Digital Production Buzz

October 30, 2014

[Transcripts provided by Take 1 Transcription]

[

to listen to this show.]

HOSTS

Larry Jordan

Michael Horton

GUESTS

Darroch Greer, Co-Director/Producer“The Millionaires’ Unit”/em>

Larry O’Connor, President & Founder, Other World Computing

Sean A. Williams, Russell Frazier, and Sean Stack, VP Design, Senior Designer/Animator, and Colorist and Finishing Editor, Alpha Dogs, Inc.

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Digital Production Buzz

October 30, 2014

Hosts:                        Larry Jordan

Michael Horton

Guests:          Darroch Greer, Co-Director/Producer, “The Millionaires’ Unit”

Larry O’Connor, President & Founder, Other World Computing

Sean Williams, VP Design, AlphaDogs, Inc.

Russell Frazier, Senior Designer/Animator, AlphaDogs, Inc

Sean Stack, Colorist and Finishing Editor, AlphaDogs, Inc

 

Voiceover: The Digital Production Buzz is brought to you by Blackmagic Design, creators of the world’s highest quality solutions for the feature film, post production and television broadcast industries; and by shutterstock.com, a global marketplace for royalty free images and videos. With over two million royalty free HD and 4K video clips, Shutterstock helps you take your creative projects to the next level; and by Other World Computing, providing quality hardware solutions and extensive technical support to the worldwide computer industry since 1988.

Voiceover: Live from Ralph’s Maytag Museum and Podcast Studio in beautiful downtown Burbank, it’s the Digital Production Buzz.

Voiceover: Production, post production, distribution.

Voiceover: What’s really happening now and in your digital future?

Voiceover: The Buzz is live now.

Larry Jordan: And welcome to The Digital Production Buzz, the world’s longest running podcast for creative content producers covering media production, post production, marketing and distribution around the world. Hi, my name is Larry Jordan and joining us is our co-host, the stunningly handsome Mr. Mike Horton.

Mike Horton: Hello, Larry.

Larry Jordan: Michael, it’s good to see you back again.

Mike Horton: Well, I was here last week, remember?

Larry Jordan: I know, and I’ve missed you every day.

Mike Horton: I was wearing a different outfit.

Larry Jordan: I only see you every Thursday.

Mike Horton: I was unshaved and I looked different and my hair was shorter.

Larry Jordan: Yes, but you look very, very spiffy tonight.

Mike Horton: I do.

Larry Jordan: Yes, I tell you, it’s that suit that you have on.

Mike Horton: Hey, by the way, it’s going to rain.

Larry Jordan: No it isn’t.

Mike Horton: For those watching the drought in California, it’s going to rain tomorrow.

Larry Jordan: It is not going to rain tomorrow.

Mike Horton: It is going to rain tomorrow.

Larry Jordan: Water does not know how to fall down, it just knows how to evaporate up.

Mike Horton: Please rain, please.

Larry Jordan: We’ve got an interesting show.

Mike Horton: Oh, we’ve got a good show. This is going to be fun.

Larry Jordan: We’re going to start with Darroch Greer. He’s a documentary film maker who, along with his partner Ron King, just finished ‘The Millionaires’ Unit’, a film on naval aviators at the start of World War I. We begin tonight with a discussion with him of how they created the film.

Larry Jordan: Then, in our next segment, we talk with a part of the creative team that handled the visual effects and color grading. The company that did it is Burbank-based AlphaDogs and we’ll talk with Sean Williams, the VP of Design, Russell Frazier, the Senior Designer and Animator for the show, and Sean Stack, colorist and finishing editor.

Larry Jordan: One of the things I like best about this is we’re able to contrast the creative side with Darroch with the technical side of putting all the effects and the visuals together.

Mike Horton: Yes, I think this is the first time we’ve done this, isn’t it?

Larry Jordan: Mhmm, I can’t think of a time we’ve devoted the…

Mike Horton: I like this idea of just taking the creative side and the technical side and putting it all together and seeing how it all works; and I love the story. I love history.

Larry Jordan: Yes, and this one is, well, wait ‘til you hear about it because it’s really captivating.

Mike Horton: Oh, it is. It’s a story I’ve never heard of.

Larry Jordan: No. By the way, just as a reminder, we’re offering text transcripts for each show, courtesy of Take 1 Transcription. Now you can quickly scan or print the contents of each show, as well as listen to it. Transcripts are located on each show page. You can learn more at take1.tv and thanks, Take 1, for making it possible.

Larry Jordan: So what’s keeping you busy, Michael?

Mike Horton: I’m always keeping busy. Working on the next LAFCPUG meeting, which is going to be on November 19^th.

Larry Jordan: Oh, that’s with what’s his name, the editor.

Mike Horton: With Arthur Schmidt. In fact, I just had lunch with him yesterday. Oh, it was so much fun. He had such great stories. Unfortunately, we won’t be able to repeat those stories in public, but boy there were some good stories.

Larry Jordan: Those are the best stories, the ones you can’t repeat.

Mike Horton: Yes. Unfortunately, I said, “Well, we’re taping the meeting. Oh, well, can’t do that.”

Larry Jordan: What’s he going to be talking about?

Mike Horton: We’re going to be talking about all of his movies and we’re going to be talking about his creative process. We’re going to show clips and he’s going to talk about what he was thinking of when he put the clips together.

Larry Jordan: And what movies did he cut?

Mike Horton: Oh my goodness, ‘Back to the Future’, ‘Contact’, ‘Who Framed Roger Rabbit?’, ‘Castaway’, ‘Last of the Mohicans’, ‘Marathon Man’. The list goes on and on and on.

Larry Jordan: Ah, and when’s the meeting going to be?

Mike Horton: November 19^th.

Larry Jordan: Oh, that’s going to be fun. I’m definitely going to curl up in the fireplace.

Mike Horton: This is one of those once in a lifetime opportunities, because he doesn’t do this stuff.

Larry Jordan: That’s going to be very cool. Thinking of cool stuff, visit with us on Facebook, at digitalproductionbuzz.com; we’re on Twitter @DPBuZZ, and subscribe to our free weekly Buzz newsletter at digitalproductionbuzz.com.

Larry Jordan: We’re going to be back to learn about documentary film making and World War I, right after this.

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Larry Jordan: Darroch Greer is a documentary film maker and he and his directing partner, Roy King, just completed ‘The Millionaires’ Unit: US Naval Aviators in the First World War’. This documentary was made in conjunction with the Humanus Documentary Films Foundation and there’s a really cool story behind it. Welcome, Darroch, good to have you with us.

Darroch Greer: Thank you very much, Larry. How are you?

Larry Jordan: Well, I’m not sure. It depends upon how badly I’ve messed up your first name.

Darroch Greer: Quite all right, it happens all the time. It’s a Scottish spelling and it’s pronounced Darroch.

Larry Jordan: Darroch. Oh, I got the ‘k’ sound right, Darroch.

Darroch Greer: You did.

Larry Jordan: Well, ok, Darroch, thanks for joining us.

Darroch Greer: My pleasure.

Larry Jordan: What is ‘The Millionaires’ Unit?’

Darroch Greer: First of all, it was a book that came out in 2006 written by Mark Wortman and he lives in New Haven and it was about a group of Yale students who, in 1916, took it upon themselves to learn how to fly; and being Yale students, they were mostly rather wealthy young men and the young man that started it, F. Trubee Davison, was the son of JP Morgan’s Senior Business partner. So there was a lot of attention paid to him and somebody in the New York press, I can’t remember which newspaper, dubbed them The Millionaires’ Unit just in recording things that were happening while they were training. They had a sudden drop in one of their planes over the East River and they all left school. There were 29 in all and all but four eventually went overseas to serve with the Naval Air Reserve. They actually became the founding squadron of the Naval Air Reserve in World War I.

Larry Jordan: I was just counting this up on my fingers. World War I was before you were born.

 

Darroch Greer: Indeed.

Larry Jordan: What was it that caught your attention about this story?

Darroch Greer: It was actually my film making partner, Ron King. He’s an old friend of mine from college, we were roommates, and he walked into a bookstore one day and saw his grandfather’s picture on the cover of the book ‘The Millionaire’s Unit’. His grandfather was one of these pilots, from Ohio, and he called me up and said, “How do you make a documentary film?” and I read the book and the characters are spectacular. We quickly got in touch with a lot of descendents of these men, their families, and realized that there were a lot of private collections of photographs around and that at the Sterling Library at Yale were the F. Trubee papers, which not only had a slew of photographs, but hundreds of letters from these guys. I don’t want to take away a big surprise of the film, but Trubee, who started it, in his flight test to get his Navy wings, crashed and broke his back and could not go overseas and so everybody else who did go overseas wrote him letters. We very much wanted people to understand the milieu of where these guys lived, but also what it was like to fly World War I airplanes, all the while having it be a very character driven story. I got 400 pages of letters of these guys, who were writing home to Trubee and letting him know what was happening and where they were, and we pretty much tell the story from their point of view – their training, their shipping overseas, more training, their first times in battle and then the outcomes, which were pretty spectacular. It’s one of the great stories where the diversity of characters is all there. We just had to find out if we had the visual material.

Mike Horton: It was the characters that drew you to this story? It was the story that drew me to the story, the actual ‘what do we do with these new fangled things called airplanes’.

Darroch Greer: Exactly, exactly, but the characters are so vivid and they’re so excited about flying that they really describe it in detail, they really talk about their training and they talk about how these different types of planes flew, so that was the second part of it. Ron and I realized we had to film some planes and the first bit of money we got, we went out to the Old Rhinebeck Aerodrome up in the Hudson River Valley and had a very successful day shooting air to air with some German Fokkers. There was not a Sopwith Camel, which we really wanted, but there was a French SPAD and so we started putting together some footage, started showing it around. But the whole time we knew we needed to find a Sopwith Camel and we wanted one with an original engine. They’re rotary engines, the whole engine revolves with the propeller, and they have a very distinctive sound. There were really only three, maybe four, of them in the world and the one that finally worked out for us is in New Zealand. It’s at this exceptional place called the Vintage Aviator and they build exact replica World War I aircraft, many of them with original engines. We wrote to these guys, told them what we wanted to do, told them how much money we had and they said, “Come on out,” and we did.

Larry Jordan: I was about to ask, the book was written in 2006 and the film is coming out eight years later, what took you so long? But just finding the aircraft must have taken, like, a lifetime.

Darroch Greer: It did, but we also had to raise the money. We started a non-profit and we put together a board and we built a website and nobody knew who we were and so we sort of had to prove ourselves and let everybody know that we really cared about the story, cared about their relatives, the family members of these people, and we would take trips back east as we visited museums and, as we interviewed people for the film, we would have little fundraising get-togethers and show them several minutes of what we had been doing. We took a long time trying to engage the Navy and we spent a fair amount of time in the National Naval Aviation Museum in Pensacola, which is just a fantastic museum, and we developed a part of the film about the birth of naval aviation and how this group, who were known as the First Yale Unit, how they fit into that. But that was really tangential to the story, it’ll be on the DVD, but it really took us a while to hone the story through these characters while trying to put them into the context of what America was like 100 years ago, what World War I was and why America got to it so late and bringing all these things out as it went along. But mostly fundraising was what took us so long.

Larry Jordan: How did you decide to cast this? All stories are character driven, but really the contrast between a Yale student and the war is really a special moment which makes this story so captivating. How did you find your cast?

Darroch Greer: We really spent a lot of time reading their letters and looking at their photographs and they’re very distinctive people. Robert Lovett, who went on to become President Truman’s Acting Secretary of State and Secretary of Defense during the Korean War, was very much an avuncular patrician type of guy, very dignified and held together. Da Gates, who was shot down and became a prisoner of war, was captain of the Yale football team and he was a very shy, large man. They called him The Indian, he was very dark featured. Dave Engels, who became the only ace for the Navy in World War I, he was the first naval ace, he was kind of a wiry, skinny guy, very energetic, very enthusiastic; and then you have the poet. He wasn’t really a poet, but he was Archibald MacLeish’s brother and he was a very sensitive guy and didn’t believe anybody took him seriously and really didn’t find himself until he started flying. He was roundly believed to be the best pilot from the Yale Unit and he did not survive the war. It’s really quite an amazing cast; and then our narrator is the actor Bruce Dern, and it turns out that Bruce is the grand-nephew of Kenny MacLeish and came from that MacLeish family from the north shore of Chicago, so he came in as our narrator, which was a nice synchronistic element to the film.

Mike Horton: Wow. Let’s get back to that fundraising, which is always the tough part of anything. You talk to any film maker, what’s the hardest part about making a film? Getting the money. It’s getting the money. What was your background prior to this? This isn’t about just a great story. People have to trust you.

Darroch Greer: Right. I’m a documentary film maker and I mostly work in American history, a lot of it 19^th century history. I’ve done several things on Native Americans and Native America and several things around the Civil War. For five years, I worked as a researcher in the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum and so I feel very much at home in history. I really didn’t know much about World War I and that was incredibly exciting to me, to fill in that gap and black hole in my knowledge of American history.

Mike Horton: And there aren’t a lot of documentaries done on World War I. Why? That’s the Great War.

Larry Jordan: Yes, but World War II is more recent and a bigger war, I think.

Mike Horton: Yes, I know, but they still do more on the Civil War and that’s still several generations away. I don’t understand.

Darroch Greer: We got into the war very late and World War I, which I would argue is the more important of the two world wars, was really very much eclipsed by World War II. World War II is five times bigger in terms of men and munitions, but World War I was the end of three world empires and it changed the map of Europe. It’s really what allowed America to come to the forefront as the leading power on the world stage in the 20^th century, because in Europe, even though we sort of invented aviation and motion pictures, even, really because of court battles, because of the Wright brothers and Thomas Edison, Europe and France in particular surged ahead in aviation and photography, plus art and music. Europe was really exploding with all sorts of cultural diversity by 1914 and they all decided to go to war and they just destroyed it all. We were able to step up, we were a younger country and we still had plenty of resources, but that really changed the whole footing of the 20^th century. World War II was really just a continuation of those same problems and grievances that people went to war for. Also, there’s more film and photography of World War II, so it’s an easier story to tell.

Larry Jordan: That gets me to, I think, a very interesting question, which is you did a lot of recreations for your film, although they’ve been declining in popularity with television networks. Did you make a conscious decision to recreate, or did you just not have any other visuals to work with?

Darroch Greer: I actually don’t like recreations in documentaries and the stuff that we recreated was shots of hands writing letters and we got a lot of props and shot in a lot of different locations. These guys trained on the north shore of Long Island, then they trained in Palm Beach, Florida, then they went to England and then to France and they were in Dunkirk.  You never see, except for when we introduced the Sopwith Camel, re-enactors pretending to be these guys except hands writing letters in these milieus that we set up. But we have so many photographs of them and there really is a lot of good footage and I had to say we spent a lot of money licensing very high quality footage from the Imperial War Museum in London and British Pathe, Gaumant Pathe in France, gorgeous black and white photography that we had scanned at 2K, so it really looks quite good. Since a lot of our film is about naval aviation, which a lot of people don’t focus on, you’re going to see a lot of very interesting flying boats, the seaplanes, the ones that have hulls that look like ships that take off from and land on the water. In that way, I think it’s quite original.

Larry Jordan: How big a crew did you use to shoot this?

