After Effects Concert Promo

[TongBlack]

Promo for a concert at our church 2 months ago. It's already past, so nothing's getting changed, but I'm just interested in input.

There are a couple glitches, I know. I was on a time crunch and didn't have time to go back and fix a few things. You'll notice as the elements move toward the camera, once they get towards the middle, their color changes slightly. I accidentally had one of the 2D background elements set as a 3D layer, and once the text and pictures crossed through that element, their color changed.

The goal of this promo was obviously informational. We posted it on Facebook and invited many students through the site. We also burned several copies to DVD and mailed them to several youth pastors in the area.

CMN Player - YouTube- ‪June 27 Willet Concert...

[wmmsaved]

HI Byron,

My hat is off to anyone who can use After Effects. That's my next thing to master.

I wasn't put off at all by the color shift. Since it happened right before a visual transition, it looked like part of the effect.

I would offer these observations:
1. A faster pace would have been beneficial. Shorter is usually better for promotional pieces, especially with today's short attention spans.
2. Vary the visual effects instead of same transitions repeated with different text
3. Music transition was abrupt at :32 in. The one at 1:15 was great because you transitioned between phrases of both pieces.
That's about it.

Nice looking spot overall that I'm sure appealed to your target audience. Keep up the good work!

Hope this helps,
Michael

[brochris]

I'd echo Michael's comment regarding the pace. The whole thing just seemed a bit sluggish. It only takes about a second and a half to read 3 words, but I counted about six seconds for each phrase shown. Granted, some of the longer phrases obviously needed closer to the six seconds you gave them, but for the short phrases, I was just waiting for the next phrase to appear.

I'd also suggest having less information. People interested in coming don't need to know from a promo video that there will be concessions. They can find that out when they get there. And the phrase about checking out the facebook group could have just been a url to get more information (facebook.com/willetconcert or whatever).

Overall, though, I thought it was great. It promoted the event with some music from the band and pointed viewers in the right direction to get more information if they were interested. And it had very nice visual effects. Nice work!

[KeckCreative]

Nice font choice and coloring. I agree about the pacing being too slow and repetitive transition effect, but it was a cool way to use lens flare effect. Probably needed to be just a little bigger to cover the text transitions. I think a free VideoCopilot.net preset/plugin like Sure Target could spice up the text movement.

Still getting something done under the time constraints and at the quality you produced deserves a round of applause. Well done.

Sure Target 1.5
Sure Target 2.0

[TongBlack]

Thanks for all the input!

I do already have SureTarget, and part of the reason I didn't do any camera movement was because most of the videos I've made to date have a lot of that type of 2.5d movement in them, so I was looking to do something different. I also wanted to use the twister plugin from VideoCopilot, which is what created the floor in the video.

Thanks again!

[joshsliffe]

tong,

a few things i noticed... the floor was brighter than the text especially during the intro... and the movement and transition was slow like an emotional testimony pace verses a quick fast exciting concert promo.

regardless of what your other stuff looks like... or what you want to use or do... you have to take each project and let it be it's own... i know that sounds lame... but what i mean is regardless of what you overuse or underuse... you need to do whatever it takes to make each project the best it can be.

also with mixing in static pictures hovering in 2.5 or 3 dimensional space ... it made the pictures seem really lame verses making them full screen or something.

overall not bad ... but i think a lot of time can be wasted just for the sake of something small no one notices... instead of spending that time on stuff that makes the project better.