When Cape-Verdian singer Gil Semedo decided to organise a special concert to celebrate his 18 years as a singer/songwriter, he asked The Motion Factory to create a teaser commercial.

 A teaser is a special type of commercial that gives you a taste of what's to come, without giving away any concrete information. In this case, the teaser was meant to leave you with a feeling that something big, something special is going to happen. 

The commercial was to be created using existing material only. No material was filmed for it. So we started sifting through Gil's collection of videos, from his first TV performance, to images from live shows, video clips and documentaries.

We had to put the images in such an order that we would touch important aspects of the artists career and at the same time build up tension as the video progressed. The music also plays an important part in building up the tension. In this case, we chose a stong, almost operatic background track for the commecial and not music from Gil himself.

The look

All the images we used for the commercial had a different look. Some bits were filmed recently using modern equipment. Some video clips were even shot on film, giving a very high quality image. Other material was shot 18 years ago and some material was shot on amateur cameras or transferred from VHS tapes.

Every shot was treated with the "look". On the left you see the original image, on the right the processed image. 

In a commercial, everything has to look consistent, so we decided on a "look" for the teaser. The look would have to make the images better than before, but also hide the bad picture quality of some of the clips.

Basically, for the look we decided to go with strong, saturated colours, high contrast and a dreamlike glow. All these elements would make the video look very bright and energetic and at the same time, it would hide the imperfections of some of the source material.

Now the teaser was falling into place. However, we still had one more challenge to face. For the teaser, it was important to show both old and new material, to convey that he's still active and succesful today. However, we had almost no video recordings of recent concerts.

Luckily, a couple of months ago we'd made a recording of one of Gil's concerts as a reference for him to evaluate the show. The recording was not meant to ever be used for anything else. It was just a static recording; a camera on a tripod filming the whole stage. Not the type of recording you'd want to use in a commercial. However, we did shoot the concert in HD, which allowed us to zoom in on the video without losing too much image quality. After processing the video, we got a few nice shots from it.

Some of the recent concert footage we shot of a live show and how we treated it for the commercial.

Here's how we processed the recording:

1. The original image. A wide shot of the whole stage with the singer in the middle. The whole image was quite dark and because the stage is large, you can't see the singer very well.
2. We zoomed in on the singer. We could zoom in afterwards without losing much image quality because we shot the original footage in HD. Then we changed the colours towards red to make it look more fiery and dynamic. At the same time, we made the image brighter.
3. There wasn't much light on the artists face in the original image, so we made his face a bit brighter.
4. Finally, we treated the footage with our "look", making it look better, brighter and making it fit in with the rest of the commercial.

The result

Here you can see the final result of the teaser commercial:

For more information about Gil Semedo, check out his website: www.gilsemedo.com.