Heading back up to Spokane

I leave today for Spokane for a month and a half to work on some projects with Mortimore Productions. Not to mention working on the house and finishing up the bodywork on my production vehicle. ('94 4Runner) I'm picking up an advanced Final Cut Pro book for "fun reading" and to see what little tricks and tips I can pick up. I also need to develop my After Effects skills. Some of the 3-d titles I've seen recently are impressive and I'd love to be able to kick those out.

I'll be posting some :30 / :60 commercials in the next week or so. I'll make another demo DVD that will have those on it. I'm still relatively unsure what the niche in Bozeman would be. Longform videos or Commercials or a mix of both, perhaps?

Longform Demo complete!

I just finished putting together a longform demo, which has about 6 of my 4 minute + spots on it. No, I don't expect anyone to watch all of the videos in their entirety, but they give enough diversity in style and topic that I think it will at least give someone an idea of my versatility. I need to work with Mortimore Productions in Spokane to get some of my commercial projects off of their system. Over the last 5 years I've been doing this, most of my :30/:60 commercials have been done while working with/for them. Now that I'm moving to Bozeman relatively soon, its time to network!

The shoot with Jay went well, and has now been completed to satisfaction. He spent the last couple days making Timecode DVDs for editing. You can see the ending vlog there. We had every intention of doing more...

/rob

Timelines, Continuity and Sweet Marketing Buildings

You can take a short click over to Jay's blog to see a little vlog we did on the first day of production. The building we're shooting in is owned by G&G Advertising, a pretty sweet looking outfit based in Billings. As you can see in the video, the wall is old-school brick and some pretty thick plaster. We pimped out the set in what we all consider to be non-boring / industrial. Setting up the lighting was pretty easy, camera positioning was a little tricky because of a column located almost dead centre of our set. Setup overall was easy, and the first day of shooting was also mostly-partly-kind of seamless. When we got to the capture part we had a little "it would be nice if..." moment regarding FCP / Adobe reading internal timecode on .dv clips. We know the TC is there, as we've been writing down timecode and notes in between shoots/pauses/retakes, but the "read timecode" option isn't quite working the way we'd like it to. There are a couple way around it, but all involve laying the clips down on a timeline and then re-exporting as a video and then re-importing as a single clip... weeeeee... right? I'd give you more details on it, but we're leaving in 5 minutes so as to make it into the studio by 8. (and pick up some coffee on the way!)

more to come...