Azkaban Video

Since I have a Meural picture frame hanging in the living room that can not only show paintings, but full motion video, I thought this would be a great place to recreate some Azkaban Prison “living photo” wanted posters. I recruited a few friends (and our house-elf cat) to pull this off. A YouTube embed of the resulting video is below. Feel free to skip around, as the full loop is eight minutes long.

This started with a physical prop, the Azkaban sign, which ended up in the photo-op area.

We filmed our wizards against a backdrop, holding the sign and making faces. I then made an Apple Motion template with the correct orientation and aspect ratio for the Meural frame. I used this to overlay the frame and “roughen up” the captured video: to desaturate color and add some artifacts.

Fun fact: my extremely under-acted segment was meant to be a quick test to see if I could get the technology pipeline working well enough to deploy the video onto the picture frame. The other folks filming videos on our video shoot day loved it so much, I was pretty much forced to keep it in there.

This gave us four videos of Azkaban wizards, one of a… lizard…? (thanks, Snapshat filter!), and one of a house elf wearing a pillowcase.

I didn’t want a constant loop of motion video grabbing at people’s attention. I thought the video would be more dramatic if it only occurred every so often. I threw some static images in there as interstitials between videos using some free printable posters loaded in as slate images.

As mentioned in the introduction, this is the one realm where I do not have raw video, Apple Motion projects, or Final Cut Pro X projects to share. This is partly due to the size of the raw video and partly out of respect for our (over-)acting friends.