New Student Welcome Night video advertisements
Continuing the topic of art and inspirations, we’ll be discussing about some recent work that we did and what inspired us.
Acts2fellowship, Koinonia, and Kairos (three Christian fellowships) will be hosting a huge event — New Student Welcome Night — on the UC Berkeley campus this Wednesday and Thursday. In the past, we’ve always faced the same challenges in coming up with video ads for this event. Each video must:
- Be interesting and engaging (obviously)
- Involve many college students
- Have a quick turnaround from storyboarding to execution
In trying to come up with this year’s videos, we came across a neat music video from a Japanese band:
Sour – Hibi no neiro
Their music video works on so many levels, but I’ll highlight just two. First, it’s beautiful in its simplicity. The format is rather straight-forward: the screen is divided into separate parts. Don’t get me wrong — much labor went into thinking things through and choreographing all the parts. However, in the end, there is no dialogue, no special effects… no post-processing of any sort. In fact, they recorded each screen via webcam.
This brings me to the second aspect. Though the concept is nothing new, they pushed it to its extremes. As the video progresses, the interactions amongst the individuals (or “screens”) become more complex, and therefore, more interesting. In other words, they didn’t show you four minutes of the same thing; they presented four minutes of a framework that’s evolving. They reveal the trick in its simplest state in the beginning, and they build it up. In the final sequence, just thinking about coordinating 64 different people for an 8×8 grid blows my mind.
Circling Back
We decided that this is the perfect format for our video ads. Since we’re only making ads and not music videos, each one can be shorter in length (thus simpler to create). I showed this to two college students who have been trained in the fine art of making videos and told them to run with it; the above two videos are the fruit of their labor. The first one took just one week to complete (this student devoted his entire life to this project for that one week, though), and the other about two weeks.
Check out the New Student Welcome Night site (and event)!
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- Kairos Welcome Night – Web Poster Design
- Good Idea, Bad Idea: A Cappella Tribute to John Williams
Tagged as inspiration + Categorized as Design