PROJECT: OMG HALLOWEEN VIDEO
OMG'S "THE KREEN"
While I'm not a big fan of 80's slasher films, the rest of my team at Omnicom was and I saw this as an opportunity for some fun. To celebrate Halloween, we produced a promo to honor this classic genre and the infamous jump scare and dolly zoom techniques while trying to maintain a PG viewership. Concept: To keep the promo PG, I referenced numerous children's books and found a handful of rhythms. We figured this would also be the easiest way to build a story in a short amount of time quickly. Additionally, the montage of quick cuts tells the story of a girl in the woods running from the Kreen. Why else would a laptop be in the woods?! This montage helped set up the dolly zoom suspense too. The centerpiece was a laptop because we realized everyone had one common connection - working off their OMG laptops. Initially, Kreen's costume wasn't working on set, so we pivoted to 3D and concentrated heavily on timing and audio. Due to time and budget, we also simplified the video into one dolly zoom. Techniques: In addition to the jump scare technique, we wanted to play with the dolly zoom. Location: We visited Motion Hub, a workspace I created in Upstate, NY, and found a perfect 80's style backdrop. We set up our equipment, turned on the fog machine, and worked throughout the night.
FULL SPOT :30
Explorations
A dolly zoom (also known as a Hitchcock shot, Vertigo shot, Jaws effect or Zolly shot) is an in-camera effect that appears to undermine normal visual perception. The effect is achieved by zooming a zoom lens to adjust the angle of view (often referred to as field of view, or FOV) while the camera dollies (moves) toward or away from the subject in such a way as to keep the subject the same size in the frame throughout. In its classic form, the camera angle is pulled away from a subject while the lens zooms in, or vice versa. Thus, during the zoom, there is a continuous perspective distortion, the most directly noticeable feature being that the background appears to change size relative to the subject. The visual appearance for the viewer is that either the background suddenly grows in size and detail and overwhelms the foreground, or the foreground becomes immense and dominates its previous setting, depending on which way the dolly zoom is executed. As the human visual system uses both size and perspective cues to judge the relative sizes of objects, seeing a perspective change without a size change is a highly unsettling effect, often with strong emotional impact.
Explorations
We designed our typography based on a number of 80's horror film classics.
Explorations
A jump scare is a technique often used in horror films and video games, intended to scare the audience by surprising them with an abrupt change in image or event, usually co-occurring with a loud, jarring sound. The jump scare has been described as "one of the most basic building blocks of horror movies". Jump scares can startle the viewer by appearing at a point in the film where the soundtrack is quiet and the viewer is not expecting anything alarming to happen, or can be the sudden payoff to a long period of suspense. Some critics have described jump scares as a lazy way to frighten viewers, and believe that the horror genre has undergone a decline in recent years following an over-reliance on the trope, establishing it as a cliché of modern horror films.
