Madewell was introduced to Eko (then Interlude), an interactive video story telling service. Eko developed a tool that allows viewers to make choices in real-time to change the course of the video they’re watching. The end result is a seamless viewing experience with no “buffering” between scenes. It’s pretty cool. The challenge was to map out every possible scenario, as to guarantee a cohesive story no matter which direction the viewer went.
We wanted to tell the story of girl getting ready for a holiday party. As you can see in the flowchart below, the 90sec experience needed to be edited, in full, 32 times. All 63 individual clips with perfectly synced audio were then delivered to Eko to be bundled into their web player. The embedded video above is a flattened version.
Go to https://company.eko.com to get the full experience.
Behind the scenes video on Madewell's YouTube Channel.
Madewell planned a video shoot to showcase the new summer collection. The concept was loosely based on a Rube Goldberg series of events, where one action triggered the next. There were two major issues. The first came from a planned transition of the model bursting out from behind a rolling rack of dresses that she had just pulled into frame.
The rolling rack needed to land in the middle, and the model had an outfit change. Between takes, the spacing of the dresses and camera position changed quite a bit. I took a still shot of the dresses from before she popped out and composited that into the moving shot of the rack. The end result is a visual where the last frame of the moving rolling rack blends nicely with the first frame of the popping out shot. A jump cut was not an option.
The entire end sequence needed a lot of doctoring. The idea was to have the yellow bag land on a pedestal after sliding down a zip line. After that, the camera needed to dolly back and truck sideways to reveal the model.
For starters, the bag never hit its mark. In addition, there was no solution for releasing the handles from the carabiner. Not only was the dolly not smooth, the focal length of the lens changed. Lastly, the model wasn’t on set for the truck shot. The only thing to do was reconstruct the entire sequence from scratch. I needed to work fast on this one, so I exported a few stills and went to work with the puppet tool in After Effects. If I had it to do over again, I might try projecting everything except the yellow bag on some primitives in 3D. Then I would do a soft body simulation of just the yellow bag.
