After being told to make an advertisement, what better than to make one of Lays. It's potato chips. Everyone loves potato chips. Or, almost everyone. But we don't talk about that.
In any case I gave a few of my friends a call and asked if they were interested to take a part in acting. Though some were busy, and others were unable to because they were either unwell or they couldn't make it or COVID caused their areas to be under lockdown.
8 phone calls and I was able to get two people on, though it was fine since there were only going to be 2 people in the ad anyways. It's only 30 seconds and it's my first time using After Effects. No need to go overkill with it.
However 3 days before the planned filming, one of my actors called in sick to Flu. He still persisted on trying to make it though his parents didn't allow him. And I'm glad they didn't. I wouldn't want him to be in any worse condition than he currently was. There was no obligation to actually take part in the ad. I wished him to get well soon and that it wasn't anything to worry about.
I was unable to source anyone else and as time went on, the day of filming arrived and eventually I got my brother to fill in.
He did the job well. But recruiting Najam as the second actor was probably the reason the whole thing went so smoothly. The guy's a natural. Like he was born for the job. There was no strict script and he came up with hilarious behind the scenes footage and jokes. Kept us all in the mood even during the cold outside.
We got to work, did the filming, had some lunch, called it a day. I spent the next 2 hours editing together the footage we collected and considering that this was my first ever After Effects project, I'd say I did pretty well. I didn't have Media Encoder installed so to not let AE make humungous file sizes because it renders in lossless, you can normally just import the .aep file to Premiere and use the standard encoders like H.264. However today of all days that was being buggy so I resorted to the lossless render which turned out to be 3 gigabytes for only 7 seconds of footage. Worked with it and exported it, made some final touches, and boom we have an ad. Though if I might do things like this in the future I might need a bigger hard drive.
Najam saved me heaps of time because (Although I didn't actually inform him to do this) he did the whole "pulling a bag of chips out of the phone" rather quickly. Hence it was much less work for me because it meant less frames to do rotoscoping for in the edit. Though it still had to be done frame by frame.
Anyways, let's see how much more we can do with After Effects. Maybe next time I'll even include a Blender segment for one of those cinematic shots of like the chips coming out of the bag and it's all slow motion and....well you get the idea.
Infinite possibilities!