 

Darroch Greer: It was pretty much Ron and me. Ron is more the cameraman and very much more the technician and more the writer/researcher, but I always went along and shot as well. I went to Europe by myself for about five weeks and I used a Canon 60D and I had to track down the graves and a couple of cemeteries of these guys and I filmed in Dunkirk and I filmed in Felixstowe, England and Belgium. I filmed on the North Sea. I took a ferry ride to go into the harbor to see the mole Zeebrugge, where the German submarines were kept, and that was very exciting. But Ron really arranged our shoot in New Zealand and we rented two RED cameras down there. Ron shot from the ground and we hired a gentleman, Richard Bluck, who’s a second unit DP for Peter Jackson, and he did our shooting from a Cessna we rented and from a helicopter. We ran into a wonderful man, John Coyle, who invented the shot over mount and it’s a rather sophisticated, pretty cutting edge mount that we had to harness onto the bottom of the helicopter and then work from the inside of the helicopter with a joystick. So we got up there with those airplanes and we were there in New Zealand’s fall and there was some wind, and some rain, and clouds, and rainbows and we got quite a variety of shots. We spent about five days shooting.

Larry Jordan: Before we run out of time, because we’ve only got a few minutes left, as you look back on this eight year journey you’ve been on, what would you do differently now that you’ve got the experience of having done it?

Darroch Greer: Boy, that’s a very good question, Larry. What would I do differently? It’s been such a great journey. We didn’t waste some time trying to bite off too much of the story. We wanted this to be a big, epic film, and it is a two hour film and it really takes that to tell it, but we really did try to fill out all of naval aviation and more of World War I than we should have bit off and it took us a while to hone down our story, to have it be character driven, and we believe it works very well now. We’ve just finished the final edit and we’re starting to make our deal with PBS and look for distribution.

Larry Jordan: For people who want more information, where can they go on the web to learn more?

Darroch Greer: Millionairesunit.org. The name of the film is ‘The Millionaires’ Unit: US Naval Aviators in the First World War’.

Mike Horton: It’s a great story.

Darroch Greer: It is a great story. Thank you for your interest.

Mike Horton: Well, I’m looking forward to this.

Larry Jordan: When are you going to release it so Mike and I can sit and enjoy it? Hurry up!

Darroch Greer: That’s a very good question. I’m going to New York in two weeks and we need to work that out with PBS. I don’t know if PBS is going to wait until 2017, which is the big centennial of when America, it’s the 100 year anniversary of when American joined.

Larry Jordan: They can run it twice.

Mike Horton: Exactly.

Darroch Greer: Exactly, exactly, and we’re going to get it out on DVD and we’re putting together the supplemental material now. We want to get it out as soon as we can.

Larry Jordan: For somebody who’s interested in history, this has to be a dream project, because every time you turn around there’s some new piece of history to discover.

Darroch Greer: That’s exactly what it is. I love doing the research, and I love to travel and I got to go to Europe and New Zealand and a lot of trips to the East Coast, which I just love – I used to live in New York.

Mike Horton: Life is good.

Darroch Greer: And digging into the archives, which I just love. The national archives and the Library of Congress are just these gifts to the American people and it’s there for us to use.

Larry Jordan: Oh, that’s very true.

Mike Horton: The story of ‘We’ll show you what to do with these airplanes’.

Larry Jordan: The website is millionairesunit.org and Darroch Greer is the documentary film maker who, along with is partner Ron King, created ‘The Millionaires’ Unit: Naval Aviators in the First World War’. Darroch, thanks for joining us today.

Darroch Greer: My pleasure. You’re welcome. Thanks for your interest.

Larry Jordan: Bye bye.

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Larry Jordan: Larry O’Connor founded Other World Computing, which we all know as OWC, in 1988. Their website is macsales.com. They’ve been supporting all things Mac for more than 25 years and were recently recognized as one of the fastest growing privately held companies in the Chicago area. But what I like is that Larry understands storage. Hello, Larry, good to have you with us.

Larry O’Connor: Yes, likewise, Larry. Thanks for having me.

Larry Jordan: It is my pleasure. Just recently, and Michael is looking at his calendar to look up the exact date, Apple released its latest operating system, Yosemite, and there’s some news from a storage point of view. What’s happening?

Larry O’Connor: I’ll just say right off the cuff that 10.10 is probably the best upgrade that I’ve enjoyed out of Apple in a long time. It was not a big Mavericks fan but 10.10 has been a fantastic upgrade, a smooth upgrade, and we’re really enjoying the benefits of it. One thing that certainly came out of the 10.10 update was a change in policy to handling, not to be overly technical, but text edits and the impact from this change happens to impact a very large number of people who are using SSDs with a TRIM enabler.

Larry Jordan: Wait, wait, are using SSDs with a what?

Larry O’Connor: A TRIM enabler.

Mike Horton: What’s a TRIM enabler?

Larry Jordan: I haven’t seen scissors around my computer in a long time. What’s this?

Larry O’Connor: Indeed. Most solid state drives depend upon OS side management for the optimal placement of files and effectively keeping the system in sync with where available space is and where data can best be stored, where the free blocks are. In the event of not having Trim, that resource, that management is put entirely on the SSD itself. Years ago, SSDs in a Mac environment, before any TRIM support existed, performed really poorly. They worked really great initially and then within just a few months they would significantly slow down as things became, for lack of a better term, grossly mismanaged and out of optimal organization. OS side TRIM puts the burden on the OS to keep things in check and allows the SSD to primarily be there as a storage device. There’s interim garage collection, other things that go on, but TRIM is something that a lot of SSDs require the OS to manage, and it also keeps right amplification low. And right amplification just simply is a measure of how many blocks after you’ve written to the drive for the actual data to be stored, kind of like a Point A to B thing. If, as the crow flies, you could travel a mile to get to your destination, the best route would be no more than a mile. In the case of certain drives, they have a wormhole that opens up and they can get there traveling less than a mile in distance. With right amplification, there may be a mile of actual distance to travel, but you can end up traveling three, five, ten or 20 miles to get to the destination. In the case of…, just like on a car’s tire, that’s wear on the device, wear on the storage medium, which reduces its life.

Larry Jordan: Ok, take a deep breath here for a second. So there’s this function called TRIM which does file management on the SSD drives, gets rid of the stuff we don’t want, organizes the stuff we do want, so what does Yosemite have to do with all of this?

Larry O’Connor: A lot of drives that require TRIM really depend upon the OS to take care of the TRIM functions so they can do the rest of the work. Yosemite disables TRIM for non-Apple drives in a way that’s hard to work around. There have been hacks – effectively it’s a hack, for lack of a better term it’s software that’s a hack that then allows you to enable TRIM for non-Apple drive – but Yosemite changed some security settings and effectively took away that option. In fact, if you have a TRIM enabler operating on your 10.9 install, when you go to upgrade to 10.10, the first time you boot, it actually hangs up during the boot process because it’s not a recognized software edit.

 

Mike Horton: Does this happen to you a lot when we have OS upgrades?

Larry O’Connor: Typically not.

Mike Horton: Or is it just that this is an aberration and that’s it?

Larry O’Connor: This is kind of an aberration. On the one side, I think it’s wrong that Apple doesn’t support third party TRIM. They should. On the other side, we got into this marketplace, got into solid state storage ourselves, because the SAN 4 solution, the … controller that we were to build our products with offered a solution that didn’t require any OS side TRIM, that did all the management internally by design, as opposed to having a dependency by design outside of the device. Our products never required TRIM. In fact, there’s demonstratively no real benefit to enabling Trim, to hacking on Trim, to using the OS side TRIM with our product. I must say, it’s nice to be able to say, “Well, our stuff doesn’t need Trim.” On the other side, I support upgrades, end user upgradability and certainly choice in terms of what you put in your system. Of course, we’d love to see you always use OWC stuff, but nonetheless Apple’s not going to allow people to make this particular edit. It’s relatively a small percentage that are doing this and it would be a nice thing that Apple just support third party TRIM in the first place. Windows has for years.

Larry Jordan: Wait a minute. I’m trying to decide exactly how panicked I should be about this. So because TRIM is not enabled, are you saying that every SSD which is not made by Apple will lock up when you go from OS9 to OS10? Or only boot disks? Or only exterior drives?

Larry O’Connor: It only affects your boot drive and only if you’re using a hack, a TRIM enabler, which Apple never supported in the first place.

Mike Horton: Most of us don’t even know that.

Larry O’Connor: Yes, how do you know…

Larry O’Connor: Well, you should know that. Well, I guess there are two things. If you put a third party drive and it doesn’t have a SAN 4 controller, whether it’s performance or drive longevity, you already have a less than optimal situation. Most people who are upgrading do a bit of research and they are aware of TRIM enablers. Everybody’s talked about TRIM enablers, it’s been a couple of years since the first TRIM enablers came out that effectively used Apple’s internal TRIM for non-Apple drives. But you would know if you put a TRIM enabler on your system.

Mike Horton: Well, all I know is when I buy a product from OWC, which I do all the time and everybody I know does, that’s just like a no brainer, you make good stuff, I buy an SSD drive, I install it. I don’t know what the hell it’s got in it.

Larry O’Connor: Well, that’s the beauty. In fact, we’ve blogged about this multiple times because some people are like, “Oh, I’ve got to have TRIM.” We’ve made it very clear that you don’t need a TRIM enabler for their drives. We don’t recommend installing or activating. You don’t have to do anything with our drives, you’re correct. Our drives, you plug them in and go.

Mike Horton: I never saw the word ‘TRIM’, I never looked for the word ‘TRIM’. I still don’t even know what the word ‘TRIM’ means. I just bought the damn drive and it worked.

Larry O’Connor: That’s the way it’s supposed to work and that’s the way it still works.

Mike Horton: Ok.

Larry O’Connor: If you have an OWC drive, nothing to worry about with 10.10.

Larry Jordan: Ok, but for people who don’t have OWC drives, there may be a problem if you’re running a third party SSD drive as a boot drive – not as an external drive, you’re saying external drives are fine, it’s just the boot drive – how does somebody find out if they have a TRIM enabler or not? Because if you asked me, and I pay attention to this stuff, I would have no clue where to look.

Mike Horton: Yes, I wouldn’t know.

Larry O’Connor: You have to manufacture the drive… There’s one particular drive out there that I know actually provides a TRIM enabler with their solution. If you had to install software for the drive to operate properly, then you probably have a TRIM enabler. If you bought the drive and you read somewhere that you shouldn’t use a TRIM enabler and you download and install such a product, you would know that you’ve got this. It doesn’t magically appear on the OS, you have to install it and enable it. In fact, if you were using a TRIM enabler, every time you install a new OS version, even going from 10.9.1 to .2 to .3, any new iteration, you end up having to reinstall the enabler. So if you’re using an enabler you know about it. It would just be a surprise for a lot of people, whereas if you had an enabler with 10.9.5, whatever your last OS was, upgrading from that version to 10.10, that software stays put and…

Mike Horton: Ok, I’m not using an enabler.

Larry Jordan: So it sounds like the answer is before you upgrade from OS 10.9 to OS 10.10, if you’re running an SSD drive as your boot drive, contact the manufacturer of the SSD drive to make sure that it’s compatible with 10.10 before you upgrade. Is that a true statement?

Larry O’Connor: They may have problems. They’re probably confused a little bit. It won’t be a compatibility issue by any means. If you’re using a non-Apple drive on your Macintosh, by default there is no TRIM support. Apple does not recognize non-Apple drives. It doesn’t matter, even from a standpoint of a hard drive, Apple really only recognizes drives that Apple shipped you from the factory, otherwise they don’t support such drives and in this case there’s no TRIM support enabled. The compatibility is the same. For optimum performance with a lot of third party drives, you need to enable TRIM. On the Mac, the only way to enable TRIM is with a third party TRIM enabler. If you don’t enable TRIM, long term there are performance issues.

Larry Jordan: Ok, but Larry, hold it, time out. I just need a short answer. There is a chance that, when you upgrade from 10.9 to 10.10, your SSD drive won’t work because of the differences in the operating system and you should therefore check with the manufacturer of your SSD drive before upgrading. True or false?

Larry O’Connor: Well, I guess I’d take false with the exception of one – the manufacturer’s not asking you to install this third party software. Compatibility with the physical drive itself isn’t affected by the OS update. What’s affected by the OS update is a particular piece of enhancement software that’s out there, it’s freeware, it was put out there to enable TRIM and bring the benefits of TRIM to non-Apple drives.

Larry Jordan: So you wouldn’t get this TRIM enabler from the manufacturer of the SSD drive, you’d have to search around on the web to download it as a separate entity?

Larry O’Connor: Correct. There is one exception to that rule. One particular manufacturer did promote a TRIM enabler with their drive, but other than that one exception, none of those manufacturers are promoting any kind of third party software on the Mac. They really don’t even talk about it for all effective purposes.

Larry Jordan: Okidoke. Larry, for people who want to learn more about the products that you’ve got, where do they go on the web?

Larry O’Connor: They can go to www.macsales.com. If they go to our blog site, rocketyard.com, we also have a lot of information that goes into better detail. It may be a little less confusing than I spoke about. By no means do I want to scare anybody in terms of drive compatibility but…

Mike Horton: You don’t have to worry about me.

Larry Jordan: The website is macsales.com. Larry O’Connor is the CEO of Other World Computing. Larry, thanks for joining us today. Bye bye.

Larry O’Connor: You’re very welcome. Thanks for having me.

 

Larry Jordan: When you’re working with media, one thing is essential – your computer needs peak performance. However, when it comes to upgrading your Mac, there are so many different options to choose from that the process can be confusing. That’s why Other World Computing carries the best upgrades that let your computer’s performance and storage grow as your needs grow. Since 1988, OWC has become one of the most trusted names in quality hardware and comprehensive support to the worldwide computer industry.

Larry Jordan: With an extensive online catalog of Mac, iPhone and iPad enhancement products, as well as a dedicated team of knowledgeable experts providing first rate tech support, OWC has everything you need to take your current system to the next level. Whether you need to maximize your system’s memory, add blazing speed or enhance reliability, look no further than the friendly experts at OWC. Learn more by visiting macsales.com. That’s macsales.com.

 

Larry Jordan: We began our show talking with the director of ‘The Millionaires’ Unit’. Now we get to talk to part of the creative team that handled the visual effects and the color grading. The company is Burbank-based AlphaDogs and Sean Williams is the VP of Design. Hello, Sean.

Sean Williams: Hi, Larry.

Larry Jordan: I need to have you get closer to your phone, because sitting next to you is the Senior Designer and Animator, Russell Frazier. Hello, Russell.

Russell Frazier: Hello, Larry.

Larry Jordan: Good to have you; and calling in as well is the Colorist and Finishing Editor, Sean Stack. Hello, Sean.

Sean Stack: Hello, Larry, thank you for having me.

Larry Jordan: It’s good to have all three of you on.

Mike Horton: This is really cool. There’s going to be five people talking at the same time. It’s going to be awesome.

Larry Jordan: And we can all hear each other, which just amazes me as well. Sean Williams, because we’ve got two Seans – this is going to be impossible for all of us – Sean Williams, how would you describe the overall challenges that were inherent in working on The Millionaires’ Unit from AlphaDogs’ point of view?

Sean Williams: Oh boy, that’s a big question. We may have to break it down between the three of us, since we did work on different shots. Certainly, Sean Stack had the bulk of the film to work on because he worked on every single shot in terms of the color grading; and then Russell and I worked on a number of visual effects shots to enhance particular key scenes.

Larry Jordan: Ok, we’ll let Sean Stack defend himself in a few minutes. Let’s talk about the design, the animation and the visual effects and we’ll talk about color grading in a minute, so tackle just your part of it.

