SHORT CUTS
Dancing Diablo, an animation studio located in Brooklyn, N.Y., has been providing the digital coloring for the weekly animated series, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, which appears on FOX-TV each Saturday morning. Produced by 4Kids Entertainment, New York, the cartoon has aired on FOX since February 2003. Dancing Diablo styled and painted backgrounds for 26 episodes in season one, and completed the last of the 26 episodes for season two. The company recently began working on 13 episodes for season three. The Dancing Diablo creative team included founding partner/designer Beatriz Ramos, who is also the stylist; color supervisor Liz Artinian; background painter Reginald Butter; prop/character colorist Pedro Ros; and production manager Francisco Hurtado.
Soho, a Toronto-based postproduction and visual effects studio, collaborated with Toronto’s groundzero Marketing Communications to complete a series of CG animated spots for Fisherman’s Friend cough lozenges. The ads include :30 and :15 versions in English and French. Soho’s creative team worked with groundzero at the early production stage to create an animated sequence to entertain the viewer. Soho creative director/designer Tony Cleve led the team, developing a storyboard and choreographing the sequence of dancing cherries using Maya’s 3-D animation software. Soho’s animators created several virtual elements incorporating the Fisherman’s Friend original and cherry packages, various cherry configurations and a stage. The spot features the cherry characters acting out their roles, while the hero package flexes his muscles, plays hacky sack and ultimately leaps into the air to swallow a cherry lozenge. Later, the original pack transforms into a new cherry-flavored package. Soho credits include executive producer Doug Morris, lead animator Davor Celar, senior animator/technical director Derek Gebhart, Discreet/Fire artist Lee Maund and producer Josa Porter.
Cutting Vision, New York, edited a pair of :30s for New York agency Conill Advertising and its client, Tide with Bleach. "Orange Juice" takes place in a futuristic supermarket where a mother and child are faced with a wide variety of choices for juice but very few choices when it comes to bleach. That problem is solved with the new Tide with Bleach. In "J.Lo," a woman wants to impress her husband by wearing her white trousers out to a special occasion, with Tide again saving the day. Both ads were directed by the Black Brothers out of H20 Films, Miami. Greg Kiernan was both offline and online editor, with Alexandra Leal executive producing. Jeff Spangler handled visual effects and graphics for Cutting Vision.
MUSIC NOTES
New York-headquartered G&E Music provided the original theme song and score for Extreme History with Roger Daltry, a 13-episode show airing on The History Channel. G&E’s Glenn Schloss and Erik Blicker composed, recorded, and delivered a rootsy-techno theme song on spec to Extreme History‘s producers, Matt Ginsberg and David Leepson of Boom Pictures, New York. Looking for a fresh, modern-day, adventurous anthem, the producers selected G&E’s theme to bring the viewer full-speed ahead into the fast-paced weekly program. Schloss maintains that the theme song came out of a G&E jam extravaganza, recorded to ProTools at G&E’s studio. Extreme History features Daltry "walking in the shoes" of various historical figures, such as a member of the Lewis & Clark expedition, a Buffalo-hunting Native American, and a sailor on a battleship in 1812. The programs’ scores are as varied as they are dramatic, while keeping to the show’s theme song-established sonic character. G&E’s Schloss, Blicker, Brian Quill and Rauri Finan contributed nearly 200 tracks over the course of four to six months while the show was being produced. Extreme History was the first episodic TV series for which G&E provided all the music. A full-service music house equipped with a new ProTools HD2 system, G&E’s Gotham facility accommodates recording, voiceovers and mixing.
For more than 20 years, Roy Latham of hsr/ny recorded, mixed and sweetened the audio for New York agency Serino Coyne’s television and radio spots on behalf of Broadway, Off-Broadway and touring company campaigns. Latham has mixed the music tracks for the public relations and promotional materials for the shows as well. Among the productions that Latham worked on were Boy from Oz, Taboo, Wicked and Radio City Music Hall’s Christmas Spectacular. In addition, Latham has worked with Serino Coyne on Disney’s Aida, Lion King and Beauty and the Beast, as well as Hairspray, The Producers, Movin’ Out, Mamma Mia!, Thoroughly Modern Millie, Urinetown, Little Shop of Horrors and 42nd Street, among others. Latham, assisted by Chris Varekamp, utilized a Soundtracs DPC-II digital console and a Fairlight MFX to complete the projects.
