Dan Brown "ORIGIN" Voting Video

For the new book by the "Da Vinci Code" author Dan Brown, a cover voting and simultaneous raffle was to be held from May to June 2017. The participant in this competition was able to choose one of six book covers and then receive a personal video. In the video, Dan Brown signed his new book "Origin". The video should be personalized in several places and the signed book should be provided with the selected book cover of the participant.

Our task was to explain "BeeLiked" and its video production how the process of creating a dynamic video works. This included explaining what you have to pay attention to when making such a video and how you have to prepare the dynamic parts so that they can later become personalized scenes in the video. There was also a detailed vote on the raster, the tracking points and the corresponding book covers.

In the final video there were four scenes which were personalized or individualized. First, an invitation card. This card showed the name and surname of the participant and also the personal date and time when he was invited. The highlight of this scene is the user's personal salutation. The whole introductory scene was spoken by a voice and so the personalized name is just a part of the text and seems to be real in this context. This was realized with the speech synthesis "Polly" by Amazon. Later, the author greeted his guest as he signed the participant's book. The book cover and spine were the most complicated parts in the video and more complex to implement than the rest. Since each participant chose a different book cover, the spine was tracked to later put the selected cover over it. For this, a mask for closing the book and Mr. Brown's hand had to be made. Furthermore, the book was signed by Dan Brown for the participant and their name was also tracked in the video.

In this project we used grid mapping for the cover and the personalizations in the book to capture and transfer distortions in the cover and on the book page. Another challenge was the shift of focus in the scene with the invitation card. The film crew had let the sharpness wander over the map during shooting and we had to recreate this effect in the individualization and personalization. We solved it at the end with two basic pictures of which one picture was sharp and the other blurred over two masks. The audio customization was realized by "BeeLiked" directly via Amazon itself and sent the link to the audio file at Amazon to the backend of ImpossibleFX during rendering. To customize the film and render the video, DDD used Adobe AfterEffects and Mocha for a wide variety of preliminary work, and later Impossible's ImpossibleFX web-based technology solution.
In the campaign period of about one and a half months, around 60,000 videos were rendered.