Marketing concepts

Storyboards

Action & Title safe areas

Visual design

Animated elements

Production

There are many elements in an effective commercial. These require careful combination to be successful. A number of areas need to be considered during the development process, they include:

These will also give you a suggested framework for creating the commercial.

Marketing concepts

The primary purpose for creating a commercial is to sell an item, a service or an idea. To be successful the interest of your viewer must be gained within the first 3 seconds. Therefore first impressions are extremely important. Think carefully about your target market. Set up a situation in which your intended audience will feel comfortable and will, as a result, identify with what you are trying to sell.

Developing marketing strategies and concepts is fundamental to the success of communicating a strong identity and creating an impact. Think about using a catch phrase in your marketing concept; try to be clever about the idea you are trying to sell. Brainstorming will help you to develop and refine a theme or slogan that you wish to convey.

Express your marketing concept clearly so that it is easily absorbed and becomes memorable. Simple ideas are often the best. Having a strong single focus is more effective than lots of small ideas and special effects.

Storyboards

Storyboards will act as a guide when you are planning a key vision or action. They will underpin the strength of your concept and sum up your entire selling message. Storyboards are usually rough hand drawn sketches and do not have to be finished masterpieces. They are useful as a starting point when developing ideas and providing your basis upon which to work.

They may include a script, descriptive text, and the length of each frame with a visual image of the action intended. When developing storyboards it is important to think about how you frame each image.

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Action & Title safe areas

Once the storyboards are completed it is important to consider action safe and title safe areas. This is important when working on the visual design and the placement of key graphical elements. Some of your graphics may be cut off or invisible to viewers depending on the final medium your commercial will be viewed in. The action safe area of a screen is approximately a 15% border around all four sides of your file's dimensions. The title safe area is approximately a 30% inward area from all four sides of the outer edge of you file's dimensions.

Visual design

Effective visual design or style of your commercial is crucial to communicating a mood and tone effectively. You can use various design styles such as vector animation, 3d animation or video footage to develop an individual style.

Think about the style of graphics you wish to use. Think about your colour pallet and use colour to highlight features or to set a mood and tone. Where does your commercial take place, think about the setting?

Finished storyboards can help you to visualise the overall look and feel of your commercial. By using your initial storyboards as a foundation you will be able to refine and develop some of your original ideas. This will result in a clearer more resolved solution when combined with your visual design concepts.

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Animated elements

Images and words should be combined effectively to present a creative concept that reveals a story or narrative. Use methods of story telling to entertain and make a point. The timing of you commercial and the elements you wish to highlight are critical for creating an impact or an emotional reaction. Remember commercials can be entertaining, amusing, terrifying and absorbing.

Make sure you draw your audience into the story you are telling. How? Animated graphics will add movement to a commercial to make it more interesting and possibly mesmerizing. Audio and visual messages must work together to develop and highlight a point. The types of transitions you create between each frame of your commercial can become a visual effect that enhances its style.

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How you choose to animate your commercial may involve the use of rotoscoping. Rotoscoping involves using captured video footage as a template for animation and tracing over individual frames to create realistic animation. The example below uses a still image sequence of a walk cycle from a well know photographer Eduard Muybridge. He was the first photographer to experiment with time-based photography. His work is a great resource for animators who wish to use the technique of rotoscoping.

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Make sure you show a close up of your product and the brand at the end of your commercial, usually this will be for at least 2.5 seconds. There is a balance that needs to be struck between clearly defining a brand and making a strong creative impression.

Production

Before you go into production make sure you are aware of the length your commercial, the dimensions of your file and any design limitations or consideration set out in your brief. By using your storyboards as a guide in conjunction with a resolved visual design production time should be relatively short in comparison to the time it took to develop animated elements, transitions, marketing concepts, narratives and branding strategies.