was a big hit for our customer and we went on to do many more fliers with different products the company wholesaled to dealers. A few more samples are shown below.

Monogramed Knives

Working Knives

Collectable Commemorative Knife and Marble form a catalog we produced.

A few additional pages of tools from their catalog. 

House, Photos, and Photoshop

Often times in the selling of new homes builders will show homes under construction, because that’s all they have to show. The following is just one of many photos I created or manipulated to show what the final home would look like. In this way customers find it easier to visualize their new home.

This home was in a rural neighborhood which was still in development. As of yet there were no paved roads or gutters.

The Original Photo

First - I removed the car, built the small rock wall, and cleaned up the yard.

Second - the cloudy sky had to go. Southern New Mexico has around 300 clear days a year. Leaving the clouds would have been as much of a misrepresentation as actually removing them.

 


Finally - the driveway, gutter, and paved road. This was done by shooting photos of roads and pavement that would match the real thing.

Thurston Homes - Marketing Artwork

Customer - Thurston Homes

Date - August 2004

Job - Ad for the Real Estate Weekly

Design Tools - Digital Camera, Photoshop, and Pagemaker

Since September 1997 we have owned and managed Bob Stovall Printing, and have been blessed with the glories and stresses of self-employment, however from September 2002 to September 2004 I had the good fortune of being the Director of Marketing for Thurston Homes in Las Cruces, New Mexico. As such I oversaw the sales and marketing of new residential custom built homes. A list of my duties and responsibilities are listed below;

·      Oversaw the advertising design, and marketing of the company. This included newspaper, magazines, radio, web, and TV.

·      Designed and manned open houses, entertaining customers and potential clients.

·      Designed brochures, signs and material needed to inform customers of the essential information that they needed to make informed and reliable decisions.

·      Met with clients face to face, helped them choose and design custom house plans that would best fit their needs for years to come.

·      Helped walk customers unfamiliar to the finance and home mortgage, through the process, by going to meet with their bank or mortgage officer.

·      Was in charge of writing up customer contracts and work orders, which required great detail to insure production as to how and where the customer homes would be built.

·      Helped the company sell more new homes than in any previous years, through quality market research of customer, finance needs, property, and home features.

The following are a few ads that appeared in the local Real Estate magazines. The mother and children were from some stock photos I had; all the other photos were of my taking, or of my creation.

Design Notes:

Peaceful Valley - (the above ad)

When creating artwork, for a home that does not even exist yet, we find it a bit of a challenge. People like to see what they are getting; they need help visualizing their possibilities. This is the case with Peaceful Valley, a subdivision about 24 miles outside of Las Cruses in a community called Rincon, New Mexico. The photo for this ad was a creation of what it would possibly look like while relaxing on your back porch. At this time all we had was lots under development, so taking a photo of the valley looking toward the east, I combined it with a staged photo of models on a porch with a stucco wall, in Photoshop. I also added a shadow to give it a more relaxed look and feel.

Building It Right!

This was one of the best ads we ran and versions of this ad ran for nearly 6 months in several different publications. When people in production speak of lean management, value engineering, or TQM we tend to think these methodologies belong only with manufacturing and production. I beg to differ, all these principles apply to design, specifically Value Engineering which examines the function of a part, process, or application. When designing a piece of artwork you really should know why each piece is there and what its function is. Note that each part of this design has a specific purpose; I will list some of the highlights;

·      Thurston Homes – the name is easily recognized and on edge so that when someone is thumbing through a magazine for our ad, it is easily found.

·      Building it Right – this title conveys the message of the builder’s desire to quality from the very start.

·      Picture of the Model Home – lets people know where they can come to see us.

·      Pictures of the construction process – let people know they just don’t walk-in, buy a home, and walk out.

·      Picture of the couple – lets potential home buyers know that they can see the building of their home from the very beginning and continue to inspect it throughout the entire process.

·      The Map – our office was in a rural neighborhood where the construction was. The streets were all new and were most likely not on any map.

·      Dare to Compare – any builder can give you walls and home furnishings, however we built for energy efficiency and thus required different construction methods from the very beginning. In a Check List fashion we invite people to compare each of these items with other builders, educating the public on the options they can have.

·      Ken Thurston – Builder – no matter how impersonal work can get, it is important to remember that behind this company are real people working hard to build homes for other real people, and we care.

·      Yellow pad & Pencil – both items work to visually convey the message of action. Don’t just read it, get out your paper and pencil and take notes, compare and start doodling. That’s where homes start.

·      Picture of the sign – name recognition helps link our ad with our signs around the area.

