Tuesday, September 05, 2006

How to make a Google TV ad like BA

Never let it be said that the travel industry is lacking in imagination or enthusiasm to grapple with technology, or just have a fair crack at something new.

Within minutes of us posting a piece over the weekend about the new British Airways ad, featuring Google Earth, a friendly chap called Colin Maddocks from the Virtual Travelcast Blog left a comment with a bold claim that “creating something similar may not be that difficult”.

“I think I’ll have a go and see,” he wrote.

[Travolution admits to being mildly bemused by such an audacious declaration - Ed]

But no more than 24 hours or so later and Maddocks emailed us to let us know he had finished his masterpiece.

His “noble attempt”, he says modestly, was put together with Camtasia Studio and overlaid with text and images from his own company, Nilecruises4u.



It was a “bit of fun”, Maddocks writes.

There are trendy advertising agencies across London's Soho that would charge millions for that kind of creativity - and also spend months putting it together.

So well done!

Kevin May, editor, Travolution

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Infact its even easier Google Earth Pro has a movie plugin that lets you output Google Earth video.

The catch is that Google Earth Pro is $400 per year and the movie plugin is another $200 (one off I believe).

The advantage of using the Google Earth plugin is its much smoother (see the demo video on http://earth.google.com/earth_pro.html)
and the biggest advantage is its then legal to actual use the movie.

Just capturing the video from Google Earth Free does not mean you can freely use that video in anyway other than personal usage.

Brian Norman
Earthware

Anonymous said...

Sorry Brian,

It was created just for a bit of fun and a challenge on a sunday morning. I hope Google Earth wont' mind. I think its' such a brilliant application for so many people. My amateur attempt is flawed by the lack of smoothness and I would have loved to have had the $650 to licence the Google Earth Pro version. I can imgine the finished video would have been great. Hopefully people will view the idea as just another way that Google Earth can be used to great effect.

Anonymous said...

Hi Colin, sorry if it sounded like I was downplaying your idea, its a great one for non-commercial usage.

I was just pointing out its been commercially available from Google for ages, its just BA are the first company to really use it publically.

Brian Norman
Earthware