Wednesday, July 9, 2014

Marshall Thurber, a skillful communicator and advocate of Deming's work, suggests a clever team of creative video makers.... and they use the word "FL__X__BLE"

As a teacher, I'm always looking for mentors for my students.  I've found a remarkable video team thanks to a recommendation letter from Marshall Thurber (who introduced me in 1979 to Deming's methods and later to the words of Buckminster Fuller and to the concept of win-win).  

Here's what Marshall wrote:

steve,

Over the past few months I have been working with Creativa.  It is
very creative production company in Australia.  It produces 700+
videos annually and generating millions of views.  Creativa has over
100 different clients in a variety of industries from Education &
Government, Health and manufacturing. 

The creative forces behind Creativa are Damian Blumenkranc and Miguel
Donnenfeld.  They continue to be recognized globally.  Creativa has
been awarded more than a dozen national and international awards;
these include:

1. Best Animation, 
2. Best Promotional Video, 
3. Best Show-Reel, 
4. Best Children Show, 
5. Best Explainer Video.

We now live in a global community.  Distance is just a click away. 
Damian and Miguel’s values are totally aligned with mine.  Even if
you only have a “half-baked” idea that you want to express
digitally please contact Damian damian@creativa.com.au or call
+61-433-804-775 at Creativa.

Both the creativity and value offered at Creativa are exceptional;
when you are working in this domain please invest the time to explore
this alternative.   They are known for compelling commination and
innovation; their awards testify to this.

This is a wonderful organization; please have your own experience; go
to:

Love,


Marshall 





As Marshall suggests, "experience Creativa for yourself."



Some of my students are stunned by the Creativa team's Tricks video  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nz3j_t8_fdc







Green Screen tricks
How cool is it that the Creativa team took time to explain how they accomplished a "zoom in with two cameras and the green screen."... 

HOW TO WRITE COPY

Some of these tips will help my students...

part 2  What do you really sell?

part 3  What products do you really sell?
part 4  Who is the competition?   how to create a unique selling proposition... 
The power of annotations in YouTube
part 5  Working with your competition
to create new products for future clients...
Can you create strategic alliances with your competitors?

I hope that some of my students will take the time to study Creativa's methods and perhaps send questions to their team (and gain the team's help as mentors).


Marshall has previously written to me about "the art of change"
Help us Create a Happier New Year 2014... take a moment to check out
this short film on The Art of Change... 


With gratitude,

Marshall 




---------------
UPDATE:  July 2014
Here's the reply from Damian and Creativa....   (Thanks!)







Here are the answers to some of my questions...


To answer these two questions, I will need to make two very important statements that will help you understand better the details of the answers.
One: Shooting on a talent properly, against a green or blue screen screen will allow you to do almost anything in post-production.
Two: There are many ways to achieving the same results.
Now that that is out of the way, let me go into your questions:
Question 1:
How does the arm (in the Creativa Homepage video) reach out of the camera frame and touch the botton (Facebook link) on screen?
Let’s have a look at a screen shot of that part of the video.

The first thing to notice is that the arm is actually still within the camera frame. All we did was put the Creativa YouTube Channel image over the talent so that it looks like the video he is in in on our YouTube channel.
In order to get the talent’s arm to ‘pop’ out of the ‘screen’, we shot the talent in front of a green screen, then put another green screen in front of him from about waist down. So, when he is talking, both his arms and half his body is behind another green screen, much like a puppet show. Then all he needs to do is to reach out over the green screen in front of him to “touch” the button.

Of course it requires some planning for the talent to know where to touch so that his hand position matches where the button should be when added in post-production.
As mentioned before, there are other ways of doing this, but this is one of the simplest methods.

Question:
How did your arm stretch so far to grab the “FLEXIBLE” sign?
Again, let’s take a closer look at a screen shot of that part of the video.

Look at the blue circle, what do you notice?
There is no shadow on the floor. This means that our talent isn’t really standing in front of the green screen you see. In fact, he has already been ‘keyed’ (Process of removing the green background of the green screen so that you can replace it with any background) out from the green screen studio, and the background has been replaced with, in this case, a picture of a green screen studio.
This is so that it is easier to do the next part.
Now look at the red circle. You will notice that there is ‘joint’ there. So what you think is the talent’s arm is really an image of an arm created in Photoshop.
So all the talent needed to do was to hold his arm out as still as he can; and someone hands him the “FLEXIBLE” sign. In post-production, after keying out the background, we can also “cut” out his hand, ‘attach’ it to a fake arm, ‘stretch’ it out of the frame and then back, so that it looks like it grabbed the sign from out of the frame; when in reality, there was just a guy standing near the talent who handed the sign to him.
All this can be easily done because the talent was shot on green screen and anything we don’t want can easily be removed and replaced, especially the background.
Again, this can be done in several other ways, but in this video, this method is the simplest way to do it.

I hope these explanations have been helpful. I look forward to answering more of your questions.


Damian Blumenkranc ⋅ Director
t 1300 90 18 58   0433 804 775

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