2 Hour Advert Competition

Today in class, to get to grips with after effects a bit more, we were set a competition to create the best advert for a soft drink in 2 hours. The advert could be anything we wanted it to be, but it had to advertise a soft drink. As soon as the time started, I instantly wanted to advertise an energy drink, because I knew I could have a lot of creative freedom and could create something wacky with an energy drink being the product I was advertising, and this is my type of editing and creative space, anything that is fun and stupid.

2 hours, for me and my classmates is a very short time period to create an advert, as we have not got much experience in short turn around projects, nor are many of us very adept at after effects, so this was going to be a challenge. I started off by just looking around on the web for royalty free footage to use for my advert, but shortly realized that this wasn't going to work for my editing style, so I immediately got some png files of monster energy, and started to animate the images in after effects. Seeing the monster energy can being animated made me think of explosions and madness, so I found a few chroma videos of explosions and keyed them out, and put them behind the monster energy can. At this stage, I had a monster energy drink on a gradient blue background, being zoomed into using the camera layer on after effects, whilst there is an explosion in the background. Whilst zoomed in, I realized that the monster logo was the main component of the screen, and so I wanted to put an effect onto the 'M'. I did this by going into Photoshop and separating the M on the can, so I was left with a blank energy drink can and the monster logo. I re-animated the monster energy can and the M logo, and started to add the effect to it. I decided to light up the M when the camera zoomed into the can, and make the light of the M move. After this, whilst the camera is still zoomed in on the can, I wanted to change the background from blue to a more monster energy themed scene. I decided to change the background to a hell theme, with fire, because it matched the theme of 'monster' as well as the font that monster used. I positioned the fire scene behind the blue background and changed the opacity of the blue background after the light animation. I then zoomed back out from the can so the full can was in shot, and you can fully see the 'hell' background.

I started to run out of time at this point, so I needed to finish up the advert quickly. I decided to end it on the hell theme. I wanted the slogan to be 'unleash your monster', and so on the same screen as the can in hell, I added 'unleash' and 'your' on either side of the can. I couldn't fit the monster text anywhere so decided I needed one more scene, so I swiftly changed scenes by getting a chroma of fire, and keying it out, and putting it over the scene. As the fire rises, the can and the text disappear, and when the fire is full screen, the text 'monster' appears.

overall, I was pleased with the advert, as I have never had to do a 2 hour turn around before, but there were definitely a lot of improvements I would have made. Applying motion blur to the can made it seem more realistic, but something was still missing from the animation of the can, so I would have to fiddle around with that. Also, there was no sound on the advert which definitely would have improved the advert by tenfold. I learned how to master the camera layer which will come in handy, as well as using animation and chroma keying different videos. I also learned a few basic lighting effects and got a better grip of where the controls are in after effects, so an overall good 2 hour session. Below you can find the advert I made for the competition.