A relaxing summer home turns deadly in our promo for James Patterson’s new thriller, The Summer House
We like all our projects, but some projects we really like. Our book promo for The Summer House, a James Patterson thriller, is one of the latter. This Patterson joint begins with a gruesome murder in a once opulent summer home so we knew we could push the spook factor in our trailer a bit.
Seth Johnson, ECG animator and creative powerhouse, came up with the winning concept involving a bloodied up Zillow listing. Our three man crew shot on location at a lovely lake home in Georgia. The shoot involved taking stills of various rooms in the home, both before and after a bloody murder takes place. It’s not too often we get to utilize fake blood in a beautiful home, but we savor the moment when it comes! There’s nothing quite like taking a perfectly decorated interior, turning it into a nightmare horrorscape, and then returning the whole thing to its perfect state at wrap.
With such simple footage, the real magic happened in post-production. Seth used his expert compositing skills to place our images onto an old school computer screen, mimicking a Zillow-type home listing. Anyone notice the reflection of the fan in the screen? It’s those small touches that separate the pros from the amateurs, y’all.
Once again, the video wasn’t complete until Joe Dicosola, ECG’s beloved sound mixer, stepped in with an incredible audio mix. The audio is subtle at times, and in-your-face creepy at others. And it drives home the spook factor perfectly.
For all the winning elements in this video, at least some kudos are due to ECG Producer and Production Designer Muriel Lee’s performance as a floating dead body that ends up the promo. It was a cold, rainy, windy shoot day, but the opportunity to join the ranks of ECG staff that have posed as dead bodies in video shoots was too appealing to resist. And the final video made it doubly worth the shivers!