Online video advertising is frequently repurposed from TV spots, but the original version of the video that plays at www.hbovoyeur.com originally appeared as a projection on the side of a building on the Lower East Side of New York. In fact, the piece of branded advertising is the side of a building — it shows occupants of a Manhattan apartment building moving about, allowing viewers to be voyeurs into their private lives.
“HBO was looking for a branding campaign that wouldn’t be related to programming, they were interested in doing something that speaks to the brand,” said Brian DiLorenzo, director of content and executive producer at BBDO/New York. “They’re known for story telling and innovative execution and this was a different way to tell a story. We had the opportunity to do it in a non-traditional way and use different media platforms.”
The four and a half minute video features 30 actors in 12 spaces that look like their apartments. “It looks like a crafted doll house,” DiLorenzo said. “You see them moving and each apartment has a connectedness, so the individual stories have an arc to them.”
The site is designed to give viewers “tools to explore it more richly,” DiLorenzo said, including a choice of music that plays with the video. Stephanie Diaz-Matos, music supervisor for Search Party/New York, said the company created six pieces of music for the main apartment complex and found a variety of composers who wrote dance music, indie rock, electronic music and more. “It was a musical strategy to maximize the interactivity of the web,” she said. “It shows how the music affects the picture while you’re watching it.”
Producing the video was an elaborate process because there were so many stories involved in adjoining apartments that had to be told simultaneously in a short time span. “The action was happening between the floors and the timing had to be right,” said Jake Scott, director at RSA USA/bicoastal. “There was a time map everyone was working with and it became a matter of the assistant director calling out the timing of the beats as he watched the shoots. It was more like conducting an orchestra.”
In one of the stories, an elderly woman collapses and dies in her apartment and her ghost ascends to the upper floor where a psychopathic mass murderer has a man tied to a chair. “Everything happens simultaneously, there are some big and small events,” Scott said. “We had to find ways to make them coincide. As simple as some of it seems, like walking up the stairs, you have to know how it interacts with the rest of the building. The added problem was how to balance the action so you’re not drawn to one area of the building. The eye tends to go toward the bigger stories, so we had to balance the performances.”
Post production by Asylum/Los Angeles was a mammoth project that involved stacking the apartment sequences to make them appear as if they were in the same building. “Instead of undertaking the seemingly impossible task of shooting all four floors at the same time, one floor was re-dressed four times, then the shots were stacked on top of one another in post,” said Tim Davies, Asylum’s VFX supervisor. “All of the apartments needed to be stabilized and had the lens distortion removed to keep them square as they were stacked on top of each other.”
There were a number of other effects Asylum utilized to show individual scenes, including the CG animation of a skeleton with its rib cage and skull that fell from the ceiling of the apartment of the woman who killed people and kept their bones under her rug.
If you look carefully at all the scenes you could say “Only in New York.” Or maybe “Only on HBO.” “HBO didn’t want to promote its programming but promote an awareness of HBO and the type of things they do,” DiLorenzo said. The video represents “ground breaking stuff with Flash that does streaming content and music you can change on the fly that hasn’t been done before.”
The voyeuristic aspect may be unique for advertising but it’s computer related, he said. “Computers are voyeuristic by nature. People Google each other to find information on things that people want to hide, so putting the voyeur concept online seems a pretty natural fit.”
HBO Voyeur was projected onto the wall of a building on Ludlow and Broome Streets in New York on June 28 and the site went live the same day.
Writers of “Conclave,” “Say Nothing” Win Scripter Awards
The authors and screenwriters behind the film โConclaveโ and the series โSay Nothingโ won the 37th-annual USC Libraries Scripter Awards during a black-tie ceremony at USCโs Town and Gown ballroom on Saturday evening (2/22).
The Scripter Awards recognize the yearโs most accomplished adaptations of the written word for the screen, including both feature-length films and episodic series.
Novelist Robert Harris and screenwriter Peter Straughan took home the award for โConclave.โ
In accepting the award, Straughan said, โAdaptation is a really strange process, youโre very much the servant of two masters. In a way itโs an act of betrayal of one master for the other.โ He joked that โYou start off with a book that you love, you read it again and again, and then you end up throwing it over your shoulder,โ crediting author Robert Harris for being โso kind, so generous, so open throughout.โ
In the episodic series category, Joshua Zetumer and Patrick Radden Keefe won for the episode โThe People in the Dirtโ from the limited series โSay Nothing,โ which Zetumer adapted from Keefeโs nonfiction book about the Troubles in Ireland.
Zetumer referenced this yearโs extraordinary group of Scripter finalists, saying โprojects like these reminded me of why I wanted to become a writer when I was sitting in USCโs Leavey Library dreaming of becoming a screenwriter. If you fell in love with movies, or fell in love with TV, chances are you fell in love with something dangerous.โ
Special guest for the evening, actress and producer Jennifer Beals, shared her thoughts on the impact of libraries. โIf ever you are at a loss wondering if there is good in the world,โ she said, โyou have only to go to a... Read More