Russell Frazier: I would say that one of the great things about this project was that it wasn’t so much a challenge as just a great pleasure to work on this particular topic. When Ron King and Darroch first walked in and talked about the subject, I immediately mentioned that, as a kid, I had gone to a place called Old Rhinebeck Aerodrome and seen World War I planes fly as a kid and they said, “Yeah, we shot there,” and we immediately had a rapport. It was great to see the Sopwith Camel, the SPAD, the Albatrosses, all those old things come back in my memory, so it was a very vivid subject and quite a pleasure for me to work on.

Larry Jordan: Russell, what did they ask you to do?

Russell Frazier: My big thing was a night raid on the port city of Bruges, which was actually the first combat mission of one of the main subjects of the film and, like much of the film, it was visuals to go with a letter that he had written describing the event. There was such excitement in the letter that one really had to pump up the visuals to match that, which made it pretty interesting because you weren’t necessarily going for realism, you were going for his experience as he would have seen it. So the lights are slightly brighter, the darkness is darker, the mysteries are more mysterious and all that, just making it as vivid as his description made it sound.

Larry Jordan: Sean Williams, you’re the VP of Design and, I suspect – and correct me if I’m wrong – that one of the roles you serve is the interface between the company and the film maker. How do you work with a film maker to minimize problems and maximize communication? In other words, what do you recommend they do before they even come to you?

Sean Williams: The most important thing is to have, if at all possible, a face to face meeting. We definitely like sitting down with the clients so that we can discuss the project, get a feel for each other. I tend to find that doing that only through email or over the phone can be a challenge sometimes. It’s great to be able to sit down and establish a rapport, get to understand where the client’s coming from, figure out what they’re looking for and then to start working from that point. That’s definitely very key.

Larry Jordan: So then what’s your role, Sean, with the process? I’m avoiding Sean Stack, and we still love you, but hold on, we’re going to get to you in a minute. This is Sean Williams. How do you describe your role within this process?

Sean Williams: I don’t put myself as some kind of intermediary between them and Russell, for instance. We definitely try to break down a project into the shots that are needed. We tend to split it into different groups and then I would tackle the shots that I’m working on, Russell works on his shots and then we collaborate and confer with each other if we’re sharing a particular shot. But we tend to have as direct communication as possible. I find it’s best not to pass through one person, pass through another person. It’s best to just have a direct communication with the client whenever possible.

Larry Jordan: Russell, when you were setting up the visual effects pipeline, how did you design the workflow? How did stuff get processed?

Russell Frazier: We had Sean Stack in on it from the very beginning as far as the overall look is concerned. The shots I was going to do had to match other shots in the movie of the same battle. We did not do every shot for that sequence, and so Sean Stack created some visual references for us and I matched my backgrounds and such with those references. It was done in After Effects and essentially we would render out to ProRes and Sean Stack would drop them into the cut. One interesting thing about it was that the shots I worked on and that we worked on in general had to match a patchwork of other sources. They had historical footage, they had still photographs which had to be sort of animated into the scene and so the look was basically largely determined by the source and the surrounding shots. But yes, Sean Stack actually had a great deal to do with it from the start as far as getting the look that we would work with.

Larry Jordan: That is a perfect cue to go to the other Sean in our conversation, Sean Stack. Tell us about how you worked with the director to create a look for the film.

Sean Stack: The first thing was knowing that these battle scenes that Russell and Sean were talking about were night time and there were also some daytime scenes of battle recreations that they were doing. The directors came in and we sat down with the footage they shot and tried to set a look that would match the surrounding clips of archival footage that existed already and come up with a feel that wasn’t realistic as much as it was like a hyper-realism, because it’s coming from these letters and so we just wanted the viewer to feel what was going on more than actually trying to create something so real looking, even though it is fairly realistic looking. It was more going for a feel, so we sat down with that footage that was going to be treated first and went into Resolve. We set a look and I exported a 4K file for Sean and Russell to work with, in the event that they needed to push in or move things around to make their graphics work. They had the ability to reframe and resize and then we finished in HD in the end, but having that 4K resolution from a shooter’s perspective is great to be able to play with it a little more.

Larry Jordan: How would you describe the look? Is it all desaturated romantic? What was the idea you had in your head?

Sean Stack: For overall picture or for the scenes that were treated in graphics?

Larry Jordan: Overall picture. However you want to answer the question, but I’m sure you had a concept in your mind of how you wanted this to look. What was the concept?

Sean Stack: Yes. When I first sat down and saw the cut and got excited about working on it, one of the first scenes is this aerial footage of the Sopwith Camels some of the other older aircraft flying over New Zealand. Immediately, I’m like, “Wow, I want to work on this so bad,” and we didn’t want to oversaturate the images, because we wanted the planes to speak for themselves. Throwing too much color at it would do too much to it, so even though the landscape was so beautiful, we desaturated that a little bit so the planes would stand out against the background. Then, with the archival footage, again, I think that’s best left to a minimum. If there was shadow detail that I can bring out from whatever we got from the historical archives, then I tried to bring the detail out and not go too far with it. That was my take on that.

Mike Horton: Did you have to clean up the archival footage at all? Was it damaged at all?

Sean Stack: Minimal, actually. When I saw it in the offline edit, most of the footage that was cut in was SD samples downloaded from the internet from the archive sites cut into the show and I thought, “Oh my goodness, this is going to be all kinds of frame rates, all kinds of frame sizes. In the online, trying to get it to look good, it’s going to be a problem,” and then magically they were delivered in 23.98 HD. As Darroch was saying earlier in your show, they were going for the best quality they could find and I was so relieved to see it come in looking so good.

Mike Horton: Yes, he said he scanned it at 2K or something like that, he was able to do that.

Sean Stack: Yes, much of it was really well done, so I was just relieved to see it looking so good so I could just focus on, “Ok, well, what do we want to do with the color? And is there detail in some of their faces that we can bring out, or detail in the airplanes and underneath the airplane where it’s all shadowy there might be something there.” In many cases, we were able to pull a little bit more out of it, which was fantastic.

Larry Jordan: Russell, let’s switch back to doing effects. You needed to add billowing smoke or searchlights and tracer fire. How did you add those elements?

Russell Frazier: For the searchlights, basically it was a two and a half D scene set up in After Effects and the terrain we were flying over was a photograph that existed of approximately the right location, a port city in Europe, and to that I added a little life, some moonlight glinting on the water and also the searchlights themselves, which were 3D shapes in After Effects which had an amount of blur and other things necessary to make them seem like beams of light passing through atmosphere. It was just a matter of setting up a two and a half D scene in After Effects and flying through it. The shot you mentioned with the billowing smoke, I added much less to that. It was basically live footage of a landing airplane. There was sort of swerving around and the camera was shaking a bit, so the only trick there was tracking both the scene and the airplane so that the smoke wouldn’t seem to be in a different environment than what it was trying to follow, and then doing a bit of roto to keep the smoke behind the airplane instead of in front of it and that was about it. Sean Williams worked on the various tracer fire shots.

Larry Jordan: So Sean Williams, how did you do tracers?

Sean Williams: The tracers were interesting. There were two different set-ups. There was basically a POV of a pilot flying one of these re-enactment scenes – I believe those were the shots from New Zealand, some beautiful footage – and Darroch and Ron wanted to add just a little bit of drama to some of these scenes so they weren’t just shots of the planes flying around. They wanted to have a hint of the actual combat going on, so again there was either POV shots of a pilot being shot at, or several shots were the perspective of another pilot seeing a battle between two other planes. It was a matter of doing a bit of tracking, some rotoscoping, trying to make sure that muzzle flashes and tracers didn’t float differently than the planes; and then with the POV shots, we added a bit of fisheye to the lens. The pilot was wearing, I think, some helmet mounted cameras so you could actually see him looking around as he’s flying forward. I added tracers that were going past him and he would turn around and look behind him and see the plane that was following, so I had to match the curvature of the lens a little bit. I think that worked out pretty well. It was a bit of a challenge but not terribly difficult.

Mike Horton: All right, tell the truth, are there tracer plug-ins?

Sean Williams: No.

Mike Horton: Well, there should be.

Sean Williams: In fact initially, one challenge was to figure out what these things would look like. We went online and looked at a bunch of historical footage, but that was all from World War II and so, rather than trying to match the World War II look, which may or may not be that accurate for these older planes, we went back to the initial letters and diaries from these pilots where they describe the color and the feel of these flashes going by and really tried to use those as a jumping off point to get the look.

Larry Jordan: Russell, you mentioned something about an unlocked timeline. What does that mean and what’s the implication?

Russell Frazier: I do not know.

Larry Jordan: Ok, I will take my notes outback and speak strongly to them. Sean Stack, when you were doing the color grading, what software were you using to keep track of all your shots and get them to look good?

Sean Stack: I was using both DaVinci Resolve and Apple Color.

Larry Jordan: Why both?

Sean Stack: Why both? Well, when I was pulling the 4K footage initially and setting the look, that was RED footage that was shot in New Zealand, it was just so easy to import it into Resolve with the R3Ds and go for it. But then, knowing that, as you mentioned, the timeline was not locked, they were still editing the picture and trying to finish. So when they got the first third of it locked, they sent that over and then there were gaps in that because they were still waiting for the archival footage to be delivered and to come in and be cut in by the offline editor and then sent over again. So working in color and the Final Cut 7 color workflow is just so solid, I didn’t have to really prep anything. There were a lot of still images, there were a lot of mismatched frame rates footage and it was simpler for the workflow. I ended up having about ten projects that finally got melded into one timeline.

Larry Jordan: So I asked the right question of the wrong person. The unlocked timeline should not have been a Russell question, it should have been Sean Stack question and it means that the editors were still editing while you’re doing color grading? That must have driven you nuts.

Sean Stack: It’s not the normal way to work. It’s not the recommended way to work, but it was the situation. We were under a deadline to meet a screening that they had set up at an air show and we were not going to miss that deadline. I sat back and said, “Well, let’s do whatever it takes,” so that was a matter of me communicating with their offline editor, their conform editor. She was wonderful and I think our back and forth of, “I’m going to send you this and it’s on this track. Cut it in,” that was critical. Without proper communication, all is lost.

Larry Jordan: Yes, very true. Sean, very quickly before we run out of time, what’s the one or two tips you want to give a film maker who’s coming in for color grading? What must they know to help you?

Sean Stack: Know where you want to go with the color. Be able to describe the feel of your film and the emotions you’re trying to communicate and maybe the arc of the story so that I can be on the same page with the film makers. I need to know, of course, what cameras you shot on and the frame rates and all the technical details, but anybody can work on technical details. I’m interested in the art of the film maker. When they come in, I want to know what they’re about. Like Sean was saying earlier, sitting down with the film makers in person, I agree, that’s the best way to get on the same page and know that they feel comfortable working with you because they can see that you’re getting what they’re saying.

Larry Jordan: Sean Williams, for people who want to learn more about what AlphaDogs can do for them, where can they go on the web to learn more?

Sean Williams: They can find out more about us at alphadogs.tv.

Larry Jordan: That’s alphadogs.tv. Sean Williams is the VP of Design; Russell Frazier, the Senior Designer and Animator; and Sean Stack, Colorist and Finishing Editor for the film ‘The Millionaires’ Unit’. Gentlemen, thank you so much for joining us today.

Sean Williams: Thank you, Larry.

Sean Stack: Thank you.

Mike Horton: Thanks, guys.

Larry Jordan: Take care, bye bye.

Larry Jordan: Michael, now I want to see that film.

Mike Horton: Yes, so do I. The topic is awesome. There’s not enough World War I history out there.

Larry Jordan: Well, first there isn’t enough.

Mike Horton: World War I history, there’s not enough out there.

Larry Jordan: You’re just revisiting your childhood is the problem; and the other is I think the reason World War II wins more is there’s just so much more footage of it. Look at how much they had to recreate – not recreate, but they had to work with letters and they had to work with still images. They didn’t have as much film.

Mike Horton: Yes, I don’t know, there’s just not a lot of interest. There’s not a lot of interest in the Korean War, and when we talk about presidents during wars, who even remembers Wilson? He was the President during World War I. We remember Roosevelt, we remember Lincoln, we remember Washington. Wilson? No, not a chance.

Larry Jordan: And who was it that said ‘Peace in our time’? Remember that?

Mike Horton: Larry Jordan?

Larry Jordan: No, no, no, no. Just assessing your history.

Mike Horton: Peace in our time.

Larry Jordan: Neville Chamberlain, but it was for World War II.

Mike Horton: Oh, for goodness’ sakes.

Larry Jordan: Right person, wrong war. Forget that.

Mike Horton: That’s not even American.

Larry Jordan: I want to thank our guests this week: Darroch Greer, documentary film maker; Larry O’Connor, the CEO of Other World Computing; and, from AlphaDogs, Sean Williams, Russell Frazier and Sean Stack.

Larry Jordan: There’s lot of history in our industry, as well as in the world. It’s all posted to our website at digitalproductionbuzz.com – hundreds of past shows…

Mike Horton: Hundreds.

Larry Jordan: …and thousands of interviews, all searchable and all available to you. You can talk with us on Twitter, @DPBuZZ and Facebook, at digitalproductionbuzz.com. Music on The Buzz is provided by Smartsound, text transcripts provided by Take 1 Transcription and you can email us at info@digitalproductionbuzz.

Mike Horton: And we will get back to you.

Larry Jordan: Our producer is Cirina Catania, engineer Megan Paulos. On behalf of Mike Horton, my name is Larry Jordan and thanks for listening to The Digital Production Buzz.

Mike Horton: Goodbye, everybody.

Voiceover: The Digital Production Buzz was brought to you by Blackmagic Design, creators of the world’s highest quality solutions for the feature film, post production and television broadcast industries; and by shuttterstock.com, a global marketplace for royalty free images and videos. With over two million royalty free HD and 4K video clips, Shutterstock helps you take your creative projects to the next level; and by Other World Computing, providing quality hardware solutions and extensive technical support to the worldwide computer industry since 1988.

Digital Production Buzz

October 16, 2014

[Transcripts provided by Take 1 Transcription]

[

to listen to this show.]

HOSTS

Larry Jordan

Michael Horton

GUESTS

Danny Manus, CEO/Script Consultant, No Bull Script Consulting

Dan Montgomery, CEO, Imagine Products, Inc

Rob Bessette, Colorist, Finish Boston

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Voiceover: The Digital Production Buzz is brought to you by Blackmagic Design, creators of the world’s highest quality solutions for the feature film, post production and television broadcast industries; and by shutterstock.com, a global marketplace for royalty free images and videos. With over two million royalty free HD and 4K video clips, Shutterstock helps you take your creative projects to the next level; and by Other World Computing, providing quality hardware solutions and extensive technical support to the worldwide computer industry since 1988.

Voiceover: Live from Ralph’s Maytag Museum and Podcast Studio in beautiful downtown Burbank, it’s the Digital Production Buzz.

Voiceover: Production, post production, distribution.

Voiceover: What’s really happening now and in your digital future?

Voiceover: The Buzz is live now.

Larry Jordan: And welcome to The Digital Production Buzz, the world’s longest running podcast for creative content producers covering digital media production, post production, marketing and distribution around the world. Hi, my name is Larry Jordan and joining us, finally back from the wilds of the Pacific North West, Nanuk of the north, Mr. Mike Horton.

Mike Horton: Thank you, Larry. I went up to Mount Rainier.

Larry Jordan: We missed you last week.

Mike Horton: Well, I didn’t.

Larry Jordan: You could find you easily.

Mike Horton: I went up to Mount Rainier. It was so much fun. It was so awesome, oh my gosh.

Larry Jordan: Was it raining?

Mike Horton: No, it was absolutely gorgeous.

