today we go behind the scenes of how this was made
hey guys i'm rafael and welcome to the channel where our goal is always fix it in camera and then
finesse it in post and i always appreciate the early thumbs up because having fun at halloween
is awesome and i'm excited because i don't usually get to talk about the projects that
i work on because of perpetual ndas check out this video where i talk about what it
really means to sign an nda but this project came together nicely it actually started with
my friend scott who was in advertising and worked with some pretty big brands but then
three years ago just disappeared went silent spooky right but this april i got a call from
him after years of silence and he tells me that he left the industry and he started
a distillery making gin and vodka what talk about hitting the bottle hard literally
fast forward to today and we teamed up to make a spot for his brand heretic spirits
let's walk through the process of how we made this spot the brief was simple something for halloween
using the papercraft style with the label and after a bit of brainstorming we landed on the
label gets blown off by the wind gets crumpled up and lands in front of the camera and using
the american werewolf and london transformation as inspiration it turns into a pumpkin it sounded so
simple for this one we went straight to previz and i'm way more comfortable
doing it in 3d than drawing storyboards and doing it in 3d helps me work out the
timing for these types of animations when you look at it though it looks
really rough it's hard to see what the finished product will look like but i saw it in my head
and luckily scott can see something like this and understand how it can be and if you're working
with clients that aren't that visual you'll have to walk them through it step by step
the mood boards and examples of how the finished product will look and feel after some tweaking we
settled on the label blowing off and crumpling up towards the camera to clearly show that the
label is the pumpkin at the end the original texas switch where the label flies up and the
pumpkin comes down felt a little disconnected between the label and the pumpkin besides it
looks so much better rolling towards the camera so we had the story and now we had the previz
we had to do a little experimentation because the label coming off took some
work and i enlisted the help of a very talented c4d artist patrick letourneau
he has a far better grasp on fields and soft body simulations in cinema 4d but even after some
playing we ended up using ben deformers and low poly geometry to better match the material of the
physical label the pumpkin transformation posed its own set of challenges how to get it to crack
open to its final state it came down to using a mesh deformer and animating it from post
to pose and once we had the look for both the pumpkin and the label we moved on to production
one of the beauties of working with small products and product photography is you can
film this at home you only need a little bit of space if you have the gear it's easy to set up
next was to capture the bottle light it and get the right camera move and make it feel great
i started with just photos of the bottle for reference for lighting what did we want it
to look like we needed to recreate the bottle in 3d so the label wrapped around it perfectly
and the reflections all played nicely and we could do whatever with the camera that we wanted but the
footage of the bottle looked really good so we decided to save time and use the 3d bottle in
the future these are some things that you need to consider when shooting reflective products
and the types of lights that you have to work with this is the four foot pebble tube
this is the 10 inch bubble tube nand light as a secondary front light just
to give another reflection we have the aperture 120d with the light dome
as our main light and backlight at the same time it really captures all the light around the edge
we have a bounce to give a little bit more reflection on that right side i also picked up
this fake acrylic ice which is fantastic for these kind of product shots they don't melt and
just keep going so i think it looks fantastic for a prop nobody knows and whose ice looks this good
honestly whose ice ever looks this perfect but for a product shot that's we need tracking
marker to do all the tracking obviously to help i actually didn't need it for this shot
because everything on the bottle worked but i was using a clear bottle for the effect
thank you heretick for providing a clear perfect bottle set to clean it up a little bit definitely
when you're working with glass make sure that you wipe down any fingerprints because those are
really hard to get rid of and post it's doable but i don't recommend it we have your aperture
mc with a nice blue highlight on the background i was using this light to give a nice edge light
right on the side if you notice there's that really big streak right there
and if i take this and i move it that edge only appears on that top portion of the bottle
you turn on your light bam and right now it's in the front so i'm slowly starting to move it
and just finding where where it's giving me that nice rim light and this one light because of the
shape of the bottle i'm able to get the light wrapping around both sides i didn't want too
much of it up here because the 120d was giving me a lot of that i didn't want a full solid white
line all the way around that would be way too much so looking through the lens and once you find that
spot
place it down then you can move on to your next leg so then turning on the four foot light
that give me nice illumination overall here but i felt like i was missing a little bit
of the punch here so that's where the other light came in that gives those ice cubes and that label
that silver a really nice pop right into the lens and then really pop in on this side to give us a
nice highlight on the label and the last thing i'm going to add reflector to fill out the other
side but without dominating the entire frame so again 120d the 10 inch led the 4 foot led another
10 inch led the aperture mc on that background giving us that nice little blue highlight and
then the reflector to fill it all out depending on the materials that are on the bottle and the kind
of shape of the bottle the light is going to work differently so always look through your lens check
the frame and to make sure that it's lighting up the way you want and what looks good for you
so this is a tiny little setup for product shots you can pretty much do anything with this setup
if you're working with products always check the frame to make sure that the product looks sexy
larger light techniques translate at smaller scales backlight and rim lights are really nice
for definition and a soft front light for pleasant lighting always check the frame to make sure that
you're liking the way the light is playing on the surface of the product move the light around
to see what works best and change the angle of the light and see how it looks from the camera's
perspective that is always what matters if you can have an external monitor showing you the camera's
output you can quickly build your lighting one light at a time and if you end up using
a reflective black acrylic like i did make sure you clean it often and then clean it again dust
love sticking to this stuff the further we went down the animation and since i had the lighting
all set up i decided to go and get some supporting shots to lead into the animation the ice dropping
the pouring out of the bottle and into the glass and the hand coming towards the camera implying
that this is for you to enjoy it was fun building these shots and it didn't have to be crazy camera
moves to get the feeling and the point across we wanted to keep this simple for a quick turnaround
once all the shots were done we started editing and i started with the goal to have this fit into
a 30-ish second spot i mapped out the shots that i wanted and i visualized the three bottle shots
first the timing for the label to the pumpkin shot was already locked at around 15 seconds
four seconds for the end tag so i had to work within 11 seconds at the beginning
for the opening shots to make it feel right with the timing and once we had picture lock we moved
on to color correction the brief for the color grade was they wanted blue like the flame when
vodka is on fire and that actually contrasted nicely with the copper label on the bottle
so after picture lock we went into audio post this is not the final spot that went out and i did my
own sound design and chose the music so i can post it here on the channel so after editing i started
to build the soundscape for myself this is what it looks and sounds like with just the sound effects
i got most of the sound effects from our list and a few from audio this is my favorite time of year
the mood the colors the whole feeling around fall and that's what i really wanted to capture
the sound design was already creepy enough and i wanted a nice balance to bring back some of
the fun and silliness of halloween for the music for my version i wanted something that was a bit
more campy halloweeny playful and something that reminded me of halloween of the movies of the fall
of the colors and because i edited the picture first and build the sound design next the music
had to be cut to fit not the other way around and this is a little tease to editing with music and
cutting to the beat video that i keep talking about and then mix it all together to make sure
it's all balanced out and we get a nice beautiful spot that i'm really happy with i love these types
of projects where it's very collaborative with the ideas and we get all excited when things
just feel right and are clicking we had about two weeks to turn this around from start to finish
once we got started and i'm really happy how this turned out in the time and resources that we have
i hope you guys enjoyed it i had fun making it let me know if you have any questions about the making
of is there anything that you'd like me to do a deep dive on let me know your thoughts on that
also let me know which parts of halloween you love the most as always thanks for
watching give this video a big thumbs up subscribe i'm rafael i'll talk to you soon