NEW YORK - Reality television meets the Web in a new anti-smoking campaign for the American Legacy Foundation via Austin agency GSD&M. Mad.house (www.madhousenyc.com) editors Craig Warnick and Ben Whitten cut 28 two-minute clips in as many days for the project.
Viewers can log on to BobQuits.com to watch an average New Yorker's real-life struggle to quit smoking.
Warnick and Whitten, assisted by Kathy Horne and Amy O'Neill, were hired to cut seven clips each week from daily DV footage of Bob. Beginning December 26th, the editors worked on a nearly non-stop schedule to craft the daily content in time. "Mad.house seriously went above and beyond the call of duty to pull this difficult project off," says agency producer Dan Brown. Other Mad.house credits include executive producer Kevin Gottlieb and producer David Schulenburg.
Editing was done on an Avid Media Composer 9000, title work was in Adobe After Effects, and there was minimal mixing on only a few of the spots using Digidesign Pro Tools.
According to Shulenburg, "The only difference between cutting these for the Web and cutting your usual commercial was that we were not restricted to a specific time limit for each of the spots. We were told that they should be somewhere between 30 seconds to two minutes in length, so things were really left open for us in terms of what we could get out of the footage for that particular day. We were given the freedom to only show a quick snapshot of his day, or we could show a more complex sequence of events, whichever we and the agency creatives felt would be most impactful." Mad.house also edited the intro down to a :30, which began airing in the New York area. It was finished in Discreet Flame.