On September 2021, I decided to pitch a new content idea to my employers where two people, afraid of the horror genre, would be put together in a dark room to play horror videogames. The idea was well received and soon was given many assets to make these videos come true.

I named this project PoltergACE and it would be one of the first original content video for the company, and also one of the first productions I've directed.

In this project I will share only what I made personally, including the show's intro, the outro, the logo animation, color correction and very editing.

For the intro, I was inspired on Netflix mystery shows. Although I don't have the resources to single handedly produce and render 3D sculptures or settings, I used what I had in my hands to work with what I could.

Project 3D, a 3D projection plug-in for After Effects, was used to create the illution of a room on the first scene. For the next scenes, I used basic shapes and textures to manually create a 3D world and render some light using After Effect's built-in lighting system. I also got some footage from the recordings and placed them on Old-TV stock videos I found on the internet.

The music was also hand-picked by me. I heard it on a website and thought it would be a perfect match for the mood and feel of the intro.

At the end you can see the PoltergACE logo designed by DASH, an outstanding graphic designer, who was kind enough to share his talents for the project. I took his logo and animated it.

This is one of the things I'm most proud of, mainly because I was amazed at how good the color correction looked. Initially, the whole session was recorded on a green screen studio, with the lights off. Naturally, most of the footage was not fit for a Keylight effect, because of the lack of light and contrast between the players and the background. However, I did find a better solution.

Playing with the Color Correction tools on Adobe Premiere, I aimed to have a "low red-light" look that made it seem like they were in some sort of panic room or red-room, which gives a very creepy vibe. Below, you can see an example of the raw footage vs the edited footage.

Although there were no original plans to create an Outro, I thought it would be better to make a PoltergACE style outro rather than using the generic company outro. Mainly to keep the vibe flowing. I also used this opportunity to put in some interview footage we had recorded that was not going to be used, as some sort of "bonus scenes" at the very end of the whole video.

As promised, here are the final products for both videos. Mind you, both videos are fully in Spanish, so I apologize in advance for the lack of subtitles. Overall, this was a very fun, and sometimes stressful, experience. It definitely gave me perspective on how much work goes on behind a production and, instead of making me flinch, it fills me with excitement to do another production like this and push the boundary even further!