I almost titled this post "How ArtBeats & Adobe Saved the Day!" - because, really, that's what they did. The company I work for needed to create a YouTube video for part of our upcoming web marketing initiative. This wasn't just any old YouTube video. It wasn't just cute & cuddly kittens put to music. No, it wasn't even a "Rock Band vs. Guitar Hero" clip.

It was a teaser trailer to launch our current contest promoting our upcoming video series.

For the sake of fun, we decided to create a parody movie trailer, complete with cheesy movie cliche's and dramatic background music, to help promote our upcoming series. (Trust me, this involved watching a LOT of movie trailers on YouTube and also researching the work of Don LaFontaine...)

We wanted our teaser trailer to look professionally done - but we weren't professional video editors and hiring a pro would have been very expensive. Luckily, at the last two DMAG raffles I'd won some prizes from a few of our great sponsors, including Adobe and ArtBeats.

How ArtBeats and Adobe Saved the Day!

I won the Adobe Production Premium CS5.5 software back at the May raffle - and to be honest, I prefer to use Adobe for the graphics projects I create. In this particular web campaign, all graphics for print, web and video were carefully created in Photoshop. I played around with the HDR Effect (my favorite feature of the latest versions of Photoshop) but it was just too "edgy" for what we needed. Instead, we chose to manipulate photos in Photoshop to increase contrast & make the colors pop. These simple effects are something that anyone can do (even those who are new to Photoshop CS5.5) and it allowed us to use images we had taken ourselves, rather than purchasing stock photography. For print materials, we used traditional text effects such as outer glow and drop shadow to create a subtle but sleek look.

The Video

I'm not going into extreme detail with the creation of the images, print materials and advertisements that I created for this project. This is partially because I can't show you some of those images just yet. But, I'm also not going into detail because you can learn many of the effects I used at almost any DMAG meeting - and did I mention our meetings are FREE? ;)

What I CAN share is a behind-the-scenes look at how we created the video and logo graphic for our contest at work. I'll start with the video. After gaining inspiration from YouTube, Wikipedia, and various movie trailers, my boss and I began to write out a script. This is absolutely essential for any video project! Even if you think you don't need a script or a timeline, just play it safe and create one anyway. You'll thank yourself later!

After creating our script, we considered the visual imagery and the audio effects that would correspond with each piece of our timeline. This is where ArtBeats comes in! My boss and I are not video editing professionals. We are completely self-taught (thanks to Google, YouTube and some online tutorials) but had we tried to create every scene for this video, we would have never been able to see our idea come to life. Luckily, ArtBeats Royalty-Free HD Stock Video Footage does the work for you! We were able to find videos that we can use not only on this project, but on future projects as well.

We ended up grabbing this cola clip and we were THRILLED with the size, quality, length and clarity of the video. Our company makes caramel colouring and we definitely hope to use more videos like this one from ArtBeats again in the future. Another sweet surprise was that when we downloaded this video, we also received additional stock video clips that we will try to work into future projects as well.

After finding all of our clips, we spent a few hours each day editing everything together. The timeline came in handy for seeing exactly how the audio lined up with the images. Timing was crucial because 1) you only have a limited amount of time to grab people's attention on the internet, and 2) most movie trailers are only about a minute in length. We managed to find some stock music that was just dramatic enough that it sounded like it belonged on a movie trailer.

Once we determined what images looked best for each moment of our video, the hardest part was creating the text effects and determining how we wanted to fade the video clips into each other. We found that it really wasn't too difficult of a process once we Googled the steps, and we're still impressed (and sometimes overwhelmed) by just how much control and how many professional, movie quality options we have to work with in this software. You'll notice that we use a lot of fading in and out between our clips; we found that this was the least distracting and most professional way to tie it all in together. And because this is a movie trailer, we had the freedom to include some carefully placed scenes of just white text against a black background for that added dramatic effect.

The Logo

The logo was 100% created in Photoshop, as it is a web-only campain. (Luckily, I also have Illustrator CS5.5 so if I ever need to create a vector version for print materials, I can do that, too...) We wanted something colorful (we make caramel and natural colors, after all) and we knew that a clean, sans serif font was the way to go for a sleek, sophisticated look.

After three or four variations, we decided to go with this:

This logo really wasn't too difficult to create. We wanted something sleek, modern, just SLIGHTLY edgy but nothing too crazy. The colors fit very well with another stock video clip we are using for our upcoming video series (can't show you that one yet, but you'll just have to trust me...) and the font was chosen as we felt it was a sleek sans serif with just enough weight (without being too "bold"). And yes, there is a little Filter > Render > Lens Flare and a slight Blur to some of the letters, but again, we tried to make those types of effects subtle. It's more about the words and the colors than the effects for this logo.

Timing and Cost

So, after reading all the work that went into this campaign, you're probably wondering two things:

1) How long did it take?

and

2) How much did it cost?

It took us about a week to produce the finished video you see here, working just a few hours each day. If we had devoted 8 hours of a working day to creating this video, we could have probably completed it in just a few days - and that includes the time it took us to figure out the software, find the stock footage, search Google for answers to our questions and watch video editing tutorials on YouTube.

The cost was zero. Zip. Nada. Nothing... except for our time. "Free" is always a VERY good cost, if you ask me! Remember, we WERE able to use our own images instead of stock photos, thanks to a wonderful digital camera and some Photoshop effects. ArtBeats provided some of the video footage, which I won for free (normally that particular clip would cost you $199 - not bad considering you keep the cip) and then we also already had the video editing software.

Yes, I realize that Adobe's Production Premium CS5.5 is quite expensive, but if you have a passion for video editing, a computer that is powerful enough to handle the software and a desire to create things that are professional and movie quality - this is the way to go! Plus, you can combine this software with free plugins or even something like Audacity (for sound edits), and find plenty of free tutorials all over the web that will show you how to use it and how to achieve almost any effect your creative mind can imagine. I would never trust a "free" service to create the types of effects we created here. Remember, you get what you pay for.

All in all, we were thrilled with what we were able to accomplish, with the QUALITY of our final creation, with how much TIME we saved in our turnaround time and also with how much MONEY we saved (remember, we were able to do this all in-house rather than paying an outsourced company to create it for us). I highly recommend using Adobe CS5.5 and/or ArtBeats for your next video project.