Firefox Flicks Backstage

I knew for my concept I wanted to use the foot of the Mozilla dinosaur in my ad. I found the SVG file of the Mozilla dinosaur on the Internet and opened the vector graphic in Adobe Illustrator. I needed to cut up the jaw and head for animating on separate layers in Sony’s Vegas.

My favorite part of this project was coming up with the mighty growl of the Mozilla dinosaur. Instead of using a generic dinosaur sound, I decided to make my own so I would have control over minute details. I mixed together an alligator growl, an elephant growl, 2 gorilla roars and breathing, and a Bengal tiger roar. A little subtle mixing and offsetting created the roar you hear in the final ad. I added the rumble and shake to exaggerate the effect.

The rest of the ad is pretty self explanatory. Just screen shots of the browser with a voiceover explaining what is on screen, which I did in my closet. The music was the last element added using Sony’s Acid Pro 5.0 Even though my ad didn’t win the grand prize, it still came in handy for a final project in a compositing class I was taking. The teacher loved it!

-Russell Heimlich

Check out Russell’s video on Google Video.

We’re working with our developers to try to get the Flicks site functioning better. Right now, it seems to be going down under load about twice per day and we’re looking for a way to improve things. If you’re having trouble accessing the Flicks videos, please try back in a few minutes. Thanks.

I just got back home after spending yesterday at the Awards Celebration and today in San Francisco and San Jose being interviewed with Pete Macomber, our Grand Prize winner at Flicks. I’ll get more photos posted soon but wanted to share this photo of the 5 finalists.

The winners in the photo are, from left to right, Pete Macomber, Danny Robashkin, Chris Wedding, Andrew Green, and Jeff Gill.

Just when I thought I’d spent my last laugh on Wheee!, along comes this amusement.

While I may not have won the contest, I am still proud of my “Legend of Firefox” ad I submitted for this contest.

I focused on a simple idea. What if cavemen, from the beginning of time, had been always dreaming of the ultimate web browser? Cavemen would sit around fires all the time and see foxes in the wild - so why not? I set out to show first a prehistoric cavemen drawing the Firefox logo on a cave wall, and to then cut to modern day cavemen using Firefox on their own computers.

Sadly, I could not afford to pay anyone or pay for rentals. The ad was essentially a one man job, with friends and family filling in the roles of the various cavemen. I managed to finagle equipment from both my friends and my school.

The idea was for me to create a very intense visual contrast between the early cavemen and “Modern” cavemen. For this reason I shot the first half in an abandoned building nearby with the DVX-100A, a portable i-Light, and a cookie board my dad waved around to simulate a roaring fire. For the second half I shot on a wonderfully overcast afternoon with the Canon XL-2, an Arri 150, and a Brunell. Both halves contained the stark visual contrast I desired, and the final shots of the modern cavemen came out better (not worse) than I hoped for. As most student film makers such as myself can tell you, not all of your shots come out worse, and not better, than planned!

For the first half of the soundtrack, I modeled the score after the “Conan the Barbarian” soundtrack. I wanted something very primitive, so using my Peter S. Gigastudio library I created a simple score of cellos and a timpani thundering together, alongside the howling wind and crackle of the fire. I wanted a very traditional film soundtrack, but also something very primitive that would effectively fill the space. For the second half I wanted something more modern, so I used a simple drum loop and ’spiced’ it up a little with me making funny noises underneath it. Again, I didn’t want to oversaturate the soundspace, so I kept it simple.

Overall I have to say I had a wonderful time making the ad, and can say I have learned a lot from the experience (this was the first time I used the more serious Arri and Brunell lights). I’m still not happy with the audio for the piece, so I am undeterred by not winning. My next video shall be even better.

I have no shame, so I’ll promote the video since it’s not on the site yet. Watch the ad on YouTube!

Thank you,
Roger Matthews