New Challenges, New Horizons

What better way to start a business with a mango on its logo, than by adding an edgy mango inspired product reveal to its portfolio. Manila Mango is a New England IPA crafted by a local neighborhood brewery, Salty Turtle Beer Company. The tropical notes speak directly to my Puerto Rican soul and the round mouthfeel just makes it an adventure with every sip. I have worked with Salty Turtle in the past, at the time of this writing, they had no idea I was taking this product on the exploration in creating a high-end commercial reveal. This pandemic has put me in a position where I’ve had to think differently. My primary source of income, a wedding film company (Absum Pykno, LLC ), started losing bookings. Since March I have been toying with commercial work as a means to diversify and broaden my skillsets.

The result of challenging yourself is that more often than not you end up surprising yourself, fortunately for me in this odd time I have found a workflow that exponentially increases my creative spurts.

My prior attempts to create videos like this, which I’ll describe later in more detail, were spontaneous in comparison. I thought to myself, that if I had taken just a little more time to plan these projects they would have undoubtedly turned out like this well-executed video. I moved forward with thoroughly planning, storyboarding, shooting, and post-production of this product reveal for Salty Turtle’s Manila Mango back in November and you can see the results below.

Behind the scenes:

The Idea
I had a particular shot in mind of the mangoes around a can as the camera pushed in, creating a parallax effect. This presented a challenge, building a set and recording repeated motion with elements in and out of the scene. This setup would later serve as the different layers I needed. I would mask out the supports for the individual elements in the scene, once I brought everything into my non-linear editor (NLE), e.g. Premiere, Final Cut.

The Story Board
Storyboards provide a lot of insight into how the story is shaped and helps to uncover technical hurdles as you prepare. Storyboards are not an interesting subject to me; however the dullest process in your pipeline is sometimes is the most crucial for success. Despite drawing skills, simple stick people and generic shapes are all that is needed to step back and put the project into perspective. Picking up doodling is a non-committal way of leveling up your illustrations. Better yet, learning some basics will make this process easier for you and more effective for teams.

The Edit
Regardless of how much effort you put into planning out your perfect idea, the editing process is a time where you take your director’s hat off and put the audience hat on. Director’s pride can negatively impact superior work. If you do not have access to a team and struggle with clinging to specific ideas, a second set of eyes will only bring positive impacts to your work. For this project, I used Premiere and After Effects.

Final Details
Applying some graphics that reinforce branding and product messaging was the only thing missing at this point of the project. Motion graphics are a double edge sword, it can be your best ally when used with restraint but, your worst enemy as they can clutter things if over used. One of the exiting things about Adobe Premiere is that it can take advantage of dynamic link. What this means for creators is that if you create an After Effects project file in Premier, it will remain connected and update automatically. This makes the process of working with motion graphics vastly easier when compared to something like DaVinci Resolve.

My journey has taken me to different places in my creative career, sometimes by choice and other times by necessity. Since the beginning of 2020 things have drastically changed for all of us and this undoubtedly put more strain on creatives. I plan to continue sharing my process so that it may inspire others to take that first step. If you have any questions about this or other projects don’t hesitate to ask; we’ll get back to you as soon as we can.

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