HODGSON, WILLIAMS & NELSON TAKE NEW APPROACH FOR POST ON LAGOON 2010 CAMPAIGN
April 29th, 2010 § Leave a Comment
Part 5: Post Production
With 11,000 stills and an amazing music track from Bitter:Sweet, Matt Hodgson (Director/Writer) and Matthew Williams (Director of Photography) were looking at the Post Production phase of Lagoon Amusement Park’s 2010 campaign in a whole new way.
“It was such a weird time for us,” Hodgson recalls. “Normally by the time we’ve got the music figured out we’ve already done a Best Light in Seattle with Jeff Tillotson at Lightpress and we’re in LA working on the edits and the visual effects, but this year with a scaled back production budget and a campaign idea that was going to consume a vast amount of time on the Post end, we felt like we needed a solution that would give us the flexibility to work on this night and day, without consuming our budget.”
Over the period of several weeks Hodgson and Williams sifted through the mountain of stills in order to choose selects for the hero sequences. Then with a beta version of Lightroom 3… even though the usual warnings of using Beta versions came up over and over, LR3 (Beta) had so many improvements, I had to take the risk over my existing LR2 version… so we were able to quickly create looks and experiment with different color treatments for the campaign. Lightroom 3 allowed me to work faster and with their “sync” feature, I could do a test and sync a hundred photos in a few seconds and test it out with their new time lapse feature, without ever having to edit a sequent to see how it played. With Lightroom 3 we didn’t spend valuable time dealing with a host of technical and orginazitional issues. Then this mountain of photo sequences had to be exported and brought into FCP 7 where the color automatically shifts from “computer color space” to “television color space,” so that brought another level to the complexity of this many still photos, but since I could see the shifts and understood what happened in the conversions, I could go back and make different corrections where needed, right in the same room.
“I was literally color sweetening sequences as we were editing to keep up with the pace, and I know we couldn’t have done this in a traditional editing workflow, but then again this was not a traditional edit for a television spot,” Williams said. When all was said and done, we did the final color pass in Apple’s Color program which was impressive in its ease and workflow… more like I’m used to in a bigger color suite, and this whole overall approach gave us tons of creative freedom to try out new looks without spending a lot of time and money we didn’t have on this one.”
After spending time cutting rough sequences together and experimenting with “test” color options in Lightroom 3, Hodgson and Williams decided that the best way to approach the actual editing, was to simply do it themselves. “We knew the material so intimately, we knew how much finessing we were going to want to do to the images once we had edited spots, and we knew we didn’t have the post budget to spend two or three weeks at a facility, Hodgson said. “So we approached veteran editor TJ Nelson to see how he would feel about doing the cutting and color for the campaign on Apple’s Final Cut Pro 7—and to say the least, he was all over it.”
“We really thought this was the perfect project for TJ,” Hodgson said. We had all these beautiful images, the cool Bitter:Sweet tune and a solid vision of what we wanted the campaign to look like, but we were so close to the material that we needed a fresh editorial perspective from an editor who was willing to dive in and do whatever the project called for and that’s exactly what TJ did.”
Together the threesome crafted a campaign of 15 spots (five :30s and nine :15s) that Lagoon will begin airing on April 26, 2010.
“This campaign represents a lot of firsts for us,” Hodgson said. “It seemed like we were always experimenting, always trying to push ourselves and we had a blast doing it. The campaign just exudes fun, and that’s what Lagoon is all about.”
Campaign Credits:
Lagoon’s 2010 Advertising Campaign was conceived, written and directed by Matt Hodgson | DSLR Photography and 35mm Cinematography by Matthew Williams | Art Direction by Cameron Gardner | Film Transfer by Jeff Tillotson at Lightpress | Editorial by TJ Nelson | Color Correction & Color Sweetening Matthew Williams and TJ Nelson | Producer Brent Feulner | Audio Production by Chuck E. Myers at Big Idea Music | Music Composition/Lyrics/Vocals by Bitter:Sweet
