Alright, so I was just chilling the other day, flipping through stuff, and one of those super sleek Rabanne commercials popped up. You know the type, right? Everything looks like it’s from the future, all shiny and impossibly cool. I think it was the one with that little robot bottle, Phantom. That one really stuck in my head for some reason.
And it got me thinking, maybe a bit too ambitiously, I’ll admit. I was messing around with a little side project, trying to make a cool intro video for some personal stuff I was tinkering with online. Nothing professional, just for kicks. But I thought, hey, why not try to get that same kind of high-end, futuristic vibe? A little taste of luxury, you know?
My Big Idea… and the Not-So-Big Budget
So, the “practice” for me was trying to figure out how to even approach that look without, well, any of the actual resources those big companies have. My first thought was lighting. Those ads always have this amazing, almost otherworldly glow. I figured, okay, I can do something with that.
I started by just playing around with some basic LED strips I had lying around from an old DIY thing. I tried bouncing light off different surfaces. My first attempt was to shine them onto some crumpled aluminum foil. I thought, “Yeah, this is gonna look so metallic and edgy!” Well, it mostly looked like a scrunched-up snack wrapper having a disco party. Not quite the sophisticated shimmer I was going for.
Then I thought about the smooth camera movements. Everything in those commercials just glides. I don’t have a fancy camera rig, just my phone. So, I tried a few things:
- Sliding my phone across a polished table. (Got a nice shot of the table grain, mostly.)
- Putting my phone on a skateboard and giving it a gentle push. (A bit wobbly, and nearly lost my phone down a small gap.)
- Even tried tying it to a piece of string and swinging it gently. Let’s just say that ended with a near-miss with my coffee mug.
The whole process was a lot of trial and error, mostly error if I’m being honest. I spent a good afternoon just trying to get one decent shot of a simple object, trying to make it look mysterious and important, like they do in the ads. I used a black velvet cloth I found as a backdrop, thinking that would scream “luxury.” It mostly just collected a lot of dust.
What I Ended Up With
After a few hours of this, I had a collection of clips that were… interesting. Definitely not Rabanne-level. My “futuristic glow” was more of a “someone left the small lights on” kind of feel. The “smooth” camera movements had a distinct homemade charm, which is a polite way of saying they were a bit shaky.
But you know what? It was actually pretty fun to try. It made me realize just how much skill and, frankly, money goes into making something look so effortlessly cool. It’s not just about pointing a camera; there’s a whole art and science to it that I barely scratched the surface of. My little experiment ended up looking more like a student film project than a high-fashion commercial, but hey, it was a good way to spend an afternoon. And it definitely gave me a new appreciation for the real pros. Sometimes, trying to copy something makes you respect the original a whole lot more.
