Central Garden 2015 – featuring Lilly the Ladybug.

Aerial drone shots and an animated ladybug highlight our latest trade show video produced for Central Garden Distribution.

(Enjoy the video at the bottom of this blog page.)

We do quite a bit of trade show video production here in Las Vegas. Many of our clients are repeat customers year after year and use us for all of their videos when they come here. When you have corporate customers like that one of the challenges is to come up with different and unique projects every year. We’ve worked Central Garden’s Dealer Buying Show for several years now. This time we added some unique twists to both the shooting and the final edit. Our client thought it’d be neat to somehow have Lilly the Ladybug, the show mascot, be part of the show so we decided to have “Lilly” give a tour of the show and speak to exhibitors and attendees.

We’re always itching for an opportunity to use our UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle-drone) in a production setting, so one immediate idea was to get some drone footage we could use to portray a the viewpoint of Lilly the Ladybug flying around the show.

Our most current camera equipped drone is the DJI Phantom 3 Professional which we brought along on day one of the show to use in the morning while things were still being setup. Being inside a convention hall, the drone wouldn’t detect a GPS signal so we had to switch to a manual flight mode which requires precise handling by our production team.

We captured great quality 4K footage but decided to bring it down before the show floor opened so as not to endanger the attendees during the event.

Along with the drone we brought our SteadyCam to get interesting smooth motion shots and to portray a lower first person view mode of Lilly moving around the show.

We did interviews with the interviewees speaking to “Lilly” and telling her about all the features of the show which of course we showed from Lilly’s perspective of a ladybug flying around.

Putting the video together involved animating Lilly to fly into Las Vegas, going into the Mirage Events Center and then flying overhead and through the show aisles using the UAV and SteadyCam shots. We had a voiceover produced in a voice matching what we felt a ladybug might sound like and used the VO in the beginning and also for the ending where she encouraged viewers to come to the next show at Paris, Las Vegas next year.

These comments we got from our client expressed their appreciation for producing a video to match and exceed their vision:

“Wow, I love it! Thank You.”
(Show Coordinator, Central Garden Distribution)

“Fantastic!!! I’m very pleased with the finished product. Thank you for bringing my vision to life.”
(Customer Marketing Manager, Central Garden Distribution)

“The video is fantastic.  I just e-mailed it out to 1000 people yesterday. Thank you.”
(Show Coordinator, Central Garden Distribution)

The end result may be the best work we’ve done for Central Garden as of yet, enjoy the video below.