It’s a familiar challenge in the world of a TV promo producer. Network A calls on you eager to promote series X, which hasn’t begun shooting yet. With little-to-no assets, they want a campaign in two weeks.
Ten years ago, the obvious solution would have incorporated a blitz of cleverly packaged motion design. Not only were we targeting a world still fixated on the wizardry of CG, but we could also assign an entire team of designers for less than the costs associated with expensive telecine sessions, film labs and traveling.
We lived and worked during a time that favored a more graphics rich approach to promotion all the way around, whether fueled by consumer interest, programming demands or available technology. Design was all the rage, and let’s face it: the more creative your CG, the happier the client, whether you had assets or not.
For today’s TV promo producers facing the same creative challenge, options are a whole lot different. I’m not saying “video’s killed the design” star yet, but certainly gone are the days when motion graphics ruled promo. As technology’s cyclical ebb and flow shines light on another area of opportunity, promo producers are taking notice. We’re returning to the simplicity of storytelling through “emotionography.”
Hardly a new concept, emotionography leverages the power of live-action storytelling through cinematic, short-form narratives designed to generate emotion, thereby eliciting viewer interest. With a refinement not unlike the golden era of Hollywood, it means applying a movie trailer grandeur that captures the soul of a project in often 30 seconds or less. And it doesn’t rely on assets to hook viewers into a new series…emotionography can be metaphorical.
This is well illustrated in the initial campaign teasing Bravo’s Shahs of Sunset, where larger-than-life visuals combine a cinematic approach, emotion and narrative to instantly connect viewers to the series’ affluent Persian cast without using a single scene from the show. Viewers were sold on the sizzle without the steak, and one metaphorical promo is all it took to whet an appetite.
Thanks to a technological rise in digital cinema, techniques that were once prohibitive and time intensive are now part of the common language among network executives. Using a $15K Canon C300, promo producers can achieve a level of live-action motion picture-style storytelling previously only feasible with a $100K Arri 35MM camera. Instead of film processing and telecine sessions, we shoot and go quickly into post, where we’re able to do our own color correcting, grading and finishing. The possibilities of conceptual thinking abound, and emotionography becomes a design tool that enhances, if not surpasses, the production caliber of the projects we promote.
When you add to this a television landscape rife with big personalities, you have content practically demanding the emotional approach. Look at programs like NBC’s The Biggest Loser or Discovery’s Deadliest Catch, where unique character relationships and personal struggle take center stage. The narrative, live-action promos for these series dive headfirst into emotionography, pulling viewers right in with them by reconnecting us with humanity in a way motion design could never do it. In these cases, the promos are less about what the show is doing, and more about how and why the characters are doing it.
It’s no different with branding TV channels, where the essence or “face” of a network can hold significant power in forming those lasting viewer associations. We produced the launch campaign for Discovery’s Velocity Network with this in mind, letting powerful digital cinema take viewers into the turbo-charged soul of racing with the hosts of the show driving various vehicles. And about those assets? Through emotionography, networks actually gain assets–BTS footage, outtakes, and elements that they can redeploy in other ways. The human face, after all, is infinitely more unique than Helvetica.
(Joel Pilger is president, founder and a DP for Denver-based Impossible, a hybrid creative-boutique/production company.)
