The American Advertising Association’s Awards, formerly called the ADDYs, is one of the ad industry’s highest honors. Taking place regionally, the award events are huge productions that bring together the best creatives in the US ad space.
Because ad people know how to make an impression in 30 seconds, any video introduction to the events had better be something special.
For this year’s Orlando awards, Florida’s Ad Club chose Levitation Creative Agency to come up with an intro video that would show off Orlando and why it is such an amazing place to live and create. And what better way than to fly through every part of Orlando and turn the city into an 80s arcade game?
Levitation Creative Agency is based out of Lake Mary, Florida, and works with both regional and national clients to create ads, corporate videos and other creative services. They know the city of Orlando is more than just a vacation spot, with its vibrant creative and arts community, so the video for the awards had to show that Orlando is an amazing locale for the ad community.
The Great Orlando Arcade
The intro video for the awards was definitely not small in scope, starting with a shot of pixelated boxes screaming down to earth from space. The boxes are immediately recognizable by anyone who has ever played Pacman or QBert for the 80s shape and feel.
These boxes fly down to Florida and into Orlando, where they go through various neighborhoods, over the city’s main lake and end up at the award ceremony itself. Landing at the ceremony, the boxes form together to spell “ADDY AWARDS.” The spot perfectly captures the fast pace and creativity that has made Orlando a top spot for advertising and production.
“Anyone could do a video with general beauty shots of Orlando. But Orlando and the Orlando production and post community are more than that. We are constantly producing some of the most amazing work in the world. So not just any video would do,” said Dan Reut, CEO and Creative Director of Levitation Creative Agency .
“The idea was to show off Orlando in an old video game style, and was very VFX heavy. So we had to have a camera that could get us great images and have enough data on there for the VFX artist to work with. The Blackmagic Production Camera 4K was perfect for what we needed here,” Dan said.
Dan’s group brought the camera to all of the main points in Orlando, getting shots from high up on top of buildings and across waterways. They had to get wide sweeping shots so that the VFX crew could have the space to properly show a mob of pixelated boxes flying through the street, and this meant getting shots from some very tough spots.
“The Production Camera 4K was great for motion shots and getting good angle shots for VFX. The camera was small enough that we could get to every angle that we could dream up, and because we could shoot in ProRes HQ, it was easy to use in post production,” he said.
Once the footage was shot and VFX added, color correction was completed in DaVinci Resolve.
“You can really tell the camera was developed with post production in mind. And the high dynamic range meant that we got a ton of data from each shot,” he continued. “We basically set up the camera physically, set the ISO and were ready to go. I knew that we would get the shots we needed and that they would look great.”
To view the video, please go to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bMm9xXrvELc
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