Hurrah!  I finished the first cut of the Live Life Then Give Life ad last night and I’m really pleased with it.

Ironically, after spending a couple of weeks picking and piecing things together (on and off), the actual picture edit didn’t take me that long, once I’d got to grips with the tools.  What actually took the time was the 15 seconds of titles at the end, which required 3 separate, fully-rendered images created in a separate program and imported into the editing software.

You always know you’re in trouble with a piece of software when you open it’s electronic user manual (it’s another one of those which doesn’t come with a hard-copy version as it would, presumably, take up a whole book shelf) and it says,

“Because LiveType is a creative tool, documentation can only go so far in describing its
potential…In the end, you are limited only by our own creative vision, and the way to push the limits of LiveType is to jump in and start creating”

Or, to paraphrase in more precise language: we’ll tell you what the buttons do, but then you’re on your own.

And in case no one reading this blog has noted it in the past – I’m not very good at being on my own…

Still, soldier on I did and churn out something fairly brilliantly acceptable I did, too, if I do say so myself.

Seriously, I’m actually really happy with this as a first cut and I’m keen to show it to the rest of the gang at Live Life Then Give Life to see what they make of it.  Once I’ve got their feedback, I’ll have to pull my socks up and launch myself into another cut of it, no doubt killing some of my creative babies on the way, but such is the world of film – it doesn’t pay to be precious.

I’ve taken a bit of a leap in second-guessing people’s level of understanding and how quickly they’ll marry the intentions and the images, so it’ll be interesting to see whether or not it works of if I, having been so close to the material for so long, have made some major assumptions which stretch things too far.

We’ll wait and see and I’ll report back, no doubt.  Watch this space.