Addy Awards Intro
01 Challenge
How can you show all entries, in all media, in a creative competition, set a tone, and build excitement, in a short time on a small budget, without expensive video technology?
With over 60,000 entries each year, the Addy Awards is the world’s largest advertising competition. It honors creative excellence in advertising and the advertising arts. The American Advertising Federation conducts the awards through its 200 member advertising clubs, of which the Rochester Advertising Federation is one. The RAF Addy Awards have become a much-anticipated tradition in the local creative community.
The RAF wanted a high-energy Show Opener for the 2008 black-tie gala awards night, to focus and fuel the anticipation and excitement, and set a tone for the whole evening. It had to give a fast-paced preview of all the submitted work, and support the Oscar-like theme of red carpet celebrity and flamboyance. Kate Sonnick, RAF President, described the challenge as, “to celebrate the work, celebrate the creative community, and bring the Addys back to their heyday.”
02 Solution
“Previous Addy Show Openers,” Kate said, “took a lot of time and energy—they were like feature films!”
Dumbwaiter Design proposed two basic design concepts: having models “hold” the creative work and to use scribbled masks, for a gritty realism quite different than the usual hard-edged vectors of computer animation.
We started, appropriately, with the ending, by animating the Addy and RAF logos, using a scribbled mask. We projected the logos onto a white board, and shot stop motion (frame-by-frame) animation with a Canon 30D digital camera, as we drew in the logo by hand.
To allow the models—coworkers and friends—to “hold” the creative work, we had them hold a large white card, on to which we would later matte images of the work. Lacking access to a high-definition video camera and green screen technology, we settled for stop motion. We shot the models in various poses, holding blank cards, against a dingy beige wall and a nasty blue carpet, not out of choice, but practicality!
Now, we used Adobe Photoshop's animation palette to crop and turn many hundreds of high resolution photos into stylized animated sequences, in a relatively short time.
We cohesively compiled the sequences in Adobe After Effects. We then added numerous post effects, including frame by frame scribbles. The last step was to overlay the submitted artwork onto the white board images. Keeping the style gritty and hand-made, we overlapped the edges, and even dropped artwork images into other areas of the animation.
03 Result
“The Addy Awards Show Opener was a fun, energetic, feel-good piece,” Kate Sonnick enthused, “because you saw your work and felt excited.” “The results exceed expectations,” she added, “because we didn’t realize what was possible in Flash—it enabled a much shorter timeline, with really efficient production, yet the end products still knocked the audience’s socks off!”
Kate summed it up, “I can’t even tell you how positive the feedback was—the best show ever!”