As the third video essay in the series of StandardX Originals, I knew this next video would be releasing around the holidays so the goal was to make a Christmas video. I decided to have fun with this and not take it too seriously.

There was still research to be done, but the basis of the research document this time was to get a list of holiday time commercials. After I had a good list of commercials I would watch them and write a comedic script reacting them. The more depth research came after as I still wanted to have some fun facts mixed in for each commercial. The voice over was recorded and and this point I had a working system of separating sequences by topics, or in this video’s case, by commercials. The commercials were inserted and mixed in with fun graphics such as the video border and snow transition. A pretty unique part of this video I knew I wanted from the start was to have a character speaking to the audience in the form of a ball of light. And after some trial and error finding the most effective way to create this ball of light synced with my voice I ended up very pleased with the final result.

The video was rendered, uploaded and shared. Although this video didn’t garner the same attention as the others, it meant a lot to me as the video that really let me flow as I was comfortable with my workflow by now.

Here are some of the graphics used in the video. The title card is a template that I made sure could be easily edited for each commercials title. Everything for it was created in Adobe Premiere alone, and I was very pleased that I was able to create exactly what I planned, with some additional polish that took it above and beyond. The snowflakes, on the other hand, were created exclusively in Adobe After Effects. Using a stock image of a snowflake and particle tools, I fine-tuned what came to be an amazing transition that fits the video perfectly.