Long Island Loves "The Insider Card"

We recently were contacted by our good friend Mad Dog Media Relations to edit a 30 second spot for "The Insider Card", a discount shopping program in Long Island. That was music to our ears as we were excited to put our new Premiere and After Effects 5.5 video editing and compositing software through its paces. Fresh out of master level training from Adobe (so fresh in fact most of the spot was edited in the hotel room between classes,) we had a ton of fresh techniques to apply to this project.

Working on a tight deadline didn't afford us the chance to shoot any footage on location studio or otherwise create a lot of custom elements. So, we decided to access the impressive library of stock footage from Corbis Motion. The clips were selected and downloaded as samples from the Corbis site. The offline clips were assembled  in Premiere for timing, pacing and client approval. After the final clips were selected and downloaded, we began the online edit and compositing in After Effects.

One of the features I found most useful in  the Adobe Creative Suite was the ability to open and replace sections of the Premeire timeline directly in After Effects for compositing and motion graphic needs. This saved a tremendous amount time as I didnt need to render and replace and often retime as i did in older workflows. The timeline layers convert to an AE comp and you can use the edit original command in Premeire to jump back into editing the comp in After Effects. This is one of the things I always found was a downfall in working in AE and Final Cut Pro or as in my case Combustion and Final Cut Pro. I know using Motion gives you that type of integration but I never thought Motion as capable.

We had to be able to turn around post-production in just a few hours, and there was specific VFX work that needed to be done, so I relied on a few time tested clean designs for most of the creative stuff. For instance, we floated the logo as reflected layer in a 3d space, created a wall of video and used subtle 3d camera movements. I also relied on stock applications of AE's animation presets for the text treatments. One of the more challenging VFX needs was replacing the shots of a generic credit card. This was accomplished by using motion tracking a series of animated mask to lay the "Insider Card" over the stock footage of a regular credit card.

in the end, the client was extremely satisfied with the results and the turn around time. Look for the "Insider Card" coming to a city near you soon.