I don't know about you - but in between full projects and client work I like to keep myself creative with fun little afternoon projects and personal work.
So here's the first post of (hopefully) many where I give a little insight into my one-off fun projects - if I'm happy with the result I'll even include it in my portfolio!
One such example is this little Adidas retro spec ad I shot and edited one afternoon.
Cool right? I even created some BTS segments to show a little sneak peek of how I got the product shots as well as a quick look at the editing timeline.
HOW I GOT THE PRODUCT SHOT
EDITING TIMELINE OVERVIEW
For this video I really wanted to see what it would be like to shoot using my TV as the background, so i loaded up a bunch of different abstract animations and patterns on Youtube and suspended the Adidas trainer in front of the screen using a backdrop stand and some fishing wire.
Then after that it was a case of meticulously and gently getting the shoe to move in a smooth, slow and consistent rotation without any sway - delicate hands were definitely required on this one!
The final thing I did to accentuate the shoe and bring it together with the screen more organically was I used two YN360 Pro light wands: One for a side of clear white fill to define the 3D shape of the shoe, and the other in RGB mode to match the colour of each backdrop.
I shot the shoe spinning footage in External RAW on my Ninja V, and the walking footage was recorded into camera in XAVC-I. I did shoot this content vertically (I am not a huge fan of vertical but it's the world we live in sadly). This made it difficult to get smooth gimbal work as I feel gimbals are more designed to handle a horizontal payload as opposed to a vertical one.
With regards to the shots with the model wearing the trainers - we had to run through the sequence multiple times with different looks - thankfully it was shot just outside my apartment complex so quick changes were pretty rapid.
The edit is what really brought the whole thing together though as I hadn't chosen the music prior to shooting - yet the music was what guided the final look, feel and pace of the sequence.
The track I chose had almost an old hip hop style blast beat with DJ scratches and a fun vocal sample to boot, altogether making a nice chill summery vibe with retro overtones. So I decided to dirty up the frames and the text and almost degrade the quality to help fit this.
Then the magic secret sauce was Posterize Time (hella demanding on my PC rig!) to bring that frame rate down and make the footage feel truly vintage.