Larry Jordan: What’s the sense of going to Seattle and not see rain?

Mike Horton: You know what?

Larry Jordan: It’s like a wasted trip.

Mike Horton: I didn’t see rain the entire time.

Larry Jordan: Oh, that’s just a wasted trip.

Mike Horton: I know. I would have gone out and just put my head in it.

Larry Jordan: You know, some of us could use showers too, I can see why.

Mike Horton: Yes, it’s been three years with no rain here.

Larry Jordan: Welcome back.

Mike Horton: Well, it is good to be back and good to see your face.

Larry Jordan: It is always fun.

Mike Horton: Even though I can’t see it because the microphone’s in front of my mouth. There you are!

Larry Jordan: Just peer around it. It’s like a Volkswagen, it’s the same size. We’ve got some great guests today. We’re going to start with Danny Manus. He’s the CEO and a Script Consultant with No Bulls Script Consulting, which I have to read very carefully.

Mike Horton: I love that name.

Larry Jordan: He’s going to talk about ways we can improve our scripts before they’re shot or even before they’re sold. Then Dan Montgomery, the CEO of Imagine Products, has got some new ways we can archive and protect our projects and it doesn’t involve storing them on a hard disk and putting it on a shelf.

Larry Jordan: And then Rob Bessette is a colorist with Finish Boston, that’s a high end post house, with an inside look at improving the color of our projects and how improving the color can improve the projects.

Larry Jordan: Just as a reminder, we’re offering text transcripts for each show, courtesy of Take 1 Transcription. Now you can quickly scan or print the contents of each show, as well as listen to it. Transcripts are located on each show page. You can learn more at take1.tv and thanks, Take 1, for making it possible.

Larry Jordan: Mike.

Mike Horton: Mhmm?

Larry Jordan: Did you notice this morning, just before you woke up…

Mike Horton: Ooh, I know, I was there.

Larry Jordan: …Apple announced a flock of new products. What caught your eye?

Mike Horton: The iMac. I know it didn’t catch your eye so much, but it caught my eye.

Larry Jordan: Why was that?

Mike Horton: Because I love the word 5K.

Larry Jordan: It’s the Retina iMac, 27 inch monitor, 5,000 pixels horizontal and about 3,000 pixels vertical. What did you say the fully loaded price of that was?

Mike Horton: I actually went to the store and configured what I would want, which is the I7 processor and the high end graphics card and a little bit bigger this and that. Anyway, it was about $3900. That’s not with tax.

Larry Jordan: That’s not bad.

Mike Horton: It starts at $2500 with nothing, which is the I5 processor. I mean that’s, what, two years ago?

Larry Jordan: Yes.

Mike Horton: So the I7 four gigahertz processor would cost you $250 more and then something else is, 32 gigs of RAM, $250 more.

Larry Jordan: You can buy me one, because they’re cheap.

Mike Horton: But it would be great to watch movies on. But I kind of agree with you, if I’m editing on it, what kind of difference would it make, other than going full screen every time you want to look at your…

Larry Jordan: We’re going to be expanding The Buzz. I’m off to do some shopping for iMacs and we’re going to…

Mike Horton: Oh, cool. And I want a gold iPad. Gold iPad.

Larry Jordan: Oh yes, those new iPads. iPad Mini, a new Mac Mini, iMac.

Mike Horton: Gold, gold. Don’t put a case on it.

Larry Jordan: If it glitters, Mike, you’re interested. Thinking of very interesting things, we’re going to be back with Danny Manus right after this.

Larry Jordan: Blackmagic Design is now shipping its production camera 4K, a super high resolution 4K digital production camera for Ultra HD television production. Featuring a large super 35 sensor with a professional global shutter, it also offers EF and ZE compatible lens mounts and records to a super fast SSD drive. Capturing high quality ProRes files, the Blackmagic production camera 4K gives customers a complete solution to shoot amazing high resolution music videos, episodic television productions, television commercials, sports, documentaries and much more.

Larry Jordan: The Blackmagic production camera 4K also features an incredibly tempting price of $2995. Learn more about the Blackmagic production camera 4K that is definitely priced to move, visit blackmagicdesign.com today.

Larry Jordan: Danny Manus is the CEO of No Bulls Script Consulting. He’s also a very in demand script consultant and the author of the book No BS for Screenwriters: Advice from the Executive Perspective. He recently announced a partnership with Simply Scripts which provides a very interesting service to writers, which we’ll learn more about in just a minute. Hello, Danny, welcome.

Danny Manus: Hi, thanks for having me.

Larry Jordan: It is an honor. I’ve had a chance to go to your website and take a look and we are delighted to talk with somebody who’s got as much experience in the industry as you do, so thanks for spending some time with us tonight.

Danny Manus: Absolutely. I really appreciate you having me on.

Larry Jordan: What got you interested in writing scripts in the first place?

Danny Manus: I guess it’s the age old story. I started writing as a tiny child and at the age of nine I wrote the great American novel, which was all of 21 pages, I believe. I just always liked writing and started out in journalism, went to school for journalism, and quickly realized that I loved it but it just wasn’t creative enough. My friend worked at the TV station at my college – I went to Ithaca College in New York – and he was a producer of some of the student TV shows at the TV station and said, “Why don’t you come and write for one of my shows?” and it happened to be a show on movies and movie trailers and I just loved it so much I never looked back and changed my major to television and screenwriting. I’ve just loved it ever since. I interned for a semester here in Los Angeles and loved it. Interned at a couple of studios in development, and in casting, and loved it and loved being here. And so moved back after graduation and got my first job as an assistant in a production company office and worked my way up the development track.

Larry Jordan: Hold it, hold it, hold it, hold it. I won’t have time for the entire biography, so I’m going to cut to the end. Explain to me, you’ve been an executive for development at a number of studios. What does that mean?

Danny Manus: Yes, I’ve worked as a development executive at a number of different production companies which all had deals with studios and basically that means I’m the gatekeeper, as they like to say, the frontline to find projects, find new writers, try to package those projects, get people interested and try to develop them to a point where they can be sold and hopefully made by the people with money.

Larry Jordan: Ok. Help me, then, understand the difference. What’s the difference between writing and developing?

Danny Manus: Writing, you’re starting from the blank page and it’s all on you. You’re sitting in your office or your bedroom and it’s just you and the blank page and it’s an epic battle every day to get stuff done. With development, you’re finding stuff that’s already written or you’re developing stuff from the idea stage. You might be coming up with an idea and then finding a writer to write that, or you’re fixing and kind of giving notes to improve the projects that are already being written by somebody else. It is very creative, but you don’t have to write from the blank page to completion yourself in order to pay the bills.

Larry Jordan: So now you’ve got yourself a really posh gig as the Head of Development of several production studios and you decide to jump off a small cliff and start your own company? Why?

Danny Manus: It is not as posh as it sounds. I was a Director of Development for a few independent production companies, which did make a bunch of movies over that time period, but we didn’t make ‘The Avengers’ or anything, we didn’t make the billion dollar movie. We made a lot of movies, with Screen Gems, my first company, and then with Warners and a few other studios, but development execs at independent production companies don’t get paid quite what people think they get paid. It is a lovely job and it’s wonderful and it does come with a nice expense account, which I miss every day, but it’s not quite that posh, believe me. It’s a lot of networking and banging your head against the wall when the project that you’ve been working on for two years developing and packaging suddenly just dies for no real reason, and so it became very frustrating and I was already very good at notes, because that’s what you do all day long as a development exec, is list the notes and meetings.

Larry Jordan: Stop a second, hold it, hold it. Define notes.

Danny Manus: Giving notes to the writers on how to improve their work, how to make that project more commercial and more castable or whatever it’s lacking, and that’s exactly what I do now.

Larry Jordan: Can we use the word critique? Is that synonymous with notes?

Mike Horton: Yes it is.

Mike Horton: That brings up the question of the people that you actually deal with, those creative people. How well do they take critique?

Danny Manus: It’s a case by case basis. Obviously with my company name, No Bull Scripts, and I have a reputation of being pretty blunt and pretty straightforward with my notes, because that’s kind of my personality, some people really love that and they come to me because of that. When you’re dealing with professional writers in development who have agents and managers, you have to be a little bit more careful and a little bit nicer because they have egos and they don’t want them bruised. It’s half and half. Some writers crave the criticism and the critique and the development and they love to get notes and improve, and some writers really resent it. As a development exec, that is your job and as a consultant, people are coming to me knowing that they’re going to get critiqued, they’re paying to get critiqued. I do every once in a while have a writer who reacts poorly to getting notes, but you knew what you were getting into. You saw the website, you called and asked for the service and you paid for the service, so what’s the problem?

Mike Horton: Yes, it’s so difficult because you’re dealing with people who are so married to their work and when somebody says, “You know, you should really change this situation. You maybe should change this character. Maybe you should change this,” and that’s really hard to articulate to someone who has just worked their butt off on this thing and it’s their baby.

Danny Manus: Yes, it is. A lot of writers see it that way and it’s a mindset thing when you’re re-writing and polishing, especially if you’re not a professional writer and you’re still trying to break in. You really have to be so open and collaborative. You have to be willing to throw everything out and start over sometimes and it’s hard, no doubt about it. Even when I do my own writing assignments or my own writing and somebody gives me a note on three words, it sends me into a tailspin, so I understand how painful it is. But you’ve got to separate work product from the ‘That’s my baby’ attitude. It doesn’t work.

Larry Jordan: See, Danny, one of the nice things about everything that I write is it’s perfect, so I never have to worry about critiques.

Danny Manus: Exactly, yes.

Larry Jordan: I want to follow up. There was a really good point you made on your website, which you called your American Idol analogy. Tell me what that means.

Danny Manus: I guess it’s a little dated now, since the judges have changed over the years, but when I…

Larry Jordan: It was good at the time.

Danny Manus: It was great at the time.

Mike Horton: Danny says Jennifer Lopez.

Danny Manus: Right, yes, I’ll just change the Paula Abdul to whatever. But yes, there are different types of consultants out there. There are so many consultants out there these days, too many, quite frankly, if you ask me. But there are different types. There’s the kind that hand holds you and tells you you’re wonderful and they will just support you, and some people like that; there are people who give you the company line and they’ll tell you what they told their other 200 clients and it’s just the stale monotonous crap that everybody gets to hear and it doesn’t really help you; and then there’s the Simons, who are a little bit more brash and a little bit more honest, maybe, but they’re the ones that you get the most out of and they’re the ones that help you learn because they’re going to be the honest ones that are unbiased and just give you the facts, or at least the unfettered opinions that you need.

Larry Jordan: Is honestly that hard to find?

Danny Manus: Yes, it is, because nobody wants to be the one in Hollywood that says no, nobody wants to be the one that hurts somebody’s feelings and then three years later that project is at the top of everybody’s list, and everybody loves it and you get screwed because five years prior you told the writer it was awful. In the professional Hollywood world, nobody wants to say no. But in the world of up and coming screenwriters trying to break into Hollywood, you hear ‘no’ every day and so you have to get used to the critiques and the honesty, as long as it’s done in a constructive, professional way. I would never write in my notes, “You suck. Stop writing.” I wouldn’t say that. It’s, of course, constructive and tells you how to improve. But every once in a while there’s a writer who isn’t going to improve, it’s just not their thing, and sometimes before you spend thousands of dollars on a hobby, you should know if you’re good at that hobby.

Mike Horton: So do you actually tell them that in the first session? Is there a criteria where you accept a client who has sent you a script? Do you read the script before you accept them, which is terrible business?

Danny Manus: No, I take all clients. I wish. No, they usually send me the script or some will email me first and we’ll have a chat before they become a client, but most of the time they’ve seen me speak or they’ve read my articles or it’s word of mouth, or however they’ve heard of me, and they just send me the script and they pay for the service and it is what it is, and whatever the script is is what I’m working on. I don’t really get a say too often. The only times where I have any issues or criteria is if it’s literally not in English. Then I don’t know, I can’t really work on it.

Mike Horton: There must have been a time when you were just going, “I’m sorry, you have no chance. This is awful.”

Danny Manus: There have been, yes. There have been a handful. The company has been going about five and a half years now and I would say there’s probably been a handful over that period of time where, yes, I had a conversation with the writer and said, “Look, writing’s not for everybody,” and it’s one thing if you’re 20 years old and you’re just starting out and you’ve got 20 years to learn the craft and improve, but I get a lot of people – and I love them and they’re very passionate about it – it’s second career after they’ve retired and they’re in their 60s and they want to learn screenwriting and it’s a wonderful, creative hobby and I highly suggest it, but there’s a big difference between wanting to do it as a hobby and wanting to do it as a career and you’ve got to know how to do both and what the requirements are and if that is what is meant for you and if it’s worth the time, energy and money that it’s going to take to get you to that level. If it’s possible, I would very much love to help you do it, but if not I’m going to give you the truth.

Larry Jordan: Danny, I am sitting here holding in my hand this script that I’ve spent a lifetime putting together. I’m sending it to you, I’ve paid your fee. What should I expect back from you?

Danny Manus: You’re going to get very comprehensive, constructive notes that go through all the major elements of your script and, wherever it’s lacking, how to improve it, and alternatives and options for where the story could go, or how to improve a character, or how to make it more commercial and general tips on how you’re going to improve your writing and make it seem more professional to get to the level where you could submit it to some place like Simply Scripts or other places which you mentioned that I’m working with now, and get noticed.

Larry Jordan: Do you get involved with a script before it’s sold or before it’s shot?

Danny Manus: Way before it’s shot and sold, although really at any point. I have clients who come to me with nothing more than a log line, which is like a one line idea of their project, and they want to brainstorm it and flush it out and see if it could be something. I just worked on a project that actually needed help, it was being shot and needed help with the script as it was being shot. Honestly, it really runs the gamut from start to finish.

Mike Horton: This is such a subjective art. A lot of your notes are because of what you like and not what somebody else might like. It’s really difficult to do what you do.

Danny Manus: You try to take the bias out of it. Sure, there’s stuff that I might like that other people won’t or vice versa, but you really try and look at the mechanics of stories, and writing, and voice and how to bring those out. Not just so that I would buy a ticket, but so that more people than just me – I’m not the ultimate arbiter of taste by any means, so it’s really just knowing the market, it’s knowing what executives, and agents, and people are looking for in a script and in a writer and bringing those elements out. Whether it’s something I would pay to see or not really has nothing to do with it.

Larry Jordan: I am very impressed when I go to your website that you have published all of your prices, and just to short circuit this, the cost for your services is between $100 and $300. It’s extremely affordable for anybody who’s not totally broke. What are your most popular services?

Danny Manus: The basic notes service is always the most popular, the basic and the extensive notes services. They range from 300 to 400 or so. But I do a lot of brainstorming services, I do query letters and first draft services for people who just want to get a feel for it and gauge where their projects are, and they’re much less expensive. Your script should not cost as much as your car. There are people out there charging thousands of dollars to give a few pages of notes. I don’t know, I have a conscience or something.

Larry Jordan: You recently announced a new service for writers in conjunction with Simply Scripts. What’s that?

Danny Manus: It’s very exciting. We’ve just started it. Simply Scripts is a great internet resource for writers where writers can download scripts and read them for free, TV scripts, movie scripts. They’ve got message boards, and tips and all that kind of great stuff for writers, and we recently joined forces to start a featured script of the month where writers can submit their scripts for free to Simply Scripts. It goes through their vetting process there and they choose a script of the month, which then comes to me, which gets a full notes service for free, which is then posted on their site and gives as well as the script, and the log line and all that great stuff, so that we can give those writers a showcase, really. It’s not a contest, it’s a showcase, and try to get writers that deserve exposure more exposure to the professional community, to other writers, to producers and directors and it’s free, which is different than all the other sites out there. They have one for shorts as well, but the one I’m working on is for features right now and we’ll try to maybe expand shortly.

