S4 HELPS PROMOTE 2008 AST DEW TOUR
And while the commercial takes on a free-form appearance, Helmintoller notes that the creative approach was highly structured. Chad Mallam, a producer/editor at NBC Universal, supplied the S4 team with an already completed temp edit of original footage, which consisting mostly of skateboarding and BMX action.
“We had designed the 2007 Dew Tour promotions, but our client, NBC Universal Emerging Networks, asked us to create the polar opposite of last year’s work,” says Helmintoller, “which had way more of a street grunge style. Instead, we went with a clean, colorful and sharp hyperactive graphic look that made heavy use of 1980s-style animated geometric patterns — stripes, circles, checkerboards of colored lights, cutout effects — along with a lot of different filters and lighting effects.”
The S4 team used Adobe After Effects 7.0 for assembly, design and animation. Kater, along with junior compositor Sarah Keturah, used Wacom’s Cintiq tablet to rotoscope a total of 58 shots from the live action footage.