Hello, all! Long time, no see, I realize…but I hope everyone has been enjoying the summer! We have several things going on simultaneously for “Sol,” right now…special FX, sound design and score are all being worked on by a trusty team of individuals across the country. Before we know it (hopefully!), we’ll be putting all of these elements together for the final mix!
Today, Alex Davis takes us on another journey into the wonderful world of composing. Watch closely, because he even shares his most valuable, treasured secret to writing music…!
Hi, everyone! Sara here, and I’m super excited to show you the trailer for our new documentary, M.I.A. M.D.! It’s about the shortage of primary care physicians in the U.S., which you might have heard something about on the news at some time or another.
Hello, all! This is Sara. It’s been a while for me, too, since I last posted anything, but I’m happy to say that I have a new video for you today! Now that we have picture locked, Alex Davis has started working on the almost 2 hours of music that will end up as the score for “Sol.” (He gave us a delicious taste of what to expect for our teaser a few weeks ago!) In MY opinion, a film score has as much of an impact on the viewer as the performance does, if not more so! So, I’m super excited to see what music will do for “Sol,” which is already an awesome story. In today’s video, Alex and Ben hammer out the specifics of where they think music belongs and what is should sound like – what mood it should create. It’s what’s called a “spotting session.” Take a look!
I’ll be back with more on the score in a week or two! (After I set up shop outside Alex’s office so I can listen to him composing all day…Shhh!)
The City of 4 Seasons will be stepping in front of the lens with one of our long-term projects that’s coming together. Over the course of this year we have been (and will continue to be) filming all around Hendersonville for a city promotional project put on by City Hall.
So far we’ve been out and about filming surprise blizzards, parades, landmarks, and just lately – the explosion of spring growth (and pollen) around town.
This project is going to be a lot of fun because we’ve actually got some footage of Hendersonville from the 1920s that we’re going to be incorporating into the video. Should be fun to compare ninety years of growth over the course of a short film. So to everyone around Hendersonville – keep an eye out! You might just make a cameo in the video!
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We’re looking all around Hendersonville to compile and record the most important, historic, or fun places so if anyone has any suggestions of locations to include feel free to contact us!
We had a really fun little project a few weekends ago filming some green screen elements for the Flat Rock Playhouse’s presentation of Clint Holmes – My Own Song. I really enjoyed it because it had been a while since I had shot with green screen and even though it’s a pretty straight-forward process, it will always be interesting to me to see everything come out.
It was especially cool (for a tech nerds like us) to film green screen on a digital format since all my previous uses were on film. It’s almost funny how easy high-res formats like the Red cam now make it. There was always a bit of worrying and hoping that the colors and lighting would have enough separation and now there’s hardly any doubt – you know as soon as you shoot it!
We ended up using a pre-built and pre-lit screen so that eliminated a lot of the hassle. For those that don’t do a lot of screen shooting, it’s really important to have even lighting across the screen, and as you can see from the pictures below, ours still had a decent amount of light variation. Part of that comes from the fact that we needed a green screen stage that could encompass feet as well (which is fairly rare around here) but I guess it just goes to show how advanced software has become…
Everything turned out great and hardly took any time at all to pull the green out and replace it with an alpha channel for projection.
Samples below:
Congrats to the Playhouse as the production closes in on its final week!
Hey guys – Ben checking in. Gosh, so after many, many weeks and months of endless editing we’ve finally finished picture cutting. That’s a really important step in the life of the film because most of the work that goes on in post-production can’t really happen until editing has been finished. But anyway, now here we are… Now the movie is heading forward to get all the other fun elements added like visual effects, music, etc.
Editing for Sol was a really interesting process to watch how the movie developed and took shape as we went along. Any given movie normally goes through several cuts and ours was certainly no exception. I guess the main goal with each new cut is to make the film as clear and concise as possible while still maintaining a tone and a fluid pace. So it’s sort of a fun juggling act.