Larry Jordan: I’m going to run out of time and I want to get a couple more concepts in. If a producer is looking for a writer or a script, can you help them connect the dots?

Danny Manus: I can if it’s really, really ready, and I’m tough on my clients, obviously, but if something does get a recommend, much like with the Simply Scripts deal, it can and will go through my Hollywood Connections program, which sends a script out to about, I’ve got about 60 or 70 companies and reps who have agreed to read it. So if it’s really ready and it gets a recommend, whether it’s through my service or the Simply Scripts showcase, yes, it will go out to a number of people around town and hopefully get noticed and get picked up.

Mike Horton: What a great thing.

Larry Jordan: And what website can people go to learn more about you and your services?

Danny Manus: You can always go to nobullscript.net.

Larry Jordan: That’s nobullscript.net and the Founder of No Bulls Script Consulting is Danny Manus, the CEO and Script Consultant. Danny, thanks for joining us today.

Danny Manus: Thanks so much for having me and please follow me on Twitter, @dannymanus.

Larry Jordan: Will do. Bye bye.

Mike Horton: Thanks, Danny.

 

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Larry Jordan: Dan Montgomery is the President and CEO of Imagine Products Inc. He and his wife Jane founded Imagine Products in 1991 with a concept of creating software to improve video production. From that initial dream has sprung ShotPut Pro, HDVU, ProxyMill, PreRollPost and others. Hello, Dan, welcome.

Dan Montgomery: Hi.

Mike Horton: Hi, Dan.

Larry Jordan: We are glad to have you and say hello to Mike. He was feeling a bit lonely.

Mike Horton: Yes, hi Dan.

Dan Montgomery: Oh, hi Mike.

Mike Horton: I’m here.

Dan Montgomery: You’re lonely? Why are you lonely?

Mike Horton: Because I miss you so much.

Dan Montgomery: Well, you know how to fix that.

Mike Horton: I know.

Dan Montgomery: Wait until it’s cold and then invite us out.

Mike Horton: I know, that’s what you always say.

Larry Jordan: What we want to do is leave where it’s warm and go where it’s cold, just for the change.

Dan Montgomery: Well, yes, we can do that.

Mike Horton: Yes, it never gets cold here.

Larry Jordan: Dan, give us a thumbnail description of what Imagine Products does.

Dan Montgomery: We’re a workflow solution provider. That’s the catchphrase these days, isn’t it?

Larry Jordan: I like that. Solution, provider and workflow all in the same phrase.

Dan Montgomery: All in the same phrase.

Larry Jordan: That’s a gold star right there.

Dan Montgomery: There you go. We make software products, primarily for the video industry.

Larry Jordan: What got you interested in development in the first place? It’s not an easy life.

Dan Montgomery: It is not an easy life. It’s an interesting industry we’re in, though, because most of the people we encounter, a very good portion of them, are entrepreneurial type people and so they’re very close to the money and they’re very close to trying to get value for their money and then make sure that things work and we like helping them.

 

Larry Jordan: Yes, when they don’t drive you nuts. It’s a very fine line. Help me understand, because I want to focus on the storage and archiving products that you’ve got, because you’ve also had some relatively new releases in that. Media seems to be growing almost exponentially. Image sizes are getting bigger, frame rates are getting faster, file sizes, it’s just the storage is huge. What archive and storage trends are you keeping your eye on?

Dan Montgomery: I ran across an executive summary by a fellow named Tom Coughlin.

Larry Jordan: Yes, Coughlin and Associates. He’s been on the show many times.

Dan Montgomery: Yes? Good. When I was looking at some of the different LTO consortium sites and things like that, his executive summary caught my eye because they were talking about a six fold increase in digital storage over the next five years.

Larry Jordan: Mmm, six fold.

Dan Montgomery: Six fold. That’s huge. And he’s also saying that the media industry itself, the media and entertainment industry, the revenue is expected to increase 20 percent over that same timeframe.

Mike Horton: Really?

Larry Jordan: So storage increases six times and revenue to pay for it is only at 20 percent increase? This causes me to get very nervous.

Dan Montgomery: Yes, but storage is getting cheaper.

Larry Jordan: I hope so.

Dan Montgomery: You can store an LTO tape these days for less than five cents a gig.

Larry Jordan: The tape is cheap but the hardware itself is pretty darn expensive, isn’t it?

Mike Horton: Well, actually that’s coming down now too, the hardware.

Dan Montgomery: That’s right. Well, five cents is the total cost of ownership, compared to a hard disk is probably about 25 times that.

Larry Jordan: Wait, wait, wait, wait. Back that up.

Mike Horton: If you archive to tape. I love we’re going back to tape.

Dan Montgomery: We’re going back to tape.

Larry Jordan: Wait a second. When you say that we can get it for five cents a gigabyte and hard disks are more expensive, if I look at an LTO tape piece of hardware, the drive, and the tape combined, it’s much more expensive than a hard disk. Shouldn’t I just archive my stuff on a hard drive?

Dan Montgomery: Hard drives are designed to fail, so they last about five years.

Larry Jordan: Ok.

Dan Montgomery: Less than that if you don’t fire them up, if you just put them on the shelf and never connect it to source…

Mike Horton: We have to remind everybody that you’ve got to spin them up every once in a while.

Dan Montgomery: That’s right.

Mike Horton: Even the SSDs need to be spinned up.

Dan Montgomery: That’s right. But the whole concept is that LTO tape has about a 30 year shelf life and that’s because the media itself, you can access that tape 16,000 times before it even starts to wear out, so that’s pretty significant. That’s 16,000 passes end to end, over 200 dumps of the entire content of the tape. An LTO 6 tape runs about two and a half terabyte storage. You quickly pay for that three or four thousand dollar LTO drive that you have when you spread it across a few tapes.

Mike Horton: I just went to see the recent screening of ‘Gone Girl’, which they shot in RED 6K, and the total storage on that was 252 terabytes.

Dan Montgomery: See, that’s huge and in the media industry…

Larry Jordan: Wait, wait. How much, Michael?

Mike Horton: 252 terabytes.

Larry Jordan: Terabytes.

Dan Montgomery: 252 terabytes.

Larry Jordan: Wow.

Mike Horton: And they kept it all, every single clip.

Larry Jordan: I know that ‘Avatar’ was two petabytes, which is even bigger. These are just phenomenally huge files.

Dan Montgomery: Larry, what Tom was saying in his paper was that one third of all you folks out there that shoot media save every captured clip.

Mike Horton: Yes. Well, this movie did.

Dan Montgomery: And the flip side of that is 90 percent of what’s archived is never accessed again.

Larry Jordan: Yes, but the problem is we don’t know what the 90 percent is.

Mike Horton: That’s where that really groovy software comes in.

Dan Montgomery: You never know, do you?

Larry Jordan: Dan, I want to give you time to talk about your software. What tools can we use, especially tools from Imagine Products, to archive the footage that we’re creating?

Dan Montgomery: A few years back, in 2009, IBM developed what they call a linear tape file system, LTFS, which is an open standard and that was really ground breaking and they released… in 2010 and they got a lot of buy-in from different hardware manufactures and now we’re seeing products that aren’t even tape, like Sony’s optical disk storage is LTFS compatible. So as long as the equipment and the software is written to that standard, now you have interchangeability between equipment manufacturers and you can be assured that something I put on the shelf today, even if I have, let’s say, an HP drive, tomorrow I can access it with an IBM drive. That’s part of what’s driving, I think, a lot more people toward this kind of media.

Larry Jordan: Well, that and, as Michael says, the decrease in cost of LTO drives themselves. But while the LTO file system is nice, there are limitations to it, which is getting to what you guys provide.

Dan Montgomery: It’s not a hard disk. It doesn’t have random access like a hard disk, and that’s why we got into the LTO software. We were providing ShotPut Pro and people were trying to use that with tapes, then they discovered that, gosh, there’s no back end part for making it easy to retrieve things or find what they put on the tape and logically cue them up and retrieve them, and so that’s what you need in a software like PreRollPost for, to be able to keep track of things – where it is on the tape – and to logically cue them up. Let’s say I want to retrieve 25 clips. If you do that through Finder and just browse for them and pull them off, it’s going to thrash all over the place trying to find where they are.

Larry Jordan: Have you done any tests to see, has Apple improved Finder’s ability to handle tape with Yosemite OS 10.10?

Dan Montgomery: No.

Larry Jordan: So it’s the same?

Dan Montgomery: It’s the same.

Larry Jordan: I have played with LTO tapes using Finder and it’s an exercise in watching paint dry, so anything that speeds that up is a good thing.

Dan Montgomery: And there are other applications out there that do a similar thing, but that’s what you have to do. You have to optimize that part of it, and then being able to retrieve it and make sure that what you’ve got back was what you put on the tape to start with. What makes this unique is a couple of things. One is that we do MD5 verification front and back. So we’re doing it at the beginning when you’re reading the file, and putting it on tape, and storing that information with the file information. When you retrieve it off the tape, we double check it so you know that the copy you put back on the hard disk matches with the original.

Larry Jordan: Now, Dan, the software itself is called PreRollPost and we’ll get your website in just a second. Are there applications that work with PreRollPost? And, if so, in brief, what are they?

Dan Montgomery: We have a compression software called ProxyMill that helps create proxies for the video to be able to search and play those. We have a viewer that’s an all-in-one viewer that will view any kind of format, HD material down to proxies, that’s called HDView and that’s a handy thing to do with it. ShotPut Pro, of course, can be used up front to put it onto hard disk in the field and then you’re copying those disks to tape.

Larry Jordan: Where can people go on the web to learn more about all of these products?

Dan Montgomery: Imagineproducts.com.

Larry Jordan: That’s imagineproducts.com. Dan Montgomery is the President and CEO of Imagine Products and, Dan, thanks for joining us today.

Dan Montgomery: Thank you.

Mike Horton: Thanks, Dan.

Dan Montgomery: Hope you’re not lonely, Michael.

Mike Horton: Yes, I’m not lonely any more, Dan.

Larry Jordan: Take care. Talk to you soon. Bye bye.

Dan Montgomery: Ok, thanks.

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Larry Jordan: Rob Bessette is a very talented colorist at Finish Boston. He’s been working for more than eight years bringing his clients’ visions to life on both the large and the small screen. Tonight, we want to talk with him about the process of color grading and how to use it to improve our projects. Hello, Rob, welcome.

Rob Bessette: Thanks. Thanks for having me.

Larry Jordan: What first got you interested in color? Because that’s not the sort of thing that a grade schooler would say, “Oh, I’m going to do color correction on Hollywood films.”

Rob Bessette: I kind of lucked into it, to be honest with you. I started working as an assistant editor at a post house in Boston editing in Avid, Final Cut, Flame, all those things, and we had a color suite and I, to be honest with you, didn’t even know anything about it and it really piqued my interest. I bugged the senior colorist there enough that he let me assist him and kind of tagged along with him and took on an apprenticeship role.

Larry Jordan: When did you move over to Finish Boston?

Rob Bessette: I’ve been at Finish since 2005.

Larry Jordan: Just for people who are curious, what does Finish Boston do?

Rob Bessette: We specialize in post production, visual effects, color correction and editorial.

Mike Horton: Also, you guys have got the coolest kitchen I’ve ever seen. Go to their website, look at their kitchen. It’s awesome.

Larry Jordan: Yes. In fact, it’s so awesome that I tried to go to the fourth picture and the computer froze, and it stayed with the kitchen and I had a chance to study the kitchen for a long period of time.

Rob Bessette: It didn’t want you to leave.

Mike Horton: Forget the screening room, go to the kitchen.

Larry Jordan: Rob, what exactly does a colorist do? And are there things that you bring to a project and things you decide not to add? In other words, what do you do and not do?

Rob Bessette: It really depends on the project. In the simplest terms, what we do is just kind of make the image or the piece feel the way that the director of photography or the director wants this to go. For example, for something like a romantic comedy, they might want it to feel warm and fuzzy, where if it’s a horror movie, they might want it to feel cool and moody. Just set the mood and make you look where you want to look. Sometimes I call it visual relating as far as selecting areas of focus and really just kind of helping you see the image the way you want the audience to see it.

Larry Jordan: Wait a minute, wait a minute. Areas of focus? The focus is controlled when it’s shot. What do you mean by areas of focus when you’re doing color grading?

Rob Bessette: For example, if someone is against a blown out background, you might try to duck the background down a little bit to make it not stand out so much, or you’ll put a power window on someone’s face to make you draw the attention to the face as opposed to something else that might be distracting. You want to push that into the background so you can actually look at where you’re supposed to be looking.

Larry Jordan: Have you worked on any projects the rest of us might have seen?

Rob Bessette: I’ve worked on a couple of features, a lot of commercials. I generally do commercials for McDonald’s, Subway, Carnival Cruise Lines, Titleist Golf and a couple of movies, some long format stuff that’s playing on Palladia right now, the music channel; a movie called Aerosmith: Rock for the Rising Sun. That’s on currently. But mainly commercials for the most part.

Mike Horton: You talk about emotions with color grading for feature films and narrative type of things, but when it comes to commercials, when you’re color grading those things, especially when you’re doing products such as cars, how much leeway do you have here?

Rob Bessette: Well, you’re dealing generally with an ad agency and then the ad agency’s representing the client. So it’s really in their interests to make their product look as good as it can, so you do have some limitations with the creativity. It’s all about the product. You want to sell the product and you want to see the label, you want to make it look beautiful, and that’s really the ultimate goal when working on commercials. But every now and again, you do get the chance to, where something’s not heavily featuring a product, try to think a little bit outside the box and make the commercial stand out from others, because most do rely on products for sales.

Larry Jordan: This is really a two part question. I want to have you tell me first about a project that was difficult to do and what made it difficult; and then I want to flip it around and talk about projects that are easy to do and what producers can do to make their projects easier in color grading. With that as a contrast – see how I work in color? It’s really nice – what project have you worked on recently that was really difficult and what made it a challenge?

Rob Bessette: Recently, I’ve just completed a project for Coca Cola and it was shot in Puerto Rico over multiple days, but the commercial was supposed to take place over the course of a couple of hours. A couple of days were rainy, and a couple of days were beautiful and we had to match them together to make them look as if it was one continuous thing. On top of that, they wanted the commercial to feel hot and sweaty. So we got to really go a different direction as far as what we were just talking about. Instead of product, product, product, we got to take a little creative look and really make it red and warm with a kind of golden feel, which turned out really nice.

Larry Jordan: Was the challenge the differences you had in the footage? Or was the challenge working with the client?

Rob Bessette: Definitely the footage. The client was fantastic. There was nothing that they could do about the weather. We’d like to think that we get perfect days to shoot every single time we go on set but, as we all know, that’s not the case. Making the rainy day look like a sunny day and meshing them all together was the biggest challenge by far.

Larry Jordan: What did they do in production? If it’s raining and the cast is getting wet…

Mike Horton: Yes, why didn’t they just wait until the next day? Like baseball.

Rob Bessette: In that case, they were down in Puerto Rico and had return flights and they weren’t able to push that back.

Mike Horton: Oh, this thing called budget.

Rob Bessette: Yes, that does limit us at times, doesn’t it?

Mike Horton: Yes it does.

Larry Jordan: All right, let’s flip the coin. What makes for a great project in terms of either fun to work with or easy to work with, looking at it from your point of view? Clearly there’s the ‘this is fun to do from an artistic point of view’ but technically are there things that can make a project simpler from a production and producer point of view?