IN GEAR
Base 2 Studios, a full service video and audio post facility in Denver, has purchased a Quantel eQ with QColor in-context color correction from the New Canaan, Conn.-based manufacturer. The eQ was selected because of its ability to handle any resolution and format of source material, and because it’s able to work in HD at the speed of SD. Its ability to work out of the box was handy too, as the company had a high-profile HD sales presentation booked and ready to be executed the moment the new system arrived. The video, produced for defense contractor Lockheed Martin Space Systems to use as a presentation to the U.S. government, was built with sources as divergent as old film on Digital Betacam, DV-CAM tapes, VHS and freshly shot super 35mm transferred to HD. The eQ installation complements Base 2 Studios’ existing array of Quantel systems, such as Henry, Editbox, Paintbox and Hal. Currently, Base 2 Studios is working on a longer-term project for The Travel Channel called Islands for Rent, which will air in late March 28 during the channel’s highly rated program segment, Beach Week, as well as on Discovery HD Theater. The project will be roughed together on Final Cut and finished on the eQ, and is the first program of its type to be shot and edited in HD. The show travels around the globe to unveil deluxe resort islands that are available for rent at prices ranging from $10,000 to $15,000 per night.
Panasonic Broadcast provided VTRs and HD camcorders to Euro1080, Europe’s first HD TV station, which commenced transmissions on Jan. 1. Euro1080 broadcasts 24 hours a day from the Astra uplink centre in Betzdorf, Luxembourg, via the Astra 1H satellite direct to home. In the near future, the station will also broadcast via cable TV networks supporting cable HD set tops. Euro1080 has elected to use 1080i as its production standard with the DVB MPEG2 HD transmission standard. Euro1080 is also targeting its pan-European HD capability at live (and pre-recorded) HD broadcasts for special events, particularly major sporting events and concerts. These live broadcasts will exploit the growth of new Electronic Cinemas in Europe capable of receiving HD signals by satellite, as well as HD large screen systems in stadiums and auditoriums. Euro1080 is also expecting companies and organizations to increasingly use its HD distribution system for pan-European special events and conferences. Euro1080 is using nine Panasonic multi-standard HDD5 VTRs (AJ-HD3700B) as its main recording and production machines in conjunction with HD servers. The AJ-HD3700B meets all HD studio standards for production, editing and broadcasting in 1080p, 1080i and 720p. Its picture quality is well suited to repeated dubbing and editing, and for large-screen cinema playback, there’s an option for Euro1080 with special event packages to large auditoriums. Euro1080 is also using two Panasonic AJ-HDC27F Varicam cameras. Varicam is a 720p camera production system with variable frame rate and wide dynamic range. It has been selected by Euro1080 as its standalone camera system, operating independently from the studio and HD outside broadcast vehicle infrastructures, in single film camera mode. Varicam will provide Euro1080 with material for recorded shows intermixed with live footage and for DVD production. Panasonic is also supplying eight AJ-HD1700 DVCPROHD VTRs. The VTR supports both progressive and interlaced standards and has been developed as a bridge between 720p and 1080 line based production, and between high-definition and standard-definition production. Panasonic Broadcast Europe (PBE), based in Wiesbaden, Germany, is responsible for the market development of Panasonic’s broadcast and professional digital video products in Europe, working with national sales companies. PBE is part of Matsushita Europe, the principal European subsidiary of Matsushita Electric Industrial Co. of Japan.
CLIPLAND
Los Angeles-headquartered KromA provided visual effects and animation for Get Yourself High, the latest video from the Chemical Brothers. Directed by Joseph Kahn of SuperMega/HSI, Culver City, Calif., the video is composed entirely of footage gleaned from the 1978 Chinese martial arts film Shaolin Yu Wu Dang ("Two Champions of Death"), with the material being altered so that in addition to swords and knives, the characters wield vinyl records, microphones and headphones as weapons and appear to be singing the lyrics of the song. Get Yourself High features vocals by Canadian rapper K-OS, and is the second track released from the Chemical Brothers’ new compilation album Singles ’93-’03 on Virgin. Kahn edited the video himself, creating a condensed version of the kung fu thriller that makes an uncanny fit with the song’s narrative line. The track’s refrain, "Don’t rely on us to get you high," becomes a mantra that an old sage chants to a young warrior before sending him into battle with a rival gang. The combatants are DJ masters as much as they are martial arts experts, so that in the final battle sequence, hero and villain square off with giant boom boxes strapped to their necks. KromA’s role was to integrate the computer-generated musical props into the 25-year-old film footage, and to alter the faces of the characters so that they appear to be singing. For the latter, the studio used facial capture technology to record the lip, cheek and jaw movements of an actor reciting the lyric. The resulting data was applied to a CG head that, in turn, was textured, modified and blended with the film footage. In some scenes, the film characters were actually speaking, which meant that the footage had had to be further modified. KromA lead artist Bert Yukich used Elastic Reality to morph the film footage so that the jaw movement of the film characters matched that of the CG model. KromA animators produced the records, microphones, headphones and boom boxes as CG models. The props were then integrated into the film scenes so LPs became deadly projectiles and headphones became the means of applying a death grip to a villain. KromA’s Amy Yukich was executive producer.
