As usual, I’m late putting this on my web site.  This is the 2012 Encounters trailer.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NMzGYXZUtHg[/youtube]

The visual look had already been created by Smith and Milton, who handled the design of all the other publicity material.  So I was just required to follow their lead.  They had opted to push the Cineman design in a different direction by using a real figure for the body with an overlaid screen head.  This in turn was placed in a real street environment.  The environment they had used for their first test piece was a brightly lit Hong Kong street.  Obviously, we needed to show Bristol instead.  Unfortunately, Bristol doesn’t have many glitzy, technology filled locations, being that it is filled with older looking, picturesque architecture.

So, Jane Davies and myself scoured the streets at night looking for exciting locals.  Jane was the photographer and in this modern age has rediscovered the delights of film.  So we would stop on various street and get excited when some traffic flowed past that would give us the lovely long exposure effects that we needed.  Unfortunately, as this was the middle of summer, the days didn’t actually get dark until nine or ten in the evening.  Sometimes we would be out until midnight.  Also, at that time of night there is in fact very little traffic.  So we would become rather over excited when we saw a bus coming.

The films were then sent off for processing and we awaited the results with anticipation.  What eventually showed up was some lovely atmospheric photos.  Film seems to effortlessly achieve things that you would spend hours trying to perfect in a digital format.

Once we had our backgrounds it was then on to photographing the bodies.  This involved friends and studio staff standing in awkward poses trying to move were slowly as we took sequential photos of them.

Music was supplied by a trio of musicians called Three Cane Whale.  They play their music live so their are three instruments and no additional mixing.

With all the material in place it was just up to me to edit and composite the trailer together.  Simple.