Here’s my entry into the 48 hour Cannes Young Lions Contest. To vote, click HERE, then click the “Vote” tab, and search “LucasRidley” to find my video, then click the thumb’s up button. Voting ends in 6 days! It’s a great concept of a contest: You only have 48 hours to make a video from the time they tell you what you should make it about, to the time it should be finished uploading to youtube.

The winners are selected by a split of 49% public vote and 51% judges votes. The two winners are flown to Cannes, France for a week to compete in a film competition. Other interesting characteristics of this contest were you had to be 18-28 to enter and you couldn’t use any music. That last one was tough since music can play such a crucial role in videos, especially ones with emotional subject matter. This one is for WaterAid.org who wants you to sign a petition trying to get world leaders to stick to what they signed 10 years ago, the Millenium Development Goals. At the current rate they’ll be about 200 years late achieving the sanitation standards they signed on for. So this petition is important, don’t let them drop this issue.

So my idea was to try and play to the fact we couldn’t have music, so I tied in sounds with the issue. It’s tough just to hear someone blabber on sometimes, so to have those sound fx under my voice helps break up the monotony I hope. I am happy with it considering I made it within 48 hours of reading the brief for the contest. Half the battle is coming up with an idea, or ideas, and then picking which one is the best, and then sitting there and thinking, ‘okay this is going to take a while’ and now I have to actually do it. But that personal challenge is also part of the fun. I’ll be interested to see how many people actually entered this contest because of the 48 hour restriction. My other idea was to actually film with my camera and not do animations, but that meant going to several locations (for the alternative idea), ask favors of the location people, and maybe try and ask a favor of a friend to help. Instead, I just sat in front of my computer and cranked this out.

I did everything in After Effects CS4 (I really want to get that CS5 upgrade) except for the ending logo animation with the water drop. That was done in Cinema 4D and I actually downloaded a trial version of RealFlow just to have an excuse to use it and see what it’s like (It costs $1,000!). That animation could have been a lot nicer, but I had to turn things off like Global Illumination and certain aspects of the materials like transparency in the water because it was taking forever to render. After almost 3 hours it had gotten through a ‘first pass’ on about 30 frames (out of 250). So I had to ratchet down the quality just to get it rendered.

The After Effects stuff was pretty straight forward, but tedious. The biggest thing was just trying to come up with some kind of style for it that would work throughout the video. I think it’s a little too grungy for my taste (that’s why I shattered it when it says “You make a difference”), but you can tweak and think and rethink yourself into oblivion with stuff like that, and that wasn’t going to work for the 48 hour deadline. I did enjoy using Red Giant Trapcode’s Particular 2 plug-in. That’s how I created the stick figure scene. I’m familiar with Particular (that’s how I made the cloud finger-tracer effect in my HP video) so it was fun to get my hands on it again, but I wish I had more time to play with it, I think I could have made that piece of the animation bit prettier (see the “4,000” photo above).

One thing that snagged me for a while was it was taking forever to preview that short sequence and I couldn’t figure it out, then I realized I had selected “Random – Play Once” instead of “Random – Still Frame” for the layer I was using to populate that crowd of stick people. So every frame it was having to repopulate each 4,000 particle, when what I want it to do was produce 4,000 and then just stay there, which was the “Random – Still Frame” option. Enough of that technical stuff . . .

I forgot to mention I only started working on it Saturday afternoon because I wanted to fly in the morning. Then I stayed up all night except for a 2 hour nap and worked on it. I started to go a little crazy when I couldn’t nail the voice over stuff. I had to keep saying “like a toilet” over and over. I still don’t think it works in the video, but I had to stop trying to get it just right because I was going crazy repeating “like a toilet” over and over. You never realize how hard it is to copy your own voice and match voiceovers together, it’s something you never think about, but is the reason getting voiceovers in one or two takes quickly will have the same tone and pitch in your voice.