Filed under: Jobs, Motion Graphics | Tags: jobs, motion designer, Motion Graphics
Scorch London is looking for a Motion Designer to join our very talented motion design team here in Central London.
The right candidate:
• Highly skilled and fast user of After Effects.
• Design trained to understand typography, movement and layout.
• Quick to understand a brief.
• Experience in working to very tight deadlines.
• Enjoys the creative challenge of working on several projects in the same week.
• Some experience in Cinema 4D or 3DS Max is a bonus but not essential.
• Minimum 2 years experience working in the industry.
We work on just about everything, from short promo videos for iPhone apps, to TV commercials, to website landing page videos, to games trailers, to corporate presentations. The right candidate will be happy to take on whatever we throw at them with the same level of enthusiasm for each and every project.
Suitability for interview will be heavily weighted on the quality of your showreel and work. Please apply via email with a link to your showreel to: tristan@scorchlondon.com
No phone calls or agencies please 
Scorch London require an Account Manager to join our growing team in our Central London office.
Key Responsibilities:
• Liaising with and managing clients from initial enquiry through to final delivery.
• Handling and developing inbound enquiries on the phone or email.
• Working with others on the team in the proposal process including credentials pitching, proposal writing and budgeting.
• Presenting Scorch London to existing and new clients through direct communication in face-to-face meetings, telephone calls and emails on a regular basis.
• Day-to-day project management including liasing with suppliers, organising shoots and helping to co-ordinate the whole production process.
Key Skills Required:
• Excellent organisational and project management skills.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills including scriptwriting experience.
• 2+ yrs hands on experience in the production industry.
• An all-rounder with an in-depth knowledge of the whole production process.
• Ability to provide first-class customer service in a fast-paced, deadline-driven environment.
• Ambitious to make your mark and be a key asset to the team.
Hours of work:
9.30am-6.00pm Mon-Fri
Location:
Central London Office.
Salary:
£25-35k dependent on experience.
How to Apply:
Please apply via email to: tristan@scorchlondon.com
No phone calls or agencies please.
Scorch London
Scorch is a highly entrepreneurial company, with a strong work ethic, an established client list and a clear strategy for growth. The right candidate will be excited about the challenges that lie ahead and being part of a motivated, passionate and ever growing team.
Client: “We’d like to make a Viral Video please”
Would you? I’ve lost count of the number of times over the last few years that a company has phoned us and proudly asked if we could help them to create a viral video for their brand.
We research their product, we research their audience, we brainstorm ideas, we argue, we laugh, we refine and narrow down our ideas into 3 or 4 routes that will work. 3 or 4 ways of producing something that the target audience will love and will be sure to share online and spread like wildfire to the masses.
The problem comes when the client then realises that the ideas go too far. “We can’t show our boss this, he’ll never go for it!” “Our brand can’t be associated with that! Far too risky! Can we tone it down?” …Oh, so you didn’t want a viral, you wanted an ad, is that right? “No, we want a viral, we want it to go massive!”
So we brainstorm again, we argue about how ‘viral’ something is, we laugh, we refine and narrow it down to a couple of further ideas, which could still be good enough, still funny enough to at least make an impact within their industry if nothing else.
“These are great! We’ll show it to our boss and let you know if we get the go ahead”. Great news, or so we think. But the boss has other ideas. “There’s not enough of the product in there, can we add in a packshot at the end?” “Can we add a voiceover explaining the benefits of the product?” “Can we put bullet points at the start and end to highlight the key features?”
You want an ad.
This happens a lot, and of course, we can make ads, we make great ads, but a great ad does not a viral make.
So, if you are a brand, looking for a company to make a viral video, ask yourself if you really are prepared to go the whole way and really make a viral. Ask yourself if you can go out on a limb to produce something really funny, or clever, or disruptive, or preferably all three. Viral isn’t right for every brand, but it’s certainly true that a well made viral rarely harms a brand image as much as nervous brand managers think it might.
If your aim is to show your customers what your product can do, how it can help them, whilst clearly showing the product, covering all the features and benefits, and finally have to demonstrate to your superiors how each feature is clearly shown to the viewer throughout.. then you want an ad.
If you want people to talk about your brand, and you want to minimise media spend by encouraging them to spread your message for free, then you need a viral.
Obviously, it’s not always black and white; there are indeed many shades of grey. Sometimes an ad becomes a viral, and sometimes a viral gets re-made into an ad, but shades of grey are not what makes things viral, it’s the black and white that gets shared.
Like this:
Filed under: Jobs
Scorch London is looking for a senior video editor to join our team in Central London.
The right candidate:
• 4yrs+ solid editing experience in a production company or similar.
• Highly skilled, creative and fast editor.
• Experience using Avid systems preferable.
• Broad portfolio of work including short form and long form broadcast and corporate productions.
• Strong technical skills including deep working knowledge of all major formats, codecs and deliverables.
• Experience of client-attended edit sessions with a personable and friendly manner.
We work on just about everything, from short promo videos for iPhone apps, to TV commercials, to website landing page videos, to games trailers, to 3 minute long corporate presentations. The right candidate will be happy to take on whatever we throw at them with the same level of enthusiasm for each and every project.
Please apply via email with a link to your showreel and your 3 favourite pieces of work to: steve@scorchlondon.com
No phone calls or agencies please
Scorch London require a Business Development Manager for the generation and development of both inbound and outbound new business opportunities. The successful candidate will be an experienced sales professional with a deep understanding of the video production & TV commercials industry. Additional experience of the games, music and sports industries would be beneficial.
Hours of work: 9.30am-6pm Mon-Fri
Location: Central London
Salary: £30k + Uncapped commission.
Main duties to include:
• To be responsible for developing an on-going outbound sales strategy.
