I worked closely with the Sling Freestream team in developing a CTV ad for their new product Sling Freestream! For this project, I connected with a different branch of Sling through QuickFrame.
In this project, I handled everything from start to finish including video production, storyboarding, designing, video editing, audio editing, hiring voice-over talent, and animation. This project moved very quickly and we put it together in just under 3 weeks. In that process, I took the Sling brand guides and designed out boards to fit their team's style. The Sling brand guidelines were very detailed and provided me with a lot of guidance for how things should look.
I went through and selected highlight footage for each featured channel. These clips ultimately needed to be approved by the channels and the Sling team reached out to their teams once the clips were selected. Working in the industry on similar projects I knew that there were going to be clips that needed to be changed and updated. Since it was such a quick timeline I set up a file structure and system so that I could quickly swap out clips within After Effects.
Additionally, while this was all happening in the first week I began to look for music and voice-over talent. I provided the Sling Freestream team with multiple options for both based on their requirements and we ended up working with Michael Ray for voice-over.
This was an extremely jam packed first week, but once we got everything in order we moved more into the video editing and animation sections.
Once the visuals were set I began animating and trimming the clips to fit into the piece. My first plan of action was to lock down the cut and general timing. I block out the timing for each of the full screen clip sections and tiles sections. Once that was set I moved into animating out my designs and incorporating the footage/icons into the tiles.
For the most part this went smoothly. We started hearing back about approval for clips and there were a few here in there that needed to be adjusted. By the end of this week the video was mostly locked.
Into the third week I focused on audio through getting the final voice-over from Michael, adding in sound effects, and mastering the full mix. I previously have worked in video and audio editing, but this was the first time I was handling it professionally in a while, so there was a lot I needed to refresh myself on. Mostly I needed to focus on dB levels and balancing out different channels.
Additionally, Sling requested the video be made in different formats and at different lengths for different platforms. I finished up the week by developing 30s versions and 15s versions in 16x9, 1x1, and 9x16 formats that were built from the original 30s 16x9.