Rob Bessette: I’d say for that Coke spot I did, artistically that was one of the most fun projects I’ve ever had, and one of the most challenging technically. But to take care of things on set to make it easier for a colorist and ultimately easier on everyone, if you can control your environment, if you’re inside, obviously that makes things a lot easier, but not everything calls for being inside. Lighting. Everything to me is all about getting good lighting, whether it’s natural light or whether you’re bouncing some light, just controlling that light source. I know it’s not always possible, but if you can, keep highlights under control, make sure shadow detail is there, all that kind of stuff really, really makes my life a lot easier. Probably the biggest thing, I would say, is to make sure that you have someone who knows how to light and that makes a huge difference.

Mike Horton: Yes, but if it’s absolute crap, can you fix it?

Rob Bessette: Sometimes yes, but not all the time.

Larry Jordan: I want to have you come back, because you’re using some technical terms that I want to make sure people understand. You said control the highlights and make sure the shadow detail is there. For people who don’t know what that means, what does it mean?

Rob Bessette: If you’re given a piece or a shot where the highlights are gone or, as we say, blown out…

Larry Jordan: Overexposed?

Rob Bessette: Overexposed, exactly, that detail is not able to be pulled back. In film, you can get some of it back, but in video, if it’s gone, it’s gone. So keep an eye on your waveform monitors while on set to make sure that you do have that information there. If that information’s there, I can do something with it. If it’s not, there’s nothing I can do; and that goes the same with the black.

Larry Jordan: From a highlights point of view, is it better to shoot slightly underexposed?

Rob Bessette: Depends on what you’re shooting, but in general I would say yes.

 

Larry Jordan: Ok. Now, you talked about shadow detail. What does that mean?

Rob Bessette: Same thing as highlights, just the opposite. If you are losing detail in your blacks, it’s going to look crunched. Say for example if someone was wearing a black shirt, you wouldn’t see the wrinkles in their shirt or the folds in their shirt, it would just look like a black blob. Again, by keeping an eye on your waveforms, you have the ability to make sure that information is there.

Larry Jordan: So you don’t want the shadows too dark and you don’t want the highlights too light.

Rob Bessette: Right, and if you want them to be dark or you want them to be light, I will take care of that. I need the information to be able to do that.

Mike Horton: How important is RAW files versus, say, ProRes files? Does it make your life easier if you just get the RAW files?

Rob Bessette: I would prefer RAW files every time.

Mike Horton: And do you get them every time nowadays, 2014?

Rob Bessette: I do not.

Mike Horton: A-ha!

Larry Jordan: Why do you prefer RAW? We’re going to digress on codecs, because I know Mike lives for these things, but…

Mike Horton: Hey, I live for codecs.

Larry Jordan: …why do you like RAW?

Rob Bessette: For the reason we were just talking about – more information.

Larry Jordan: Back that statement up. Give me a little bit more detail.

Rob Bessette: I’ll be able to push the image a little bit farther than I normally would if I was just given ProRes or some sort of transcoded file, and I understand that sometimes a project doesn’t have a budget for RAW. But if it does and presented with the option, I would choose that every single time.

Larry Jordan: RAW footage generally creates massively large files, which is why you have so much detail there, and not everybody can afford the storage necessary or the cameras. Are there video formats that are hard to color correct or limit you too much in color correction? I have a feeling I know the answer, but I want to get it out so we can talk about it.

Rob Bessette: In my opinion, the files that I am the most against are stuff coming from DSLR, H.264 compressed. If I have to pull some sort of a key, be it from a color or a skin tone, the image falls apart very quickly.

Larry Jordan: Falls apart means what?

Rob Bessette: And then working with something like R3D files or Alexa ProRes handles very well. If I were going to choose a ProRes file, I’d choose from the Alexa camera and that’s obviously a high end piece of equipment.

Larry Jordan: You said an H.264 file from a DSLR camera falls apart. What does falls apart mean?

Rob Bessette: Say, for example, you wanted to color correct a sky, you wanted to make the sky more blue or you wanted to make it have more of a sunset feel to it, by grabbing that color and isolating that hue of the sky, you can then alter that color in whatever manner you want – put more saturation in, color the blue to a red – and if you’re working in H.264 codec, it has a 420 color space, meaning that there’s not as much information there as a RAW or a ProRes file and you start to see little jagged edges that aren’t natural, and obviously digital and not part of the image as it is intended. It starts to cheapen the piece quickly.

Mike Horton: And you get a lot of those files in your facility, a lot of projects done in that codec?

Rob Bessette: Not many.

Mike Horton: Because you can shoot RAW in DSLRs, correct?

Rob Bessette: You can, yes, and we don’t see much of the H.264 footage any more. That was way popular three or four years ago. But for certain things like documentaries or running gut footage, sometimes that’s the best option and that’s just the cards we’re dealt and what we have to deal with.

Larry Jordan: Also, you generally work with commercials, which have a different level of production budget associated with them, so they tend to shoot the higher quality format.

Rob Bessette: Correct. They’re storyboarded, they’re scripted, they know how many shots they have, they know how many days they have. So on commercials you generally get nicer footage, yes.

Larry Jordan: Another thing that we’re hearing in the industry is bit depth, where some video formats, video codecs are eight bit or ten or 12 or 16. What does the bit depth give us and does the bit depth make a difference?

Mike Horton: Oh, good question, because I never understand this.

Rob Bessette: It kind of goes back to what we were just talking about. With the higher bit depth, the more latitude it will have and that I’ll be able to work with. Like with RAW, it’s the same thing, as opposed some sort of compressed file. If I have that bit depth, eight versus ten, 12, 16, whatever it may be, the more that I have, the more latitude and range that I have and it all goes back to what we were talking about. If I’m presented with an image that has workable footage, while it might look awful on set without a lookup table or just you’re looking at the raw footage and you’re saying, “Oh my God, what did I just shoot? It’s all gray and washed out. I’m in trouble,” that to me is exactly what I want and that allows me to make the image in a way that we want to make it.

Larry Jordan: Should we spend more time selecting the video format or selecting a good lens?

Rob Bessette: I would probably say lens and camera. Sometimes the camera, we’re not presented it as an option because they can get expensive very quickly, as we all know. But the video formats are getting so strong these days and they just keep evolving into better and better formats that I think investment in lenses and camera would be better.

Larry Jordan: How about if I have a choice between shooting an interlaced image and a progressive image?

Rob Bessette: Progressive.

Larry Jordan: I want to hear you say that again, because I’m so into that camp. I just love hearing somebody else saying it. Progressive or interlaced?

Rob Bessette: Progressive, every time. The interlaced stuff, to me, sticks out like a sore thumb. I can spot it from a mile away and it just looks old to me.

Larry Jordan: I’ve always like this guy, Mike, I really have. He’s just a great guy.

Mike Horton: You make Larry feel smart. Obviously, you work with a lot of indies. Should they talk to you first before they shoot one frame of footage?

Rob Bessette: I would love to have a conversation.

Mike Horton: Yes, I know that never happens, but in a perfect world.

Rob Bessette: It never happens but I would love it.

Mike Horton: Yes.

Rob Bessette: They always have the conversation when the shot goes wrong and then they want me to fix it.

Larry Jordan: And after they’ve run out of budget generally.

Rob Bessette: Exactly, exactly, because I’m pretty much the last of the line.

Mike Horton: Yes, please fix me.

Rob Bessette: Yes.

Larry Jordan: Rob, how about frame rate? Does frame rate make a difference for color grading?

 

Rob Bessette: Not really. It all depends on what works best for you. For me, I prefer 23.98. 29.97 to me looks too smooth and, like I said, generally that goes with interlacing and that to me looks a little cheap. But 23.98 is what I get probably 90 percent of the time.

Mike Horton: Yes, but we have plug-ins for that.

 

Larry Jordan: Wait a minute, wait a minute. You’re doing a 23.98, but it’s not going to air at 23.98, it’s going to air at 29 or 25. Why would you color correct something in a format that doesn’t match how it’s going to broadcast?

Rob Bessette: I get asked that question frequently and there are two thoughts. One is what you just said – why don’t we work in the frame rate that it is? – and the other one, which is my personal opinion, is that I want to work with this footage in its truest nature. I want to be able to see anything that is actually from the camera, from the footage that was captured on set and I don’t want to be second guessing myself, thinking that something is being introduced that could be a cause for a different reason.

Larry Jordan: Ok, but you’re still going to convert the format, so you’re still going to be adding pull-down frames for 29.97 or you’re going to be adding a four percent speed up to move to PAL. Either one of those is going to change the quality of your image, is it not?

Rob Bessette: Correct, but when we deliver, we deliver to a dub house or a place that’s going to upload those files for the broadcast stations and they have the ability to, I mean, they do it every day. So that’s something that we rely on those vendors to take care of and help with in a manner that will…

Mike Horton: In other words, they take the blame.

Rob Bessette: Yes, exactly. That’s what it’s all about, passing the blame.

Mike Horton: Oh, exactly, pass it on.

Larry Jordan: When you’re doing color grading – and we’ve only got about a minute or two left – what tools are you using, what software?

Rob Bessette: I use Blackmagic Design DaVinci Resolve.

Larry Jordan: And what monitor are you using?

Rob Bessette: Sony OLED.

Larry Jordan: I’m sorry, Sony what?

Rob Bessette: OLED.

Mike Horton: OLED. Is that just unbelievably beautiful, and sharp and crazy?

Rob Bessette: It’s fantastic. Beautiful black.

Larry Jordan: How big an image on the monitor? Are you looking at big monitors or small monitors?

Rob Bessette: My monitor is a 24 inch monitor, but we have a client monitor which is a 50 inch monitor.

 

Larry Jordan: Clients always like stuff that’s big, but I’ve found the image looks better when you see it on a smaller monitor. Do you agree or am I just blowing smoke?

Rob Bessette: I would agree. It’s easier to get contrast on a smaller monitor.

Mike Horton: Do Sony make a 50 inch OLED?

Rob Bessette: Not yet.

Mike Horton: Oh, so you show them on a plasma or something like that?

Rob Bessette: We’re still on a Panasonic plasma. I’m counting down the days until they do, though.

Larry Jordan: Rob, where can people go on the web to learn more about you and Finish Boston?

Rob Bessette: My work website is finishboston.com.

Larry Jordan: And personal?

Rob Bessette: And I also have a personal website, which is robbessette.com.

Mike Horton: People in Boston should go to the kitchen.

Larry Jordan: The websites are finishboston.com and robbessette.com. Rob Bessette is a colorist at Finish Boston. Rob, thanks for joining us.

Mike Horton: Home of the best post production kitchen in Boston.

Larry Jordan: Take care, Rob, bye bye.

Rob Bessette: Thanks so much, guys.

Larry Jordan: The best post production kitchen in Boston?

Mike Horton: Really. Next time you go to Boston, you go to Finish, go to that kitchen. If it looks anything like the picture on their website, I’m going to that kitchen.

Larry Jordan: It’s the kitchen?

Mike Horton: I bet they make killer burgers.

Larry Jordan: It’s the kitchen that got your attention?

Mike Horton: I wonder if they make Boston baked beans there on the stove.

Larry Jordan: They’re talking codecs. They’re talking lenses.

Mike Horton: By the way, when you go to Boston, you can’t find beans anywhere. Maybe they could find beans at Finish kitchen.

Larry Jordan: We have got to feed you here more, Michael.

Mike Horton: No, seriously, there are no Boston baked beans in Boston.

Larry Jordan: There are Boston…

Mike Horton: There are no Boston baked beans in Boston.

Larry Jordan: There are beans in Boston.

Mike Horton: No. Maybe there are at Finish post production house kitchen. That’s it.

Larry Jordan: Have you ordered your Retina iMac yet?

Mike Horton: No. I’m waiting for your infinite supply of money to come into…

Larry Jordan: Your paycheck is on its way, I mailed it yesterday…

Mike Horton: Wonderful!

Larry Jordan: …so it’s not a problem.

Mike Horton: Something to look forward to.

Larry Jordan: It’s all about you. Thinking of wonderful people and wonderful things, I want to thank our guests today – Danny Manus, the CEO and Script Consultant with No Bulls Script Consulting; Dan Montgomery, the CEO of Imagine Products; and Rob Bessette, a colorist with Finish Boston.

 

Larry Jordan: There’s a lot happening at The Buzz between shows. It’s all posted to our website, digitalproductionbuzz.com.

 

Mike Horton: Oh, did we get a new sponsor, Shutterstock?

Larry Jordan: We did. We’ve got three sponsors now.

Mike Horton: Hey, that’s awesome. Shutterstock make some pretty good stuff. And OWC too?

Larry Jordan: OWC and Blackmagic. It’s a great group.

Mike Horton: I’ve got to look at OWC’s website. I need a new hard drive for my laptop here because it’s just crap.

Larry Jordan: We just bought a couple of them over at…

Mike Horton: I just bought this thing. It’s just crap. I need one of those SSDs.

Larry Jordan: I’ll sell you my…

Mike Horton: OWC makes awesome stuff.

Larry Jordan: Hush.

Mike Horton: Ok, go ahead, yes.

Larry Jordan: You can talk with us on Twitter, @DPBuZZ, and Facebook, at digitalproductionbuzz.com. Our producer is Cirina Catania, engineers Adrian Price and Megan Paulos. The voice at the other end of the table is Mike Horton. My name’s Larry Jordan and thanks for listening to The Digital Production Buzz.

Voiceover: The Digital Production Buzz was brought to you by Blackmagic Design, creators of the world’s highest quality solutions for the feature film, post production and television broadcast industries; and by shuttterstock.com, a global marketplace for royalty free images and videos. With over two million royalty free HD and 4K video clips, Shutterstock helps you take your creative projects to the next level; and by Other World Computing, providing quality hardware solutions and extensive technical support to the worldwide computer industry since 1988.

Digital Production Buzz
October 9, 2014

Hosts:    Larry Jordan
Michael Horton

Guests:  Brian Drewes, Co-Founder, ZEROvfx
Sean Devereaux, Co-Founder and Lead VFX Supervisor, ZEROvfx
Dan Berube, Founder, Boston Creative Pro User Group (BOSCPUG)
Tim Buttner, Founder, Tim Butt 2 Productions

Voiceover: The Digital Production Buzz is brought to you by Blackmagic Design, creators of the world’s highest quality solutions for the feature film, post production and television broadcast industries; and by shutterstock.com, a global marketplace for royalty free images and videos. With over two million royalty free HD and 4K video clips, Shutterstock helps you take your creative projects to the next level; and by Other World Computing, providing quality hardware solutions and extensive technical support to the worldwide computer industry since 1988.

Voiceover: Live from Ralph’s Maytag Museum and Podcast Studio in beautiful downtown Burbank, it’s the Digital Production Buzz.

Production, post production, distribution. What’s really happening now and in your digital future?  The Buzz is live now.

Larry Jordan: And welcome to The Digital Production Buzz, the world’s longest running podcast for creative content producers covering digital media production, post production, marketing and distribution around the world. My name is Larry Jordan. Our co-host, the ever-handsome Mr. Mike Horton, has the night off.

We’re going to start our show with Brian Drewes and Sean Devereaux, the visual effects geniuses behind ZEROvfx, who handled over 600 shots for the new film starring Denzel Washington and directed by Antoine Fuqua, The Equalizer. We talk with both of them to learn how they did it.

Then Dan Berube, the President of the Boston Creative Pro User Group, has some insight for us about why user groups and personal networking are so important. He also just returned from Adobe Max, where he saw the latest software that Adobe released earlier this week.