·      Background – this is stucco right off the side of a home giving an interesting feel and connection to our end product.

·      The Dog – suggesting the warm and fuzzy feelings of a home.

Great Homes, Great Locations, . . .

This is a full two page spread that can be used as one full piece or as two separate ads in the same publication, giving a little more exposure as people flip through the magazine.

All I can say about my work with Thurston Homes is, we must have been doing something right, because the developer had a lot of trouble keeping building lots available for the amount of contracts we were signing.

Designing a Bottle Label

Customer - Leal's Mexican Foods, Inc.

Date – January 2000

Job – Salsa Bottle Labels

Design Tools - Photoshop, and PageMaker

Design Notes:

A few years ago I was asked to design a bottle label for some salsa for a local restaurant that was having their traditional salsa bottled to be sold in the local retail stores. The family owned business was well respected and their salsa was requested often by the many patrons of their restaurant.

They had no specific ideas about the design, but the natural requirements of meeting the regulations of the food industry, like listing the nutritional facts, ingredients, bar code, and so on, leaving the design up to me to impress them. I agreed and said I would come up with a few ideas for them to look at.

I can’t really begin to cover all the pre-design processes and steps of coming up with the design concept other than to say it took several days of devoted effort. First I took a little trip to a couple of the local stores where the product would be sold and thus it would be on display. I wanted to get a sense of how the isle would look with one more brand of salsa.

      What would make this new salsa stand out?

      Would it be pleasing to the eye, as someone

            looked across the different choices?

      If I didn’t know the name of the restaurant what

            would cause me to desire to purchase it?

      What are the reasons I would even be buying salsa?

Going to the different stores, noting my observations, and then sampling a few friends on their feelings about salsa in general, when and how they used it and so on took several hours. Overall it didn’t take a lot of time; however the value of the information I gathered and the success of its use continues to grow even today.

     

The product was easily recognized, and unlike many other labels that are cluttered with graphics of vegetables the name captures the attention at first glance. I found, a lot of people buy salsa when they are having a party or gathering so I scattered light colors of confetti on a rustic adobe tan background. I also recommended that the name of the salsa be called “Salsa Festiva” meaning “Party Salsa” in Spanish. Finally, I found that a lot of people are very picky about their salsa and most love fresh homemade salsa. So instead of simply abusing the overly used title of “homemade”, I added a personal message from the family, mentioning how long they had been in business and that the same tradition at their home could now be at yours. I then had the son I was working with, hand sign, “the Leal’s”, for the personal touch.

The label was an instant hit with the restaurant and the salsa was an instant local hit in the retail stores and has continued to grow and be added into more and more stores across the panhandle of Texas including local Wal-Marts. Outside of the label itself there has been no additional advertising to spur the products success, only excellent service maintaining the retail accounts and seeing that their customer’s shelves have been stocked.

The Photo Shoot & Creation - Football Poster

Muleshoe High School 2008 Football Poster

Customer - Muleshoe Athletic Boosters

Date - August 2008

Job - 2008 Muleshoe High School Football Poster

Design Tools - Digital Camera, Photoshop, and InDesign

Design Notes:

In 1999, I was standing in line at the local video store waiting to rent a video. As I was looking around at the Movie posters on display a thought struck me. What about doing a football poster for our local high school that had the look of a movie poster with the names of all the players as

“Starring ..., Direct by ... and so forth”. Instead of the traditional poster loaded with the ads of the local sponsors, which in my opinion has never brought the sponsors business, but is simply a donation in support of the students involved.

I had been working on a special cover for that year’s football program and so I reworked some of the artwork to fit a poster layout. For fun I printed one poster out on a large format printer and presented it to the same video store, they were big supporters of the football team. They hung it up and within two weeks we had printed over 250 posters. From that beginning it has become a challenge each year of coming up with a different poster.

As the 2008 school year came to a close I came up with a new concept for the fall football poster. During the summer I worked the concept over in my mind until I was ready to put it all together. I got three football uniforms from the coach, picked some guys to model who were not from our local community (at the high school level you never wanted single out anyone, or some parents will get a little upset), two fire extinguishers full of CO2, and arranged to use a friends photo studio for the shot.

I needed a studio with lots of lights to create the controlled high contrast and highlights on the players. On cue with two assistants would shoot the fire extinguishers at marked targets and the shot would be taken. It took about two hours and we had some amazing shots.

In Photoshop I touched up the smoke, background, changed the numbers on the jerseys to reflect no known player, and added the title and lightning. I then finished the layout in InDesign.

I think this was a major help to them winning state by contributing to a positive mental image.

Maybe!