During the seven years she spent as a producer with agency Riester-Robb, Phoenix, Louise Parker enjoyed every aspect of spot making—except postproduction. "I found it frustrating that, just because you’re in a peripheral market, you’re still not getting the quality and the services you can get in a larger market," she explains. "At one point, I actually took one of the [regional editors] to a post house in L.A. and said, ‘Look, this is what it’s about,’ and they still didn’t get it."
Parker frequently complained about the situation to her husband, cinematographer Mark Trengove. "I think he just got so fed up with hearing me bitch that he said, ‘Let’s try it ourselves,’ " she laughs.
Parker, who describes herself as "technologically retarded," teamed up with the "more progressive thinking" Trengove to launch Phoenix-based Blade Editorial in January. Since then, they’ve hired two staff editors—Kara Leivian and Sean Callahan—and cut spots for clients like McDonald’s and Discount Tire, both out of Riester-Robb—and Arizona’s Casino del Sol, done via Off Madison Avenue, Tempe, Ariz.
The company’s growing freelance pool, which includes Serena Tupper and Danielle Marcario, is made up of both local and out-of-state finishers. "Generally, in a small market, a new place opens but it’s exactly the same people from different shops that come over—nobody seems to inject new talent," says Parker. "We’ve been looking for editors that aren’t necessarily from this market for a breath of fresh air, so we have editors out of New York and Los Angeles that are willing to come in and cut."
High Tech
In addition to its extensive standard definition capabilities, Blade houses an eQ—the new, nonlinear editorial system manufactured by Quantel, which is headquartered in Newbury, U.K. The eQ also offers Henry and Paintbox effects and composting capabilities. "It’s HD/SD, so we can do all high-definition programming," Parker points out. "As far as we know, we’re the only people in the Southwest that can do that."
In hiring an eQ operator, Parker and Trengove reached far beyond the Phoenix market to get Darren Griffiths, a U.K. native who has created visual effects for a variety of British spots, as well as promos for The Discovery Channel’s Animal Planet, and the popular stop-motion series Wallace and Gromit, created by Aardman Animations, Bristol, U.K. "Quantel did a press release when we got the eQ, and [Griffiths] saw it and contacted us," recalls Parker, who also hails from Britain. "He said, ‘I’d love to move to the States. Would you be interested in hiring somebody out of the U.K.?’ We of course said, ‘No, we don’t know how to do it, and it’s going to cost a fortune.’ "
Soon, however, the principals changed their minds. "Because it’s such new technology, and it’s still very much in its infancy, we found that nobody [in Phoenix] knew how to operate the eQ," Parker explains. "We needed someone who could run it not just as an operator, but with artistic flair, so we decided to bring Darren out."
While running a post house is "much harder work" than she thought it would be, Parker is willing to go that extra mile. "I think Blade is now in a position where we can compete with any facility in the larger markets, but clients can come to us at a fraction of the cost," she relates. "In this economy, that’s huge."
Parker has been living in Phoenix since 1991, when she moved there to line-produce the British television program, Golf in Paradise. "When they asked me to [relocate], I sort of jumped at the opportunity because England was in such a recession at the time," remembers Parker, who met Trengove on a shoot. "Then, I married an American so I couldn’t get out."
Becoming business partners with Trengove was, at first, a daunting concept for Parker. "I had such a fear of working with my husband—being together twenty-four hours a day, taking work home with you, never turning it off," she says.
But that fear has long since abated for the former producer, whose business acumen complements her DP husband’s technical know-how. "I know a good edit when I see it, and because I’ve been on the agency side, I know what the agencies want," she relates. "Mark has the expertise, and he’s very creative. He surprises me day in and day out with his knowledge of all [the technology]. I thought we’d be killing each other, but actually it’s worked out great because we balance each other out."
Though Blade’s staff and freelance editors can cut any type of material, Parker’s favorite recent projects are storytelling-based spots. "We’re working on a spot for McDonald’s, Idaho, right now, which is very cute," she says of "Rainbow," which was helmed in-house by Dave Robb out of Riester-Robb, and was cut by Leivian. "It’s a little kid who’s painting a rainbow, who says there’s a big pot of Chicken McNuggets at the end. At the end of the spot, he turns his rainbow upside-down so that it looks like a smile.
"We also just finished one for Casino del Sol," she continues, referring to "Groundsman," directed by Anibal Suarez of Joe Blow Production, Anthem, Ariz., for Off Madison Avenue. "It shows a groundsman who chalks off a whole football field with triple sevens [like a slot machine]."
Like the rest of their current work, both spots are local, "because we’re still so new," says Parker, who hopes to go national in the near future. "We’re getting there. We’re reaching out to the larger agencies, and people are coming to us more and more."
The bulk of Blade’s work is in the spot world, and Parker expects it to stay that way. "I love commercials—that’s my background and my husband’s background," she notes.
Still, she wouldn’t mind adding longform projects to the shop’s itinerary. "I’d love to think that we could work on some documentaries and [TV] shows," she says. "Ultimately, we’d like to say, ‘We’re going to keep the doors open twenty-four hours a day.’ And in the after-hours, we’d have younger editors cutting student movies. It would be great if we help people who don’t have much money, but have a great project."
