SOS Children's Villages
The Project
The project involved making a CD and a web page to promote the SOS Children's
Villages and to encourage companies to take part in sponsoring programs. The
client's idea was to have something interactive but I recommended doing a video.
That way, a CEO, looking at the CD or the web site wouldn't have to click all
over the place and read text (they are usually impatient people). Instead he
would stay with the video until the end and that way get all the information
'fed' to him.
The Production
The Text
The client provided a draft of the text. I edited the text mainly to get some chronology and climax to the content. My intention was to give the sense of great success. CEOs want to be in a winner team. Special care was taken, when showing kids in bad circumstances, not to give the sense of misery and failure but instead a sense of need.The Voice Over
The client provided an actor to read the text and a studio for recording. I directed the reading.The Images
The client had several VHS tapes and photographs from their world wide operation. The video was captured, scenes selected and edited to the voice over in Premiere. Some basic color correction had to be done since those videos were of different qualities. The black and white images were given a bluish tone to harmonize with the web page. Special effects were rendered in AfterEffects and added in Premiere.The Logo
The intro logo was done as a black and white animation in Flash and then imported to AfterEffects 5 where color, bevel and lights were added.The Music
I found the song on SOS central web site and downloaded an MP3 of it. Then converted it to uncompressed audio using SoundApp. The QuickTime Player inserts periodic 'clicks' when converting MP3s making it useless for that purpose. The music was added to the video and edits were adjusted to sync with the music.The Video
The final compression was done in Cleaner 5 using Sorenson 2 pro, variable bit rate compression. The VBR handles cross dissolves and such critical areas much better than standard rate compression. An MPEG version was also made for PCs. The QuickTime version has an HREFTrack firing events within the web page and launching the sponsoring offer web page.The Web
The basic design was first done in Photoshop. Photographs were adjusted, contrast reduced to match the video, overall luminance reduced so the images would stay in the background and not conflict with the video and highlights were added drawing with a Wacom on a curve-adjustment layer. The purpose of selecting images of celebrities was to convey how well established or famous the organization is. The image was sliced and exported to html from Photoshop. Assembly was done in DreamWeaver.The CD
The CD was a MAC/PC hybrid. On a PC you cannot auto-launch an html file. It has to be an exe-file. So I wrote a small program in RealBasic that launches the html-file. But since I was at it already, I let the program detect the color depth of the monitor and ask the user to change it if it was less than 16 bits and ask the user to make sure the sound was on. Then I let the program detect QuickTime on the PC and if available launch a QuickTime version, otherwise launch an MPEG version.
Finally, click here to view the project.