Overnight Prints Web Commercial – how we made it!

Have you seen our new web commercial? If not, then please check-it-out it in the web player below.


We thought that it was about time that Overnight Prints made something that talked about ourselves as a company and about the things that differentiate us from our competitors. But we didn’t want this video to be a typical corporate affair with a man in a suit telling people how great our company is! Instead, we wanted to make something that really speaks to our designer and small business customers about our quality printing, our fast delivery service, and our green company policies.

Since we have a customer base that includes a great deal of freelance designers and creatives, we figured that it might be a good idea to ACTUALLY include one of our design customers in the video itself! Unsurprisingly, it didn’t take us long to find an exceptional artist amongst our gifted customers and we quickly hired über-talented freelance artist, Jamie Johnson. The next logical thought was to utilize the creative skills of Jamie in our commercial. So we got him to actually DRAW the commercial and time captured the whole thing on film!!!

If you’re not aware, time capture video is made by taking still frame photographs in sequence. When viewed one-after-the-other, they produce a visual effect that is rather like an animated film. In the case of our little movie, the video is really similar to animation, because all the footage was hand-drawn.

The video is the work of a few multi-talented people. It was written, produced, directed, and edited by (myself) Ben Fellowes and Hamesh Shahani with script and concept ideas from Erik Melander.  The star of the show, however, was Jamie Johnson (see more of his work at Mice of Millions.) He had to endure four tough days, sitting in a cramped space under an oppressive lighting rig while sketching this video. He showed outstanding patience when asked by Hamesh and I to redo some of his illustrations and to follow strict direction (all whilst trying to concentrate on some very complex illustration composition!)

As you can see from the video, Jamie did this project ALL FREEHAND!!? Any illustrator will tell you how difficult this is to do (especially when you also have two people looking over your shoulder giving you “suggestions” the whole time.) There was no pencil sketching, no tracing and no post production cheating involved in the making of this video.

We hope you enjoyed this video as much as we did making it. We also hope that you learned a bit more about us and the products that we supply.

This video represents the start of a campaign that includes videos to help our customers make cool print products, create better color profiles, build their own start files, and to create some really neat Photoshop and Illustrator print work.