IDD 400 Analysis of 'Air Zoom Generation - Nike'

This week I took a look at EyeballNYC's 'Air Zoom Generation - Nike' commercial. The commercial uses only 4 stills that Nike gave them plus a their white background that they created that looks boxes or walls, plus the 3D shot and effects on the rotating shoe that they are advertising. The 4 shots are of the young basketball star LeBron James. Some of the effects that are seen are currently beyond our level, however, there overall movement and of the camera seems to be something that could be figured out.

There is a lot of movement to the beat of the music. A lot of the movement is a back and forth, side to side, and zooming around the environment that they created. The movement is very quick and things are often being blurred and put in and out of focus as they are moved. It doesn't stay on any one shot for a very long period of time. The longer shots often have a rotating shoe, but even the movement of the shoe is jerky and get put out of focus while some text comes up to say some of the features. With it setup properly and most likely with a plug-in within After Effects to accept 3D environments created in other programs, the 3D cameras could have been used to create the movement. The shoe and environment has a 3D feel to it but it is quite clear that the photos of LeBron James is two dimensional and very flat. I feel like they are those life-size cardboard cutouts often seen at fast food restaurants.

Within the background there is a lot of movement as well. The walls are changing color and appear to move up and down along with the beat of the music. Red and black bars can be seen moving up and down and along the walls taking their own path during the movement throughout the environment. Sometimes the photograph is placed onto the walls or even a silhouette of James in the background. Never is the entire scene completely in focus. There is something always out of focus and moving very quickly.

IDD 400 Analysis of 'Lenovo Thinkpad - Long Life'

This week is the analysis of the Lenovo Thinkpad - Long Life commercial done by Motion Theory. The overall point of the commercial is to show that this laptop has a long battery life. The commercial starts with lid to the laptop opening in an office setting. While it is opening we see in the background the light changing to dark and things flying by very quickly. As the background flashes and comes back in we see a dark rain forest type of setting. There is then a cut transition and it shows the corner of the laptop with the Intel Centrino logo and a centipede crawling over it with vegetation in the foreground. Then the background seems to "woosh" forward almost like we are traveling in time and we see a butterfly in the foreground. The butterfly is shown in only a few places as if that the current type of video footage is more of a time lapse video, and looks like something we would see in a documentary on the Discovery Channel or something. Along that same time lapse sequence we see a vine grow and over come the laptop. It isn't your normal time-lapse footage, however, other parts of the footage are smooth such as the camera's rotation.

Then winter seems to come into season and we snow and ice start to form and then there is a gust of snow that is used as a transition to move the camera to a closer location. Occasionally the camera won't be a smooth movement and it will seem to jerk back a tiny bit to a previous location and then continue on. All of these effects really help to get the point across that there is a lot of time taking place. The scenery continues to change a couple more times until we are brought back to the original office setting and the lid to the laptop closes like it is the end of a work session. A voice then comes over saying, "Epic battery life...yadda yadda yadda" and the screen fades to black. There is then a simple white sans serif font saying what model laptop we're looking at and then we see the appropriate logos afterwards which are very typical of all commercials like this.

The color palette is dark and has a feeling that the person used this computer in the middle of the night. The audio is music with sound effects that move quickly to correspond with the feeling that there is a lot of time going by. My only complaint at the moment is that this website was horrendously slow.