• Presenting Scorch London to potential clients through direct communication in face-to-face meetings, telephone calls and emails.
• Responsible for your own lead generation and appointment setting.
• Actively manage the sales process including lead generation, credentials pitching, and handover to the pre-production team.
• Have the drive and motivation to ensure all sales opportunities are explored.
• Experienced in the video production and television advertising industries, with a deep understanding of how such a business works, what makes clients tick, and what goes into the productions Scorch London makes.
• You will have individual responsibility for new business, and are expected to self-manage, however, support is available from the managing partners and senior producer for complex or large pitches and strategies.
Please apply via email to: tristan@scorchlondon.com
No phone calls or agencies please.
Scorch London
Scorch is a highly entrepreneurial company, with a strong work ethic, an established client list and a clear strategy for growth. The right candidate will be excited about the challenges that lie ahead and being part of a motivated, passionate and ever growing team.
Filed under: Commercials | Tags: commercial, new look, tv advert, tv commercial shoot
Filed under: Commercials, Corporate Video, Motion Graphics, Video Production | Tags: commercials, london, montage, showreel, Video Production
Our latest showreel featuring work for New Look, eBay, Bosch, easyJet, Telegraph, Metro, Reckitt Benckiser & Unilever. We hope you enjoy it!
Filed under: Motion Graphics | Tags: after effects, graphic designer, how to, motion designer, Motion Graphics
This list is an overview of the kind of things that are important in the world of motion graphics, there is of course much more to it than this, including how to liaise with clients and collaborate with co-workers, but this is at least a starting point.
1. Colour.
Learn as much as you can about colour theory, and understand how colours affect perception, emotion and why certain colours are used in certain situations. Also learn which colours work together in harmony and which ones never will.
2. Layout.
Learn the basics of composition, in a similar way as with photography, learning to spot what looks right and what doesn’t when many different elements are put together.
3. Typography.
Learn all there is to know about fonts, including which fonts are out there, the difference between serif and sans-serif, and when to use which fonts, in which weights to make the right level of impact.
4. Storytelling.
Learn the basics of how to tell a story to communicate an idea or a vision. This applies whether animating a simple logo, or developing a full-on short film.
5. Problem Solving.
Learn how to interpret a brief that has clear design problems to be solved, and having a process for solving those problems. Designing motion graphics without a problem to solve is like driving without a steering wheel – whilst being free and exciting, nothing of much use will ultimately be achieved.
6. Footage.
Learn about how to use and interpret footage, including a broad understanding of the technology involved and techicalities like aspect ratio, fields, and broadcast safe areas.
7. Rotoscoping.
Learn the basics of rotoscoping including masking, painting, and simple tricks like sectioning of elements to make rotoscoping people quicker and easier.
8. Tracking.
Learn how to track graphics and effects onto live action footage. After effects has some great in-built tracking software such as Mocha to help with this process. Matching grain, colour and grade is also important when incorporating graphics into footage.
9. Grading.
Learn how to add or remove colour, tone, grain and contrast from footage to fit with the brand that is being worked on, and the tone of the entire film.
10. Software.
Learn how to use the main pieces of software that make up a motion designer’s armoury, After Effects, Photoshop, Illustrator and some knowledge of Cinema 4D, Maya or 3D Studio Max.
Not so long ago web video was a small industry, where you needed a truckload of bandwidth to even think about watching a tiny, low-resolution clip of a cat falling off a skateboard or a kid riding his bike off a cliff. Along came youtube in 2005…yes, that’s right, just five years ago, and suddenly an explosion of web video was imminent.
Widespread broadband, and even wider-spread enthusiasm from a new generation of people who have never known a world without the internet, and you have a recipe for the death of TV. But all this online stuff is still just getting going. Among the fog of videos of cats, kids, puppies and *insert cute/clumsy/dangerous/fast/slow/big animal/human here* a new dawn of web video is peeping over the horizon.
Brands are now beginning to jump head first into the web video world, even going as far as making big-budget commercials that never actually make it to TV. Recent campaigns for Old Spice and Nike demonstrate that video on the web has grown up.
Agencies are also finally taking all this very seriously, with words like ‘digital’ and ‘social’ being mentioned earlier in the creative meetings than ‘tv spots’. The question that has been on everyone’s minds in agencies across the land is how long before web (or digital as it has now been labelled) sits atop the advertising tree.
Digital spend on advertising now exceeds television spend in most developed economies, with 23.5% of all advertising money in the UK spent on digital compared with just 21.9% on TV. This must lead to the inevitable conclusion that television will eventually die out as a form of entertainment as advertisers abandon it in favour of digital. This shift in money can only render TV broadcasters the penniless poor relation of Google, Facebook et al, and completely unable to spend money on actually producing the TV shows – you know, the bits between the adverts.
This may well turn out to be some sort of abstract doomsday scenario for the future of television, but major commercial TV broadcasters should be clamouring to push their digital credentials towards the big brands who currently still advertise on TV. Attracting major digital commercial deals with big brands must be the new aim, as it is these brands who will eventually find the concept of TV advertising clumsy and expensive compared to the relatively inexpensive, efficient and interactive world of youtube, Facebook and Twitter.
Maybe television in it’s current form will die out and be forced to merge with the internet somehow. It has certainly been a long-held prediction of many a forward thinker in this industry, but yet still television continues, and most of us still go home and switch on the TV in the evening.
What will be the tipping point that means we all throw our televisions in the trash and all gather round the computer instead? Which of the major players will be the first to launch a truly revolutionary device that completely replaces television altogether? The strange thing is that all of the likely candidates for developing such a product are all from different areas of the marketplace. Google, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, Samsung, Nokia… they all have the potential to takeover TV, but it somehow seems unlikely that it will be an actual TV broadcaster who takes the initiative.
