http://www.vimeo.com/4505339
http://www.vimeo.com/4512892
So a lot of people have asked about the Drive-Bye’s shown after the main sessions. Here is the spot with some credits and the history of how we came to the idea.
Producer: Heather Breslin
Writer: Jon Acuff (Yes that Jon Acuff.)
Motion Graphics: Joe Wiggleston, Taylor Cox
Sound Design: Lane Johnson
Dance Video Shooting: Dave Blakeslee & Joe Wiggleston
Voice Over: me!
3D animation: Dave Robertson
Music: FirstCom Music
The spot obviously involves a lot of typography which was first created earlier this year for a MarriedLife ad called the “Great Date Experiment“. Some people think that the spot is inspired by the Ford commercials that have Dennis Leary as the voice over. That is only half the inspiration. Actually, if you do a search on YouTube “typography”, you will see a TON of random quotes from movies done in this style. There are so many ways to do this but I must warn you, it can be VERY tedious. Joe took all the words and found a little jewel of an Adobe After Effects script that put the script content into different layers. 1 word = 1 layer. Imagine doing that yourself & timing it out. We did. It was brutal.
We did the initial campaign for MarriedLife in house and then after that, once we had the system down, we had different animators help with the execution side of things. For the Drive-Bye, Taylor Cox was HUGE in the creativity of the animation. Heather did an amazing job producing it. Our friend Jon Acuff from Stuff Christians Like wrote the piece with Heather and I making small changes here and there. Jon is an amazing writer that we use often. It helps that he attends North Point. I need to have lunch with him soon. Hope you enjoyed this as well as Drive.
Drive-Bye
Tue, May 5, 2009
8 Responses to “Drive-Bye”
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May 6th, 2009 at 6:00 am
Awesome to know about the after effects script. Also….a little sad that a free bagel has yet to present itself to me.
May 6th, 2009 at 7:16 am
Jon Acuff is my hero.
May 7th, 2009 at 9:42 am
The footage is sick! What 35mm attachment did you use on the PMW-EX3? Did you do any color processing in AE to get that overexposed film look?
May 7th, 2009 at 9:44 am
Sorry, I accidentally left that comment on the wrong post!!! But I love the wicked cool typography too!!!
May 7th, 2009 at 9:56 am
I Loved these. “Kinetic type” (as it’s called) is one of my favorite types of motion graphics. There are so many cool things out there using this method & design. Props boys. And Brad, smooth voice over. Thanks for the script too! Great to see you guys again, and to meet some of you for the first time. Drive is always an inspiring time.
May 11th, 2009 at 9:37 pm
I can’t get the After Effects (aescripts.com) link to work. Looks like it links directly to the .zip file rather than to the page. I did some searching around on their site but couldn’t find the one you reference.
Am I missing something? Can anyone post a link to the page rather than the zip file. I REALLY need that script.
May 12th, 2009 at 4:46 am
Hey Chuck! Good observation–I actually didn’t realize that the direct hotlink didn’t work! Sorry about that. The actual script we used was posted as a link in a COMMENT down towards the bottom of this page:
http://aescripts.com/3d-text-creator/
The comment says,
“lloyd said on April 14th, 2009 at 10:24 am
@Josh - Here you go: 3D_text_spreader_from_file.jsx This version of the script will evenly spread layers in order by a defined amount on each axis.”
Basically the same guy who posted the 3D text creator script that is listed on the page, also created this sweet little modification of it that spreads the layers by a SPECIFIC amount, so that you can for instance, create a logical line of text using the X axis (instead of having them randomly spread around like in the original script). You’ll have to get into & modify the code a little bit to make it work for your purposes–you can set colors, variables, spreading parameters, etc. We created a giant 5000×5000 comp to get all of our 570 layers visible at once; we modded the sript to spread them by 200px on the X axis and made them all one color, and timed it to the audio, then we made all the precomps & camera moves and pretty layouts after.
Just make sure once it’s installed to create a text file of your material that has each word as a different line, such as:
Before
you
change
your
facebook
status
to (etc….)
For us, it was as easy as doing a find-and-replace in TextEdit where we just replaced all the spaces with returns. Modify & install the script, run it in AE & bring in the txt file when prompted, and voila. Experiment with different modifications and it’ll work like magic. Happy scripting!
May 12th, 2009 at 7:36 am
Thanks guys! This will help a ton. I’ve done several of these animations by hand and it is pretty laborious. Anything to speed up the process will be incredible!
Thanks again for all you do not only for North Point, but for the rest of us as well!