Thursday, January 29, 2009

VaZing... a recent web commercial project



To see all my illustration portfolio samples, visit stevensalerno.com

Just before the Christmas holidaze in 2008, I was contacted by Mark Kushinsky, the CEO of Insight Direct and was asked to be on board with a web commercial project featuring their new web service product named VaZing. He had seen some illustration samples of mine on the web and felt my imaging style was a good match. 

The web commercial was to be produced by Voicewalk (creators of web-based Flash demos... the team I worked with was Saul Ives, Darren Ursino and Martin Guitar). Once the contract with Insight Direct was confirmed, I jumped right in because it was a quick deadline. 

Insight Direct already had the basic voiceover script for me to interpret and develop the rough storyboard from. A first draft full story board (b&w) was presented to Voicewalk for their comments and suggestions to help edit down the visuals to better match the timing of the voiceover narrative. A second, more refined full story board (color) was then submitted for comments and approval by Voicewalk and the client. Once approval was given, next I did a couple of the final vector Adobe Illustrator images and sent them to Voicewalk, so they could review the images and determine if there were going to be any problems implementing them into Flash. (I guess too many anchor points within a vector image is an issue, so I had to keep the images simple. I used brush lines, fills and some basic gradations... but no filter effects, etc...)
Then it was just a matter of doing and submitting all the final vector images to Voicewalk for them to do their thing and implement the images into the “limited-animation” VaZing web commercial. My animated portion is the first 60 seconds of the 4 minute product demo. 

Posted here are a few of the first round story board sketches in black & white, and the corresponding final vector Adobe Illustrator color images (cropped a little bit). 

watch animation portion of client's web commercial for VaZing 

Click on the above link to view just the animation portion of the VaZing demo I worked on. If that does not work go to http://www.vazing.com and on their homepage click the “watch demo” button. After the 60 second animation portion is finished, just bail out from the site. 

Once the web commercial was completed, Mark Kushinsky really liked the “office manager” character I created, so he then wanted me to also illustrate three simple web ads on the VaZing web site featuring this same office manager character. 

It was a fast and fun project... and it looks like there is a possibility I may be doing a second web commercial project for another division of Insight Direct named MaidPro.

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