And Tim Buttner is a multi-media expert at Tim Butt 2 Productions, who just shot a music video in very low light called Wolf Bite for the artist Owl City. His production and post workflow is very interesting; we want to talk with him about what he did and how he did it in today’s show.

Just a reminder that we’re offering text transcripts for each show, courtesy of Take 1 Transcription. Now you can quickly scan or print the contents of each show, as well as listen to it. Transcripts are located on each show page. Learn more at take1.tv and thanks, Take 1, for making the transcripts possible.

Earlier this week, I had the pleasure of attending Adobe Max, when Adobe released new versions of all their creative cloud applications and I was struck by a number of things, one of which is the idea of leveraging the cloud to be able to store what they call a creative profile. Also, we’re seeing more support for a concept called libraries. This is media which is available between, say, Photoshop and Illustrator and InDesign, where we store the media in a library and it’s available between projects and between applications; and for us video types, the support for the GoPro Cineform codec, which is built into Premiere and AME, is especially exciting.

As I was looking at the work that Adobe was doing, it was clear that Adobe is leveraging the vast span of its applications to create a highly integrated suite of products targeted to specific markets. Each application can run standalone, but their true strength comes in being able to move data between applications and between the applications and the cloud.

Key to collaboration is the idea of the creative profile. This is a cloud based individualized login that can store settings, fonts, even media in a central location that is shared between applications and accessible between team members. The creative profile and associated libraries allow for easy element and document exchange between mobile and desktop applications.

Larry Jordan: And thinking about video, the new mobile app that was introduced and released on Monday is Premiere Clip. This allows anyone to shoot video with an iPhone – Android support is coming – then string clips into simple sequences, trim and rearrange clips, add music cues, add color grades based upon the LaMetric color engine from speed grade and output the results directly to social media or upload them to Adobe Premiere Pro CC. The imported clips come in as media and the edits appear as standard Premiere sequences. We’re seeing that editing video on iPhones is becoming a lot easier.

Thinking of interesting visual effects brings me to ZEROvfx. We’re going to be talking with the guys there in just a minute.

Larry Jordan: Blackmagic Design is now shipping its production camera 4K, a super high resolution 4K digital production camera for Ultra HD television production. Featuring a large super 35 sensor with a professional global shutter, it also offers EF and ZE compatible lens mounts and records to a super fast SSD drive. Capturing high quality ProRes files, the Blackmagic production camera 4K gives customers a complete solution to shoot amazing high resolution music videos, episodic television productions, television commercials, sports, documentaries and much more.

The Blackmagic production camera 4K also features an incredibly tempting price of $2995. Learn more about the Blackmagic production camera 4K that is definitely priced to move, visit blackmagicdesign.com today.

Larry Jordan: Brian Drewes is the Co-Founder and Head of Production at Boston based ZEROvfx, where he oversees all components of large visual effects projects, from initial bidding to final delivery. Hello, Brian, welcome.

Brian Drewes: Hey, how are you?

Larry Jordan: We are doing great. I also want to introduce your cohort, Sean Devereaux. He’s also a Co-Founder and Lead Visual Effects Supervisor at ZEROvfx. His visual effects artistry has appeared in over 30 feature films, including American Hustle, Transformers and Cinderella Men. Hello, Sean, welcome.

Sean Devereaux: Hello, thanks so much for having me.

Larry Jordan: We are delighted. In fact, we’re talking with both of you today about your work on the Denzel Washington film called The Equalizer and, Brian, I’m going to start with you because B comes before S in the alphabet. Brian, what is ZEROvfx?

Brian Drewes: We’re a visual effects company that works primarily in feature films and television commercials, as well as software development for those industries.

Larry Jordan: Short of hitting yourself in the head with a hammer, I think the worst thing you could possibly do is to start a visual effects company these days. Why did you decide to start ZEROvfx?

Brian Drewes: We don’t think it’s that bad, actually. We’ve had really good success and I think that for a certain sized, certain focused company, they obviously have had problems but I think there are places for success and I think we’re showing that.

Larry Jordan: Sean, you have worn the hat of visual effects artist for a long time. What was it that got you involved in visual effects in the first place?

Sean Devereaux: I think it was probably the Wizard of Oz when I was three years old, hiding behind my parents’ ugly orange and brown couch, so scared of the Witch and seeing her appear out of nowhere and then sinking to the ground in a puff of smoke and fire. That kind of started my journey for me and never really left. The passion just grew from there and I studied both graphic design and film production in college as double majors, kind of a hybrid of what we do every day, and then was blessed enough to get to do it for a living and make movies.

Larry Jordan: Now that we’ve moved past being three years old into adulthood, what did you do with “The Equalizer?”

Sean Devereaux: The Equalizer was an interesting challenge because it’s definitely not what you would call a typical visual effects film. It’s very quiet in the visual perspective. You don’t really want to see what we did, but there are a lot of visual effects. So there’s a challenge in creating the story and telling the vision that Antoine Fuqua has for the film, but also not getting in the way of it, so that was one of the biggest challenges and that included everything from enhancing violence and helping Robert McCall, played by Denzel Washington, stab people in the face with corkscrews and shot glasses, blowing up huge harbors in unbelievably slow motion so that you see every absolute detail, from flakes of rust and dust flaking off of pipe right before it explodes all the way to seeing an explosion go 250 feet in the air as Denzel Washington walks away from it. Then we also did over 250 shots of 3D environment for very intimate scenes that were shot on blue screen, which you would never really expect to be done that way. There’s a lot of stuff that I think when people leave the theater, with the exception of the explosions, I don’t think they would be able to guess what we actually did in the film, which is kind of fun.

Brian Drewes: Which I should add is well over 600 shots.

Larry Jordan: Well, I want to talk about how you created the shots, but I want to back up a step. VFX companies talk about being assigned shots. Looking at it from a business workflow point of view, what role at the film maker decides what shots are assigned and which visual effects company gets them? How does that process work?

Sean Devereaux: It really varies per project. On this one, we were collaborators very early in pre-production. So to say we were assigned shots, we did the entire film, we were the only vendor on the film, so there really wasn’t assigning going on. It was more about deciding from the very beginning before we rolled a frame of film – or in this case digital cinema – how we’re going to accomplish things both for the beauty and the best way to do it to tell the story and wow audiences and to do it in a way that’s capable with the budget.

Brian Drewes: With this particular group of film makers and studio, we have a really good relationship and this is just something where they bring us in as shareholders, essentially. We don’t have ownership of the movie, but we feel that sense of ownership and we’re tasked with managing that almost as a visual effects department for that production. We take it quite seriously and so we end up really assigning ourselves the shots. When the film needs it, when the story needs it, when the director needs it, we’re there.

Larry Jordan: Sean, how big a team did you put together to create the effects?

Sean Devereaux: We had just over 50 people for The Equalizer.

Larry Jordan: How many?

Sean Devereaux: Just over 50.

Larry Jordan: Wow.

Sean Devereaux: That included everyone from the artists as well as production and very talented specialists in every category. We were very blessed with an awesome team.

Larry Jordan: Brian, there was a term that you guys referred to earlier called “violence enhancement.” What does that mean?

Brian Drewes: Well, I’ll let Sean describe that. That’s his area of expertise there.

Sean Devereaux: One of the first conversations we had with Antoine was about Denzel Washington, this powerhouse actor, arguably one of the best actors currently still working and really over the last century, and he didn’t want to just hand over some of the key performance moments that happen to be action to stuntmen. He wanted Denzel to be able to continue to act and perform and be in character while he creates these stunts and this wonderful action, so we came up with ways to enhance the violence. Obviously, Denzel Washington, you can’t really punch him in the face, even a stuntman, because Denzel Washington is actually a boxer and boxes all the time – he’d actually break someone’s jaw if we did that – so by letting Denzel miss the punch, we then digitally replaced his arm and connected it directly to the stuntman’s face, for example, so that even if you were to go through the film frame by frame, you would see every single punch, every stabbing, any violence whatsoever actually connect, actually enter skin and all this highly detailed stuff that doesn’t call attention to it but makes it look very real, very visceral and intimate in a very cool way.

Larry Jordan: I’m personally troubled by films which are overly violent. When you’re doing stuff like this, is there a line over which you don’t go? Or are you driven solely by the director’s vision? At what point is it too much?

Sean Devereaux: That’s a really good question. I think for me, and I think it varies per film, I think it’s too much when you’re creating violence for the sake of violence and there’s no reasoning for it, it’s just to get a big jolt out of the audience. That’s something that this film definitely does not do, just to get the shock factor. There is definitely some violence in this movie, but it’s not done to get the cheap thrills. It’s done because of the way that Robert McCall interacts and the way he’s trained and the way these bad people deserve to be told to stop doing what they’re doing, and if they don’t take that chance that he gives them, he puts them down. Again, none of the violence was done for the shock value. It was done because that’s what Robert McCall had available to him in the room he was in. He never walks into a single room in this film intending to kill any of the baddies. They were always given a choice, so when they don’t take the right choice he uses what’s around him to take care of business and sometimes those things are even more violent than a gun. A corkscrew in someone’s neck is going to be more violent than a gunshot in a lot of ways.

Larry Jordan: I’m not going to go too far down this philosophical path because it would take us the rest of the week, but do you have a role in deciding what’s too much? Or are you really just the hands of the director and you do whatever the director says?

Sean Devereaux: Oh no, it’s much more collaborative than that. Every discussion we have, we discuss things visually too, so it’s not just always words, like, “Hey, Antoine had this really great idea that if we do it this way, I think it’ll really work.” If he’s not sure, the easy answer is we’ll try it and see what happens, and we tried things that way. Especially early in the process, we’ll do a lot of concept work and really rough quick animations and things like that to just sell our ideas across and, of course, Antoine does the same thing. He’ll be like, “Hey, I had this idea,” and I’ll be like, “Ok, that sounds pretty cool, that could probably work,” and then he’ll say, “Well, let’s try it,” and we’ll try and see how it goes and develop it that way.

Larry Jordan: Brian, you mentioned something earlier I want to come back to before we go back more into effects. You had said that you would be adding shots as you got into the film and there was a collaborative process of deciding what shots would be added and what the shots would consist of. But from a business point of view, ad hoc adding shots can become a really expensive way of driving yourself over budget. How do you balance between doing what, quote, is right for the film and staying alive as a company?

Brian Drewes: That’s why we’re on set. You have your expectations going into week one of production and then it’s a moving target at all points. It’s a thing where, if you can foresee that you’ve got some extra shots this week, then you work with the film makers and the production team to figure out where to get those shots back from, and again that’s where we come in to really help and advise while on set, to say, “Ok, let’s find some ways to minimize some of these other shots or make them less complex than we originally intended them to be.” Again, we’re empowered to do that by the studio because they trust us to take care of that for them, so that then, since we’re there, since Sean’s on set, since we’re monitoring this very closely, we kind of know in general what’s going to be coming out as the editing happens. But, of course, we never know what is exactly going to hit the floor and what’s not going to. In general, we’ve been down this road long enough to kind of know what’s going to happen, so we keep good control of it.

Larry Jordan: Are you charging per shot or are you charging a flat fee for the entire film?

Brian Drewes: Oh no, it’s a per shot cost, yes.

Larry Jordan: So then it would not be unusual if they say, “We’re planning 300 shots,” and it becomes 600 shots, then the budget would change accordingly.

Brian Drewes: They would never say that. They would say, “How many shots do you think are going to be in this film?” then we go and break the film down. We generally do our best job to foresee what’s coming and, like I say, we’ve done this enough so our initial breakdowns are usually pretty close to what they’ll eventually be. It’s just one of those things that you change as you go and you just have all these discussions as it’s happening.

Larry Jordan: So really it becomes an ongoing conversation of what shots are needed.

Brian Drewes: Exactly, exactly, all the way up until the last day, until you have to deliver everything, it’s always in flux. Everything can change and does change, so it just takes attention.

Larry Jordan: Does the budget ever get locked? Or is it really changing because as post is going on you realize they don’t need this shot or they may need two shots.

Brian Drewes: Yes, there’s always a point at some point where the budget gets locked, but sometimes if there are good arguments for a bunch of shots that need to get added because the story changed in time in the edit and everybody thinks that’s the right choice for the film and it’s going to make it a better film, then that decision can get made. Again, there is a locked budget but oftentimes it will change as the edit’s changing and progressing as well.

Larry Jordan: I guess what I’m asking is that you’re not totally exposed here. You didn’t say – and I’m inventing a number – we’re going to charge a million dollars for effects and suddenly they ask you to do two million dollars of work and you’ve got to eat the rest of the money. There’s a conversation about making sure that you’re compensated for the work that you’re doing.

Brian Drewes: In every case that we’ve been involved in, yes, that’s the case.

Larry Jordan: Ok, cool.

Sean Devereaux: One of my early mentors, Fred Raimondi, told me once that being a visual effects supervisor means killing your babies. I think that applies to a lot of artists in general but really it’s not just this shot even… or it’s not. You decide what shots you fight for and what you don’t and you do make compromises in every form of making art. This is just another one of those ways where you say, “Ok, I’m going to let the shot go because you’re right, we actually do need this other shot and, although I don’t like that shot as much, it’s needed for the story where my shot was just created for fun, for the demo reel,” so there’s that kind of conversation that happens throughout the process as well.

Larry Jordan: Sean, I want to get back to some production challenges. Something that I think Brian mentioned but I’m going to ask you to answer, is that you were doing a lot of blue screen shots. Now, I’m used to green screen in film. Why are you using blue screen?

Sean Devereaux: We decide between the color of the process screen in many different ways and it comes down to discussions with the director, of course, the director of photography, which in The Equalizer was Mauro Fiore, and I typically choose blue screen for night shots. If the exterior will be night time, I like to choose blue because it’s a little bit darker illuminant and it’s a little bit more natural on the edges, where green screen’s just naturally brighter. Granted, of course, the way you light it will change that too, but it’s easier to make green screen brighter and it’s easier to keep blue screen a little darker. So if I’m going to shoot a half stop or stop down, for the background I’ll typically choose blue screen; and if I’m going to shoot a little brighter, I’ll shoot the green screen, just again because I want to keep those edges as pure as possible for what the background will leave behind in the foreground.

Larry Jordan: What was the biggest challenge you had from an effects point of view in the film?

Sean Devereaux: That’s a really good question. I think the explosion sequence was a very big challenge because in the script written by Richard Went, it wasn’t defined as clearly as it really needed to be for what Antoine’s vision was, so we kind of built off of that and worked with Richard to build that. Because we were seeing this explosion in what Antoine called McCall vision, it’s this kind of predatory mode that some athletes get into before a football… or a lion gets into before it… a gazelle. It’s hyper sensitive, almost like it slows down time and, by seeing an explosion in this way, you see all those little details and figuring out what details to show, what details not to show, how to shoot it in a way that is going to get us the best background plates possible was really a lot of things that, even as we were shooting it and even in post-production, you kind of don’t know if you did it right until it’s done and that for me creatively was really scary. It’s like I don’t know if this is going to work, but all you can do is absolutely do your best and at the end you go, “Yes, these… made a right and right enough that the sequence is phenomenal, one of the best we’ve ever done.”

Larry Jordan: What cameras were you using to shoot the shots?

Sean Devereaux: For those shots in particular, we used the Phantom at very high frame rates. I think we shot up to 2,500 frames a second for a couple of shots.

Larry Jordan: Wow.

Sean Devereaux: Very, very slow motion, like… and the rest of the film almost exclusively was shot on anamorphic lenses using the ALEXA Studio XT.

