How To Succeed in Business Without Really Dying
The First Pixel Drop 48 Hour Film
This was the first of many 48 Hour Film Projects I participated in. It was also how I met my wife. Our submission, How To Succeed In Business Without Really Dying, made it into the 2012 Best-Of Richmond Showing and won the award for “Best Use of Graphics.” How were graphics used, you ask?
Spoilers Ahead!
This film used graphics, literally
Talk about graphic! When Andrew Melzer needed to give his antagonist a way to escape, I thought of something just ridiculous enough to work. What if comic-book POW signs became real? Those things have pointy edges…
The trickiest bit was just tracking it into the shot. It wasn’t a 3D track, just some clever rotation and scaling on 2.5D After Effects layers. I did have to do some rotoscoping to put the POW sign in the hands of the actor, and in the back of our poor victim.
A little about the logo
Pixel Drop was a name I came up with, before we needed it at the last second in order to turn in our submission form and couldn’t think of a better name. Here is an early design along with the final version that ended up in the films.
