Wednesday, November 17, 2004

HP Comdex

Wow, to begin all I can say is wow. After effects is quite the awesome yet highly complex program. However, I find it very fascinating that I am now able to appreciate and see how those movie trailers, commercials, and such are created. Up until last week, when I first began learning after effects, I was simply lost at how any company could possibly create such compositions and I never, seriously never thought I would one day be learning how to do it myself. But, here I am blogging about previously generated after effects movies and soon creating my own.

The site I decided to blog on this week is Verbmedia, right away I was very impressed by their site design. It was very unique and extremely interactive. They did a very good job at doing something different in a world where it is very hard to generate almost anything distinctive these days.

The movie I chose was HP comdex, now, before I even viewed the movie... I was slightly confused to what it might be because I know HP as being associated with printers and at first I wasn't sure what comdex meant. The movie was very short so I had to view it a few times to grasp what is was showing me. I believe this is an add or a type of add for something having to do with sound.

The movie begins with people in a club dancing and the camera slowly moving around the room. the music is fast paced to start off with so the people dancing go along with the music quite well. The camera then fixes on a person, in the middle of the dance floor listening to headphones, he swings his arm like he is striking a guitar string right as the music plays the sound of a guitar string being hit and this sets the transition to the next scene and completely new, slower paced music.

The next scene, after the camera zooms in on the persons headphones, is a man in a tan room sitting down in a chair closing his eyes and listening to music through a stereo in the room. At this point some dialogue is heard very subtly over the music, it speaks of designing requiring brilliant engineering for not only the eyes but for the ears as well.

So I would then assume this movie is attempting to appeal to peoples desire for music and style, and that their products sound just as intense as if you were inside of a real club. There is very little type, the only being the HP logo, with two names (possibly designers of the product along with it) that pop out of the person's earphones.

The colors of the movie are very dark in the first scene, basically the colors are what they would most likely be if you were inside of a dance club and the people are wearing the kind of clothes you might wear for a night in the club or for club dancing. When the second scene hits, the color pallet is very limited, displaying a soft and calm look; as does the clothes the man is wearing.

So in conclusion, based on the colors, the look, feel and pace of this movie I would guess that HP is attempting to portray that their products can be both intense and soft to fit ones needs and at the same time are very stylish and appealing to our senses. The movie, I see as a type of advertisement, is very effective to me. Perhaps because I am of a younger crowd and do enjoy going out to dance while also enjoy relaxing, this movie would be more effective towards me. Well whatever the case is, if I didn't already have a large stylish stereo from the sharper image (a futuristic type of store) I would very much the one I see here in the movie.