That was great, love the sliced head effect and I thought the lighting/production design was nicely done, the talent had a great period look too. This must have taken a fair bit of time, any production details -

I am new to Sony Vegas and all I have to say is WOW! I didn't know you could do all those things in Sony Vegas. I guess I have alot to learn. How did you do the splitting of the head? Is that easy?

Anything you can expalin would be very helpfull.

Thanks,

Gary

Editing done with Vegas 7

The 3D cubes were created in Blufftitler from the colorful corporate logo designs that represent the various leadership traits (they never quite disclose what the symbols stand for but I'm sure they paid some design firm a lot of money for the hidden meaning).

Head slices were each created in corel photpaint and saved as psd files with transparent backgrounds. The eyes and mouth were added as masked layers in Vegas.

Smoke effects are Bluff titler.

Letters across colored face were created with a "highly proprietary tool." can anyone guess?

Onscreen and VO were done by me because I'm cheap and I know what I like....

I'll have to create a "the creation of..." webpage for it after it's submitted. Happy to share any tricks I forgot to mention....

Jim

Thanks for the quick reply. I understand what you said but have no idea on how to do it! I was reading some other posts regarding training and I think I should get some training DVD's or a book.

Do you have any suggestions that you could pass along?

I'll keep checking your video site to see the progress of your creation. Thank you.

Gary

Gary,

My suggestions is pick a project that pushes you a little further each time. Best way to learn is to do... after all, that we like this stuff right? If you can't figure out how to do what your imagination calls for, ask a specific question to this group and I'll bet you get a few great inputs.

Thanks for the feedback all.

I don't know if you noticed, but it sure sounds like you said, "A full spectrum leader" as opposed to "The full spectrum leader".

Good work though. Do you still have your ethics video up? That was a catchy song.

j razz

jrazz,
I definately said "the" but I think the "th" got chomped in the audio processing somewhere. I suppose the easiest thing to do would be to change the title.... heh heh...

that's freaky. like a wax dumby.

Jim, looked very good, I wasn't sure if you did the 3D cube in a 3D app like BT or just used the 3D parent child track motion in Vegas, but it looked better than anything I've been able to pull off as a 3D cube in Vegas. Didn't expect to hear that the smoke was BT as well, that looked good, thought it might have been Particle Illusion.

The head looked great as it chopped, I hadn't thought of putting them in as stills, lol, I would have been masking and rendering (even on my quad beast) for a while on my machine on that one ( and I like that you didn't just make the surfaces past the front part of the face and head all one color but gave it some color gradation/shadow, as that really added to the look to be sure.

At the end i heard some kind of bg noise around 3:44 that was probably intentional but I kinda got distracted by it for a second (that's probably more me thinking about the production side of it a lot and then hearing that ).

Very good use of the theme and empty suit line at the end, really gave it a sense of cohesiveness.

Spectacular my friend, Spectacular.

Dave

Just a minor point:

The font for "Start" and "Finish" looks too modern and out of the time period you are trying to emulate.

You might try a sans-serif font with a less horizontal profile -- I recall lots of 60-ish movie trailers that used this. I think they didn't use serif as much because of poor repro and shimmer on period TV screens.

Thanks for the input Dave and Musicvid,

The font I used on the START and FINISH was Book Antiqua. Same font I used in the other titles. Maybe the all caps shows off too much of whatever you're seeing that seems too modern. I checked out http://www.1001fonts.com/fonts_overview.html?page=2&view=full&filter=All&category_id=20&sort=font_date&preview_text=1001 Fonts[/link] and looked up sans serif. Man, there's a lot of sans serif fonts that look totally different. Which specific font are you thinking of? Maybe you can find a link?

Dave, Bluff Titler is one of my favorite programs. I use it more for creating neat stuff and partical effects more than I use it for titles. I think the ambient office noise at the scene you referenced is a bit busy at that point. I'm going to replace it with a less noisy clip from that sample.

Always great to get inputs from this group. After spending a couple weeks staring at the same project it's amazing the stuff you miss over and over.

Great work Jim.

You might want to look at the breakup of the "script" font - there's noticeable breakup. Maybe 'cos of the wish to compress? Also breakup on the other fonts edges too. Again, this could be the compression. How BIG was the font to start with? Did you blow up the font or start with a BIG font and take it down?

Again, great work. The sequencing was spot on and you truly captured my idea of '50s > '60s USA - and that's from a chap over here in the UK, yeah? It smacked of "Dragnet" ( Da-de dum dah .. Da-de Dum dah .. ) and all those coy US Public Service films. "Duck 'n Cover" comes to mind!!!

Thanks Grazie.... You got me on the "break up" of the script comment. I don't know what you mean? I took a close look at the Vimeo version in full screen mode and I don't see where the script font could be breaking up? A couple of things come to mind, like maybe the letters where not flowing into each other due to kerning..but that looks ok to me.

The other thing I thought of was maybe you were referring to the thin sections of the font dropping out or "breaking up" but I don't see any of that either. So please explain to this yank what you mean? The font was used at 72pts and not zoomed out or in... ie. actual full frame size.

And I'm glad you picked up my not so subtle attempt to mimic the public service films of the late 50s. The http://www.archive.org/details/prelingerPrelinger Archives[/link] are a gold mine for raw material and ideas.... and it's free to use.

Jim, you have email. g

I have a screen grab for you - G

**Man, there's a lot of sans serif fonts . . ."

I think for something as basic as a countdown slate, one of the Arial variants, probably boldface, would work.

As for the film titles and credits, I went away from serif fonts and script fonts with thin horizontals when I discovered that my prints to interlaced videotape did not hold up at all. Out of habit, I have stuck with sans-serif ever since.

Oh, and yes, I've loved those archives for years. I found a really cool authentic scratchy countdown slate there -- unfortunately it doesn't say "Start," just blinks out after "1."