Techniques to achieve a Hi-Tech feel...suggestions?

1. SuperSteve
   Member

   
   Hey team,
   
   I'm working on a five-minute video for a manufacturing company and they'd like me to portray the company as cutting-edge and hi-tech. They do research and manufacturing and there are some impressive-looking machines around here, but, well, it's no NASA. I'm looking for some ideas on how to achieve the hi-tech feel, through content, montage, mise-en-scene...anything.
   
   Some ideas I've picked from commercials:
   -Rack-focus shots (curiously, they get used in technological settings quite a bit)
   -Dominant blues and whites (or give the Blue curve a little boost in Editing)
   -Close-up shots of products and processes
   
   
   Any other ideas?

   Posted 5 years ago #

2. compusolver
   Member

   
   Editors Tool Kit 10 from Digital Juice.

   Posted 5 years ago #

3. Tom Scratch
   Member

   
   Hi,
   
   What is the audience? Is this an internal piece for corporate magazine; or a piece for potential customers that the PR Office will be shipping out by the dozens or hundreds?
   
   Do you have a treatment or script or just this generic concept?
   
   Do those who gave you this assignment have any reference points, such as we like what Godard did with “Alphaville” or what Pee Wee did with the opening credit montage of Playhouse (recently resurfaced in Tea/brewski commercials I believe). Are you familiar with “Baraka,” which has a few dramatic images relevant to your concept. This is a feature length film that is an around the world snapshot of the planet, including technology, with only images and music, no narrative; a classic of its kind.
   
   A sound track by Trent Reznor.
   
   Use of tones toward blue/green/white for an ultra cool vibe has been relentless, but still works for me.
   
   Consider low angle tracking shots down long aisles of high tech massiveness, using wide angle.
   
   Can you blow up some outdated high tech stuff (shooting with 14 cameras of course, donÂ’t forget shooting from choppers), and run back in slo-mo and reverse, dissolving to a reconstituted high tech maxi gizmo at the end of shot.
   
   KISS usually works best. One of the more high tech concepts IÂ’ve heard is in a long running Xerox commercial that makes a verbal reference to the digitization of paper records. The only images shown are of employees on a floating pier (that's a great emplyee benefit!!) and the one who makes the point gets thrown overboard, definitely a nerdy high tech type.
   
   REGARDS ... TOM 8)

   Posted 5 years ago #

4. SuperSteve
   Member

   
   Thank you two for the replies. Tom, yours was especially helpful. I'll try to set up some of your shot suggestions and see how they go.
   
   Unfortuately I'm severely limited. I'm a marketing intern with a tiny budget (no helicopters, sadly), one camera, and the office copy Adobe Premiere Pro (on which I can work wonders, however). My supervisor gave me no reference points, but he's open to suggestions, and the video will be around 5 minutes long. Also, our audience will be potential customers and business partners (and yes, the PR guys will be shipping plenty of these videos out). The customers know a bit about what we do and how we work, so it's imperative that all my shots be informationally accurate. No random cuts to awesome-looking but irrelevant shots.
   
   I own and enjoy Baraka, and actually modeled some of my early shots on the factory scenes from it (love the scene with the "chicken factory")--the repetitive machines lend themselves well to slow-, fast-, and stop-motion. But the company wants to downplay the factory aspect and instead focus on the engineering dept., which, while they're very good at what they do, consists of ten people at computers designing things. I've used a few of them as actors and set up shots of the engineers going over schematics, etc. to decent effect.
   
   As for the music, I can probably get the company to sign off on something licensed provided it's around or below a few hundred dollars and absolutely what we need. I've actually been playing around in FLStudio mixing my own music:
   
   homepages.nyu.edu/~smg369/projectST.mp3
   
   So thanks for the help. I've been making my own movies for years now but this is my first professional project, so I appreciate it.

   Posted 5 years ago #

RSS feed for this topic

youtube, myvideo, funnyordie, gametrailers, collegehumor, dailymotion, glumbert, liveleak, redtube, googlevideo, sevenload, metacafe, clipfish, vimeo