Sophia Westrop portfolio - Project page

For this project, I created promotional images, a promotional video, a video about the brand revival, and a website. ORBITZ was a Canadian soft drink from the late 90's that didn't do so well. So I decided to play up the 90's aesthetic and cheesy commercial vibe in the backstory video. For the general brand identity, I wanted to have a playful tone and tongue in cheek humour playing off the brands previous failure. The flavour names are all alliterative which I thought was fun and true to products aimed at children, but this time I wanted to make the target demographic to be young adults and adults who were 90's kids- now millennials. That became the tone for the humour. For the promotional images, I was going for a retro feel and also something reminiscent of ads you used to see in magazines as a kid. My favourite is definitely the cow abduction ad, which I ended up using as the background for the hero section of the website. I wanted the website to be colourful, funny, and packed with visually interesting things.

Making the live-action backstory video was probably my favourite part of this whole project. One of the challenges of that video was the use of a greenscreen. We had been taught how to edit a greenscreen, but the best spot I could find to hang one was in front of some windows, which made the greenscreen colour uneven and a little harder to work with when putting in the background. Also... I didn't realize I picked an awful coloured water bottle for a prop, it was close enough to green that the greenscreen also affected it. I also wanted to put a VHS effect on a portion of the video, which was not something I had ever done. I watched a couple tutorials and played around with things in my own way until I got the result I was looking for.

Another challenge was finding a good place to film the CEO portion. I didn't have a very aesthetically pleasing space at home suited to film, but luckily I have so many great friends, and one friend let me use their super nice bedroom as well as helped me film!

The biggest challenge I had was that I had WAY over-designed my site in the beginning. I was overly ambitious and had to really reconsider the scope of the project. I figured out ways to get similar results to what I originally wanted, while reducing the workload and complexity. The answer was mostly to just create my original ideas as background images for each section. This reduced interactivity, but the end result was still fun and pleasing.

Since this was a school project, it gave me the freedom to have ORBITZ not take itself too seriously, and I had a lot of fun with the whole thing. I enjoyed including the humour and being able to be playful with my design choices.

Despite the challenges with the videos and website, I couldn't be happier with how this project ended up turning out considering how much of the work was brand new to me, like JavaScript and After Effects.