Shopping For Germs
The first sweeps spot of November 2004, this one involved one of our reporters swabbing shopping carts and having the samples tested. Just how dirty are shopping carts? Our findings: not very. Turns out the sun is very effective at baking bacteria into sterility - who would’ve thought? Not that this kept us from having to come up with a promo that would at least look scary enough to get people tuned in. Once again, I fell back on preparing some elements of the spot at home, namely the “oozy” animation of a bacteria photo from the news graphics bank. This was also the source of the shopping cart graphic in the background, which I subjected to two different “glare” treatments; I imported these different versions of the shopping cart into the Avid as stills, and created the photocopier-esque “scanning” effect by simply moving a cropped section of each across the original. All in all, it turned out rather surprisingly effective (and, as I’m sure everyone noticed, more than just a little bit Wachowski Brothers-inspired).
