SHORT CUTS
Beehive, New York, completed work on the trailer and promo packaging for Showtime’s new series The L Word. The package elements include promo opens, closes, transitions, end pages, mattes and a style guide. Starring Mia Kirshner, Jennifer Beals and Pam Grier, The L Word showcases the lives, careers and romantic relationships of a group of young L.A. women, both gay and straight. Beehive created a design centering on the red "L" of the show’s logo, with the graphic hard-edge shapes and color of the letter moving across the screen, layered in panels. The panels eventually resolve on the logo as it resumes its space within the show title. Beehive used subtle lighting effects to bring out the texture of the footage and punctuate transitions. Credits for Beehive included creative director Ada Whitney, executive producer Jessica Gleason, and designer/animator Marcelo Cardoso.
Colorist P. J. Marsiglia of Company 3, Santa Monica, provided color correction services for the feature-length documentary Amargosa: Story of Marta Becket, which recently earned an Emmy award. Marsiglia performed both dailies and final color correction for the film, working hand in hand with cinematographer Curt Apduhan and director Todd Robinson in finalizing the film’s distinctive look. Apduhan was honored in the best individual achievement in a craft: cinematography category in the Emmys’ news and documentaries awards. Amargosa, which aired on the Sundance Channel, is the story of a 76-year-old former Broadway dancer, who with her husband, has lived as a recluse in a Death Valley ghost town since the 1960s. She transformed the town’s crumbling theater into an "opera house" and made it her permanent home for creative expression. Apduhan shot the film on super 16mm film. Marsiglia performed dailies transfers to facilitate the editing process and final color correction of selects. The film was conformed to digital Betacam and then output to 35mm film for festival screenings. Apduhan used Kodak Vision 200 super 16mm film stock for interview segments, Kodak Vision 500 pushed one stop for opera house performances, and Kodak Vision 320 for the majority of the exteriors. Marsiglia performed the dailies transfer on a Cintel Ursa Diamond and the final transfer on a Philips Spirit Datacine, employing the da Vinci 8:8:8 2K color corrector for both transfers. Apduhan has worked with Marsiglia on numerous documentary and commercial projects, including Robinson’s previous film, Stand and Be Counted, about political activism in rock music.
Encore Hollywood provided graphics and final postproduction services to BLT Inc., Hollywood, for its broadcast promotional campaign on behalf of Playmakers, ESPN Original Entertainment’s first dramatic series. Encore worked on post services for the show, which revolves around a fictitious professional football team, and also posting spots promoting each week’s new episode. Playmakers airs on both ESPN and ESPN-HD. The launch campaign included teasers focusing on four of the show’s central characters and a dramatic two-minute trailer that debuted during the ESPY Awards broadcast. The spots, including shortened versions of the trailer, ran heavily on ESPN networks, during sports broadcasts on ABC and on other cable outlets. Dan Aguilar was Fire editor on the project.
MUSIC NOTES
Modern Music, Minneapolis, worked on the music track for Minneapolis agency Fallon and its client BMW for the :30 "Take the Corner." Directed by Ivan Bird of Serious Pictures, London, the ad highlights the speed and maneuverability of the new BMW 5 series vehicle. Rick Meyer was creative director/composer for Modern Music, with Tony Fischer as owner/executive producer, and Jess Ford producing. Brahmstedt White Noise, Minneapolis, completed the audio post and sound design with Carl White handling those chores.
Walter Werzowa and John Luker of Hollywood-based Musikvergnuegen composed the tracks for Microsoft Office’s "Slide," "End Zone Dance," "Screen" and "Water Cooler," via McCann-Erickson, San Francisco. The humorous :30s were directed by Gerard de Thame of bicoastal HSI Productions. The spots feature jubilant co-workers celebrating business victories in the same style as sports fans celebrating a team’s victory. Pat Weaver and Andrew Hall produced for Musikvergnuegen. "Water Cooler" and "Screen" were mixed at POP Sound, Santa Monica, by Loren Silber. "End Zone Dance" and "Slide" feature audio post by John Boland of Play, Santa Monica.
