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TV promo: Ugly Betty (Channel Four)

TV promo for Ugly Betty (Channel Four)

Director/Editor: Damien Chicken

Chicken is the director of the production company Unbroken Productions and was the director for on-air promotion for the third series of Ugly Betty. Marketing suggested that the warmth and humour of the programme were its main selling points; that the new series would appeal to both established and first-time viewers. Promotions for previous series of the programme had centred on character or story-led themes and it had been identified that the employment of conventional clip-promo techniques in conjunction with as-yet unseen situations and storylines had tended to confuse the viewer. Instead Chicken created a generic series launch trail that would both feature all the main characters and showcase the strong comedy performances in the show. The trail was built around a scene in the programme in which reference was made to the central character as an ‘ugly duckling’. The Danny Kay Ugly Duckling track was pre-edited to the forty seconds duration and was used as a framework for the edit. The edit process took almost two weeks, eventually borrowing from older episodes of the programme in order to flesh-out the imagery and increase the range of available clips. Special consideration was given to finding clips that emphasised contrasting sounds effects and imagery and their comedic juxtaposition. These were accentuated in the dubbing edit using audio plug-ins, EQ and foley sound effects. This was a campaign that would run for the duration of the new series alongside more plot-led, episodic trailers.

One of the stars of the show Michael Urie commented on the superior quality of the UK promotions and posted a link to his 65k Twitter followers resulting in almost 30k hits for the trailer on YouTube. The Trailer was nominated for three Promax awards in 2009, and won Silver for best Entertainment Promo, Silver for best Editing, and Gold for best Use of Music.