OUAN503 - UCC Coffee, Promotional Video

The promotional video was the last piece of promotional material that I intended to make for the 'Grand Cafe' rebrand and campaign. I wanted it to essentially tell the story of how coffee is processed in a nicely presented way and also bring to attention the values of the brand. The video was created in After Effects using a combination of images and assets that I created in Photoshop. Photoshop helped a lot when creating the words that would appear on screen from the type face I created. It was also used to compile scenes before making the move using After Effects - so a combination of the two programs was essential to the process here.

The first scene I created was made using the same image as the website, and acts as an introduction to the video. Pretty much all of the text throughout the video moves in some way, whether it's fading onscreen or a slight increase in the scaling of the text to give it a very slight hint of movement. Furthermore, I wanted the whole film to flow quite seamlessly from one scene to the next. To achieve this a lot of pre-comping was involved so that individual scenes could be worked on separate to the main feature and then brought back in with all of the keyframes, effects and settings still intact. The second scene is really in my opinion where the story starts in terms of the coffee's journey, as it demonstrates the places of origin for the coffee that's produced by UCC Coffee under the 'Grand Cafe' brand. I took one of their images of a world map and used Photoshop to create labels for all of the places that their coffee is sourced. Using After Effects I then animated all of the labels to appear at different times. This was a good medium between showing all the labels at once and one at a time that would have been to slow. Using this method and fading different labels in and out, I was able to make quite a successful scene depicting the places of which the coffee is sourced, and its 'origin'. Next I created two rather simple scenes that speak about the company themselves, and the process involved in producing their coffee. The words 'roasting' and 'sustainable' have become unanimous with coffee and also, I feel, to the brand that I've been working on up to this point. I used a free stock image site to collect some imagery of coffee beans and rainforest overgrowth to use as high quality background imagery to overlay the text. Images of the rainforest can be used in conjunction with the idea of coffee quite effectively as that's where a huge amount of coffee beans are sourced - furthermore, it passes on the idea once again regarding sustainable coffee. The final scenes in the film show the logos and certifications that 'Grand Cafe' coffee possesses. I used the same image of coffee that I did for the first scene, as if the film has come full circle. To finish the film making process I found some up beat music using Youtube's free music service that fit the pacing and style of the film quite well. It took a little bit of editing to make it fit as well as it could, and that complete the film making process.

Overall I think the film was quite successful and the music and visuals worked quite well together. It would have been nice to get some actual footage of beans being roasts and harvested for example, but this would have been quite difficult without using someone else's footage. Despite this I think the images and text work quite nicely to make a video with a nice flow and one that isn't too long in length if people want to sit down for half a minute or so and watch it.