IN GEAR
Lunarfish: film & visual effects, Los Angeles, chose Panasonic‘s AJ-HDC27 VariCam HD Cinema camera to shoot two commercials for ad agency Crispin Porter+Bogusky, Venice, Calif., and client Dolce & Gabbana Eyewear/Selima Optique. The :30, which aired on MTV and VH1 in the Los Angeles market this past December, was directed by Lunarfish’s Michael Carp, with Ethan Phillips serving as DP. (A similar schedule for the New York market was also planned.) The commercials capture the fantasies of a man and a woman who are wearing Selima Optique glasses. The spots are designed to be seen back-to-back, and showcase Selima Optique, a luxury eyewear boutique. Panasonic’s AJ-HDC27 VariCam replicates many of the features of film-based image acquisition, including 24-frame progressive scan images, time lapse recording, and a wide range of variable frame rates (4-fps to 60-fps in single-frame increments) for "overcranked" and "undercranked" off-speed in-camera effects. The AJ-HDC27 VariCam also features CineGamma software that permits Panasonic’s HD Cinema camera systems to more closely match the latitude of film stocks. Panasonic Broadcast & Television Systems Co. is headquartered in Secaucus, N.J.
The Filmworkers Club, Nashville, purchased a Quantel eQ HD/SD editing and graphics system with QColor. The eQ sale builds on Filmworkers long affiliation with Quantel, and the two Henry compositing machines it still uses on a regular basis. Right out of the gate, Filmworkers eQ artists Slinger and Mark Pruett went to work on a high-end DVD documentary project for country music star Kenny Chesney on the machine. In addition to The Filmworkers Club’s eQ artists, the company also has two colorists, Rodney Williams and Brent Clenney, who are integrating Quantel’s QColor system into their workflow and already using it to color correct the HD shows that are starting to come through the doors. Currently the team, spearheaded by Rich Thomas, is working on a two-hour long feature film project called Martians from Venus for Ages Productions, Cleveland.
CLIPLAND
Digital effects studio Radium performed extensive compositing and CG work to Elektra recording artist Missy Elliott’s new music video, "Pass That Dutch." Directed by Dave Meyers of bicoastal/international @radical.media in collaboration with Elliott, the clip features various looks and dance sequences. "Pass That Dutch" was shot over three days in Los Angeles, most of which was against bluescreen. There were 209 visual effects in the 4:31 piece, and Radium was given 10 days to accomplish them all. The video showcases a unique visual experience and style, opening on grainy, sepia-toned footage of Elliott at a desk as she writes down her thoughts on the hip-hop genre and pays tribute to the notable singers and rap artists who have passed away. Next is a transition into color in a cornfield where Elliott drops from a group of scarecrows into a dance sequence. The video continues with a journey through a Riverdance-style sequence with a spaceship hovering overhead and a King Kong-inspired scene where Elliott hangs onto the top of a city skyscraper with airplanes circling above her. The clip concludes with a transition back to the opening setting and a voiceover advising a sleeping Elliott to "wake up!" The opening look was shot at 6 fps, and Radium was responsible for doing set extensions, rotoscoping, and compositing, as well as creating the graphic "scratchy" appearance. For the cornfield sequence, Radium extended cornrows and created skies to replace the bluescreen. Given the artistic needs of the sequence and the intrinsic difficulty of controlling the performance of real birds, Radium decided to create dozens of CG crows for the beginning of the scarecrow sequence. Those were later combined with footage of crows that were shot on stage over greenscreen. All spaceships were CG, taking artistic cues from such classics as Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Radium also had to create CG 3-D matte paintings of an unknown metropolis for the King Kong scene, as well as numerous CG aircraft, such as WWI biplanes and monoplanes, and Korean War-era helicopters. The technology utilized by Radium included Inferno for compositing, Combustion for rotoscoping, and Maya and Paint FX for the CGI. The project was a full collaboration between Radium creative director Jonathan Keeton and director Meyers, from the shooting through the finish. In addition to Keeton, who also onlined the clip, Radium’s credits include Aladino Debert, head of CGl; Darrin Hilton, Melinda Tidwell and Mark Malmberg, CG artists; Andy McKenna, Scott Rader, Danielle Ciccarelli, David Crawford, Anita Razzano and Alan Lateri, compositors; Julie Jang, rotoscope, and Susan Thurmond, producer. Radium has offices in San Francisco and Santa Monica.