It’s pretty funny to look back on because every time we finished a new cut we were always positive that the movie was as fast and as fun as it could possibly be. But then a day or two later we’d watch the film again and get all sorts of ideas where to keep going. Running time for the film was never as much of a concern as I thought it would be. Normally it’s like pulling teeth to try and keep material short and sweet but I think that just happened naturally for Sol.
Our first cut was about two and a half hours – which is definitely longer than I had in mind – but was a great starting point as we began bringing the story together. After our first pass we brought the movie down to about 2 hours even, which was short enough for my taste, but each time we took another look at the film we always found new things to speed up to keep the story moving.
Eventually after about four cuts, and about as many private test screenings, we finally have the movie covering everything that’s essential and for the right amount of time – so it’s all set and done. Our final run time is right around an hour and forty minutes – which is right about what I’d originally hoped we’d hit if we were lucky. I’m really relieved because it was actually fun trimming the movie to that length! But anyway, with all that now finished, Sol is now getting the final elements brought in.
Hello, Everyone – Ben here. Picture editing on Sol has kept us all really busy for the last couple weeks so it’s been a while since we’ve had a chance to post. But it’s a very exciting time now because we’ve recently finished editing so now we can move on to the more developed aspects of post-production. With our picture now locked we can move on to elements like sound design, visual effects, and music! Coming down to the home stretch…
But now that Sol has been divided up and sent off to different teams to handle their sides of the work that frees us up a bit to take on some new projects. What a busy year this has turned into and it’s barely even spring! TV commercials, music videos, documentaries, TV shows, and visual effects tests – they’re all just a bit of what’s been keeping us around the office at all hours of the night.
Earlier in the year we had the adventure of going out and shooting a sample demo for a TV show we’ve been developing for a while. I can’t say too much about it yet but in short it’s a documentary adventure series that’s geared towards getting people outside and exploring nature. It’s called Trailblazers.
Heading up the mountain...
A couple of networks have requested promotional packages so we wanted to put together a presentation that summed up the visual style we had in mind for the show. It gave us a great chance to get a break from the editing room and hit the trails to film for a bit. The only problem was that it was during one of the longest cold snaps we’ve ever had around here. It ended up being about 18 degrees the day that we assembled our cast and crew to head up into the forests…
Our cast preps their gear...
It was a really interesting experience using the Red Camera in weather like that since every bit of moisture was freezing and the batteries tend not to love such low temperatures. It was a wonderful opportunity to see how versatile the camera can be, though. During production on Sol we dragged the camera through extreme heat, winds, SAND, rain, and even through the ocean but never in such cold conditions. I have to say I was really impressed with how it held up and the only difficulties we ever came across we’re more about frost bite than equipment malfunction.
A riverside chat...
We’re all really happy with how everything came out and it’s been very useful to have the additional material as we continue to develop the show. We’re still working on putting together the cast for the show so if there are any hikers out there that would like to be on camera feel free to contact us!
More info on Trailblazers to follow as things come together…
Exciting news! Ben and Dylan Correll (our editor) put together a little trailer to give you a taste of what’s to come! Alex Davis (our composer) even added music from the original score he’s composing. Everything looks great, a testament to all of the trials we had to go through in the OBX. We hope you all are as excited about it as we are!
Three weeks into production in the Outer Banks, and we had yet to film an ocean! So we said ”good-bye” to Debo and traded the dunes at Jockey’s Ridge for…the dunes at Hatteras National Seashore! What we lost in tons of sand…we gained in wind. (It’s just one thing after another with these islands!) And it just so happened that Daylight Savings Time began that week, so our call time became 6 a.m. in order to be ready before the sun came up so that we didn’t waste any daylight. Ahh…we did see some beautiful sunrises, though.
(Sunrise at Hatteras.)
(Micah had the right idea!)
(Lee)
(Chris tosses a sandbag.)
(Our main source of light and a huge budget-saver: mirror boards.)
(The camera team: Eric C., Nate, and Andrew)
(We may have had enough fun in the surf and sand after this trip…!)
