Green Screen

The Kitchen.

Most people never realize just how much work goes into producing a TV commercial. For the most part what we see, if we are fast-forwarding over them, is the fifteen-second edit of the original sixty-second spot. They whiz by in a blip sandwiched between other ads that blend into a seamless stream of no one paying attention. But occasionally someone posts a video showing how things get done.

Have you ever wondered how they match the 3D animations to live action footage? Blend shots together? What the total production of a video looks like? The video below for Canal+ shows you. No it doesn’t go into any lengthy detailed VFX breakdown, but it does give you a pretty solid idea of what it took to produce the promotional spot titled “The Kitchen”.

The finished sixty second spot

How they made it.

Forever 21 Virtual Fashion Show.

Recently Forever 21 created and produced the worlds first virtual fashion show using 3D projection mapping, and copious amounts of green screen video with special effects. The result is pretty spectacular, and when you do the math the ROI is probably pretty good when you look at production cost vs actual impressions and conversions.

Based on my experience, and what I saw in the video this had to have cost Forever 21 at least 300,00 dollars to produce.(it was probably closer to 500,00 when you add it all up)

What they got in return was 86,634 click throughs on headline banner ads, 2150 full page ad reads, and 3317 video views. That ads up to a total of 92,101 total impressions. If the average conversion rate to sales is a generous 20% that would give them a total of 18, 420 sales. If each sale averaged just $50.00 (I say that because Forever 21 doesn’t sell high priced couture, and the main target audience is not really the financially secure but rather younger less affluent individuals so $50.00 is manageable.) they would have generated $921,000 in sales. Not bad when you think about it.

If we got all pessimistic or realistic and adjusted the numbers for a 10% conversion to sales rate, Forever 21 still made $460,000 dollars. Not bad for something that has potential to be used again and again.

The concept and execution are great. The virtual fashion show can be moved, played and reused in multiple venues over the next 18 to 24 months creating even more buzz and sales.

How Engine made the Telstra Motorola Xoom Commercial.

I am a huge fan of studios that can pull off seamless blends of live action video, CGI, and green screen shots. The video below shows how Engine created an amazing TVC for Telstra and the new Motorola Xoom tablet. The video begins with the behind the scenes footage showing how they made it, and ends with the final production. Personally I find the behind the scenes stuff more interesting than the final commercial, but overall the whole thing is great.