NH For The Holidays

Just completed a commercial for the up coming “NH For The Holidays” expo to be held at the Radisson Hotel in Manchester, NH on December 8th and 9th. The spot used a combination of motion video, stock photos, and digital artwork.

The piece was pulled together in Adobe After Effects. For the main background of the photo album I used a free cardboard texture on the web and colored it a festive shade of blue. The burned edges for all the “photos” in the album was generated from the Photoshop plug-in Silver Efex Pro from Nik Software. To give some more interest to the stock photos, I masked out the girls and, in one case, dropped in some footage I had of a snow storm. I blurred it to give it some depth. This also allowed me to place the client’s logo in the background and make it look like it was part of the shot. Using the same technique, I was able to drop in the logo in the shot of the family as well. The snow fall in the final shot and the twinkling lights were produced by using the Trapcode Particular plug-in for Photoshop. The footage of the model railroad was turned into line art via the Simplify plug-in from Topaz Labs. I rendered out about 30 frames of the motion video, then sent each resultant Photoshop file through the plug-in, then read the whole series of images back into After Effects as a motion sequence.

Probably my most favorite part of the spot is the voice over. “Bob J.” is a wonderful, national voice over talent that did a spectacular job on the piece.