Animated AFF Spots Hit Youtube
The folks at the Austin Film Festival have just released three slightly bizarre, but intensely cool new animated television spots. The ads feature actual interviews with longtime festival attendees, animated using an unconventional stop-motion technique that's best described as "creepy / awesome".
The spots were created by local filmmakers Don Swaynos and Cameron Petri, who've made the AFF's animated television spots for the past three years (ever since winning the AFF trailer competition and an Austin Addy Award in 2004 with this spot). Short on conceptual ideas for this year's ads, the duo based their pitch to the AFF entirely on the strength of the animation technique.
"Cameron was really excited about this animation technique, so we did a test and showed it to people at the AFF. They liked it... but we didn't really know what to do with it, so we discussed it with everyone at the festival and decided that we would go around town and interview people that had attended the festival in the past and then animate the interviews in this style," Swaynos told us in a recent email.
"[Working with the AFF] has been a great experience every year. They're always really supportive, and they've let us make some really strange ads. We can actually take risks and be creative and they actually encourage that, which isn't the way local advertising usually works."
And though he wouldn't get into specifics about how the ads were made, Petri assures us that the spots were "made with all the regular Adobe software, mostly AfterEffects and Photoshop."