Larry Jordan: So Phantom for the slow motion and Arri ALEXAs for everything else.

Sean Devereaux: Yes.

Larry Jordan: These effects take forever and two days to render. What were you using as a rendering engine?

Sean Devereaux: Brian, you want to answer that?

Brian Drewes: Yes. A few years back we had started using the cloud to do our rendering tasks and rolled out a company actually based on that code and that software called Zinc, which is a software in a system that actually got acquired by Google at the end of August just this year, so that was a pretty exciting moment for us especially because we were using it so handily knew that it was really working well in our use case and many other use cases. For the really big shots, we sent everything up through that system.

Larry Jordan: That’s some amazing stuff. Are you now sitting back sipping mint juleps by the side of the pool doing nothing, or do you have other projects cooking?

Brian Drewes: Oh, we’ve got other projects. One thing that I mentioned earlier and it sort of goes to one of your questions, we do a lot of software development as well and that, I think, is a thing towards the business side. How do we stay healthy as a company is we don’t just focus on one thing. We make sure that we have a diverse revenue stream and diverse timelines for the kind of projects that we’re working on. Not just the kind of projects, but how long these projects take from beginning to end. For something like Zinc, that was a three or four year project, so we try to layer these things on top of each other and that really does a world of good for the bottom line and for the sustainability of a business. We much prefer to have staff artists. Of course, you’re always going to bounce up and down, but we’d much rather have longer term employees. It just is better for everybody. It’s better for the employee, it’s better for us.

Larry Jordan: Indeed it is. Brian, just to cut you off, what website can people go to see your demo reel and learn more?

Brian Drewes: Zerovfx.com.

Larry Jordan: Brian Drewes and Sean Devereaux are the Co-Founders of ZEROvfx, which is based on Boston. Gentlemen, thanks for joining us today.

Brian Drewes: Thank you very much.

Sean Devereaux: Thank you so much, Larry.

Larry Jordan: Take care, talk to you soon. Bye bye.

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Larry Jordan: Dan Berube is the Founder of the Boston Creative Pro User Group. He’s also the Co-Producer of the world famous Supermeets and a regular on The Buzz. Hello, Dan, good to have you with us.

Dan Berube: Hello Larry, how are you? And welcome and greetings from Boston.

Larry Jordan: Indeed. You know, it’s a Boston kind of day today. We were just talking to the folks at ZEROvfx, they’re based in Boston, you’re based in Boston. I don’t know where our next guest is, but we’ll put him in Boston just to be safe.

Dan Berube: I love ZEROvfx. They were just with me earlier this year at my user group. I just saw the advanced screening of The Equalizer and they showed off their sizzle reel behind the scenes and they’re great people.

Larry Jordan: Yes, it was a fun conversation. I always like talking to visual effects people because they’re living in their own reality. They’ve got images the rest of us can only dream about. You know, I just realized that BOSCPUG is more than 12 years old. That is a long time.

Dan Berube: Yes. I’m more than 12 years old.

Larry Jordan: I should hope so.

Dan Berube: I’ve got to tell you, the whole throwback Thursday thing that takes place every week, I decided to do some searching and I came across New England Film, one of our good websites here, and they did, sure enough, about three meetings in in May of 2002, that would actually be more than three, but they interviewed me and it was just an amazing process to just even find that. That the internet is documented in what you say holds true and I looked at some of the quotes that I had said and, sure enough, not only some of the quotes I had followed through on but some of my milestones that I wanted to achieve have taken place. It’s amazing when you’re passionate and you get it and it grows organically from within you what you can achieve.

Larry Jordan: Let’s just take a look at that for a second. Why did you decide to start a user group all those years ago in the first place?

Dan Berube: Back then, I was working as an Apple certified trainer and doing… They don’t have this program any more, but basically it was a group of consultants and so I was always doing these events with Apple at the Apple Market Center, right outside of Faneuil Hall, and every conversation at that meeting was, “Where can we get more? Where can we get more? What is this thing about Final Cut?” and it just, in short, led me to say, “I’m going to do something, I’m going to try to keep the conversation going in between these events that I hold,” but my user group experience didn’t start there. I was actually involved with the Media 100 user group here and it just stems from that. I remember all the excitement that built when NAB didn’t have Apple there and then that first NAB that there was this mystery software out there that could edit video without hardware and it was called Final Cut and what’s it all about? That’s where it started, Larry.

Larry Jordan: I was just thinking, continuing our Boston theme, Media 100 is part of now Boris FX, which is also based in Boston. You guys are causing a lot of trouble in the industry over there.

Dan Berube: We try. Boston strong, is what I like to say.

Larry Jordan: A lot has changed in our industry over the last ten years and I’m really starting to wonder, are user groups still relevant? Is there still a reason people should attend?

Dan Berube: Absolutely. The first and foremost reason why you should attend is that you get outside, you get out of your production office, you physically remove yourself from where you are and get inside a room with a group of people. Not online, on a forum, not on Facebook, but physically in front of other people who are likeminded and want to be inspired, want to meet you, want to hear what you’re doing, want to see some of the work that you’re doing. This is important. It’s called networking, Larry, and one of the biggest things I’ve learnt throughout these years is that this industry is built all on relationships. In order for you to progress and move, you need to physically place yourself in areas of interest and groups of interest that can help motivate you and move you forward, so user groups are very important.

Larry Jordan: Yes, but you can do the networking at a trade show.

Dan Berube: User groups are more focused than trade shows. You’re going to be guaranteed to be asked for feedback and provide feedback and see more of the people that you’re hoping to meet. I’m not knocking trade shows, I love trade shows, my career is built out of working at many trade shows and we actually started the Supermeet, the first Supermeet, back at NAB in 2002, I believe. But now, even when you go to a trade show, you have user group events and these are communal community events and community is important. Community is never going to go away and that’s what our user groups would like to focus on.

Larry Jordan: That gets to the point of the Supermeets themselves, which are essentially a super user group. Why did you decide, with Mike, to co-produce these things?

Dan Berube: Because we’re both nuts.

Larry Jordan: I agree with that.

Dan Berube: We both believe in the power of the individual and the ability to change people’s minds, to motivate people, that collaboration, value for value, together we stand stronger, all of these common quotes and phrases, they really add value when you put them all together and we like to do events. I liken it to the rush of a good take. Sometimes I say to myself, “Why the heck am I doing this every month?” and there’s so much work and no-one’s asking us to do this, we’re doing it because we feel we need to. We are ambassadors, but there’s a whole lot of work involved. But, you know, Larry, when that event happens, that night happens and we’re all together, the answers are all there.

Larry Jordan: The soul searching, I can see it from talking to Mike between events and between Supermeets. A whole lot of work doesn’t begin to describe how hard you guys work to make these Supermeets come off.

Dan Berube: Through the years, we’ve developed strategies and relationships and actually people that help us. It’s not just Michael and I. It’s you, it’s Cirina, your producer, it’s the sponsors that realize and understand the philanthropic nature of putting together an event that deals with people and our industry and this together is something that helps propel us. When we started back in 2002, there was just five of our groups that got together, but as we progressed through the years we had multiple groups and these weren’t just Final Cut Pro groups. We opened our doors and they’re all film making based. As Michael and I like to say, it’s not just about the tools, it’s how you use the tools and how you create. If there’s any indication that there’s a lot of work involved, the payoff really is the money shot and the money shot is that evening when we hold that event when everyone gets together.

Larry Jordan: Mhmm. Are you planning any new cities? Adding to the Supermeet collection of towns?

Dan Berube: This year, we were going to go to Tokyo during Inter BEE in November and so we’re looking at doing that next year and, of course, just the same as when we went to Europe for the first time to go to Amsterdam, it’s all dependent on people. In every city that we work with or that we go to, we work with likeminded people, people on the ground. Like with the San Francisco Supermeet, we have our good friend Claudia Crask from SF Cutters and others. When we went to London, we had people on the ground like Rick Young. There are a lot of people in Tokyo that we know and a lot of the companies have EMEA offices – Blackmagic Design and others – so there are people there that want to see it succeed and the culture for an event that takes place in a place like Tokyo is a lot different than holding, say, the Boston Supermeet. A lot is involved but the fun is the journey and meeting new people and working with them, so Tokyo is probably our next and most interested city that we’re going to go to. But we may very well, in fact, return to Austin for South by South West next year and in June we usually have a swing city, like we’ll do London – we’re going to do Miami this year.

Larry Jordan: Dan, for people who want more information on Supermeets, where can they go?

Dan Berube: They may go to supermeet.com.

Larry Jordan: And your website is boscpug.org and Dan Berube is the Founder of the Boston Creative Pro User Group. Dan, thank you so much.

Dan Berube: Thank you, Larry.

Larry Jordan: Take care, bye bye.

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Larry Jordan: Tim Buttner is a multi-media expert with skills that span various forms of media. Tim has worked multiple positions on a variety of productions during the years and recently completed shooting and post for the music video Wolf Bite for Owl City, using Blackmagic cameras. We want to learn more. Hello, Tim, welcome.

Tim Buttner: Hello. Can you hear me?

Larry Jordan: Loud and clear.

Tim Buttner: Awesome. Yes, I used the Blackmagic and the EF mount for that….

Larry Jordan: Well, wait, wait, wait, wait, you impetuous fool, you. Let’s start at the beginning rather than go to the middle. Tell me about what your company does.

Tim Buttner: My… production company pretty much does various media. I’m a freelancer generally and what I do is various video content as well as I also am a contributing writer to MarketSaw which is a 3D blog and I’ve done music videos, narrative, commercial content, corporate.

Larry Jordan: I’ve noticed on your website that you’ve got a variety of media – you do both stills work and video work as well as other stuff. Are you principally a video person or principally stills?

Tim Buttner: I’m principally a video guy.

Larry Jordan: Who are some of the clients you’ve worked with?

Tim Buttner: Let’s see, there was the Garden Club of America; Swing 46 was a client that we shot, it’s a restaurant and swing club in New York City, did a commercial for them back in 2009; I co-founded a company called One Forest Films, which … in college that we did a bunch of various content; Jag Old School Choppers; the Art Directors’ Club in New York; just various clients, tons of them. I’ve also worked for a 3D production company in LA, Digital Evolution Studios.

Larry Jordan: Ok, so clearly you’ve been doing this for a while. Just set the position before we talk about Wolf Bite. I noticed that the video on YouTube’s got about 560,000 views, so 560,000 people know the answer to this, but who is Owl City?

Tim Buttner: Pretty much Adam Young is Owl City. He’s a singer/songwriter and multi instrumentalist. It’s an American electronic kind of thing that he started in Minnesota and he’s done a number of music or feature films, animated movies. For instance, Legends of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga’Hoole, which is a movie I actually saw back in 2010 and I had no idea that I was looking into someone I would end up actually working with.

Larry Jordan: Hmm. Well, Wolf Bite is their latest song. Who directed it and what was your role with putting that music video together?

Tim Buttner: The director was Andrew William Ralph and my role was as an Associate Producer providing all my camera gear and a lot of my post gear and I was the Director of Photography and then I did some VFX work and I colored everything with DaVinci Resolve.

Larry Jordan: So you were the one that was taking the pictures and making them perfect. What was your creative goal in shooting the film? And for those who would like to see it, if you just go to YouTube and do a search for Owl City Wolf Bite, you’ll see the video. What was your creative goal in putting this together?

Tim Buttner: Andrew is someone who does a lot of animation on top of video and he does very stylized videos, so when we met we spoke about what we were going to go for was a very artistic and open approach, because we knew we were going to be doing stylized animations on top of the video. We knew we were going to be having a time-lapse behind a wolf mask with the full moon, so we were going to be compositing several different effects together. We knew we wanted to shoot each thing and composite them together, so the goal was to shoot everything and then do all the work in post that we needed to do.

Larry Jordan: You had a very low-light, desaturated look. Was that intentional or just a result of the shooting schedule?

Tim Buttner: It was very much an intentional look, especially because we were doing all that compositing and one of the things that we decided with the animation effects was we wanted to have more emphasis on the animation but still have the color look stylized and unique. I did emphasize a lot of the oranges and the fur color and then we emphasized the blue of the moon with the dancers. We shot it all in 2.5K raw, which enabled us to really utilize the best dynamic range and the best quality out of the camera.

Larry Jordan: Now, you were using the Blackmagic camera. Which model camera were you using?

Tim Buttner: The Cinema Camera EF.

Larry Jordan: How did that respond in a low light situation?

Tim Buttner: It responded really well. We were shooting out of a back of a vehicle that we were driving. Streetlights were pretty much our biggest light and then we had a light coming out of the back of the car to key our cyclist, who was wearing a wolf mask, and almost all of it was shot 800 ASA. I never went to 1600, I shot it all at 800 ASA, which is base ISO for the camera, and I at most boosted about half a stop when we went into a park and there was no light from the street any more, it was just light from the back of the vehicle. It worked wonders. I was amazed at how well it could do in low light, but considering I had tests for a long period of time and I’d really pushed it and seen what it was capable of beforehand, we knew we could go 800 and get those quality images out of it.

Larry Jordan: Now, when you were going into color grading at the end after the editing was complete, how much did you have to push this to get the video to look right?

Tim Buttner: Well, actually the funny thing is we actually did all the color grading before we edited it.

Larry Jordan: Hmm.

Tim Buttner: Yes, it was because we knew we were going to be doing so much VFX effects kind of work with the footage and we were going to be doing those animation effects that the decision was to get it so that we had complete color grading on all the shots. We didn’t really shoot that much, so it wasn’t that hard for me to sit there and get it all ripped out very quickly, and I graded it. For some of the shots, I used the ImpulZ LUTs to give a base grade. All the dancing stuff was custom grading that I did from scratch, but the bike stuff I used the Vision3 Kodak 500T and for the specula lights that we shot, which we shot during the time-lapse, I used a Kodak Vision3 200T. Then pretty much once it was all color graded, maybe there were a few things after it was all edited that I went in and had to tweak color wise but, yes, all the grading was done beforehand.

Larry Jordan: And the reason was because you wanted to have the grade done before you applied all that yellow line animation?

Tim Buttner: Yes.

Larry Jordan: Now, how was that animation created?

Tim Buttner: That was using an iPad app that the director uses called Animation Creation. Hold on, let me just see if I can find that name. It was Animation Creation something. I can’t find the name right now.

Larry Jordan: He was creating it on an iPad?

Tim Buttner: Yes he was.

Larry Jordan: Then how did you get it into your system for editing?

Tim Buttner: You export the animated clips and it just exports just the drawings and we were able to bring it in. We pretty much laid them over completely in Premiere Pro. I don’t think we had to worry about going into After Effects and refining anything, so we were able to put it all right on top of the video right in Premiere Pro.

Larry Jordan: So you did the editing in Premiere Pro, you did the color grade in DaVinci Resolve 11 and, if I remember the press release from Blackmagic, this was one of the first pieces of video that was created in version 11 of Resolve. What was it like to use the software?

Tim Buttner: It was a wonder, I loved it. Pretty much the day we started shooting is when they actually released the data of 11, so right off the bat what I was able to use was that new toolset to be able to, once I bring in the video, I can actually have it copied to a backup drive and just start doing my color grading. Usually, my process would be then making proxies and doing a base grade, one pass to put out proxies, but this time, as I said, I had to do the full quality color grade pass to have it that once we were going into editing. But it was a wonder to work with, it was simple and easy. I had been using all the previous versions, so it wasn’t really that much of a big changeover. There were maybe a few UI changes in small little places that weren’t problems, but it was wonderful. It was fast, it was an absolutely perfect machine.

Larry Jordan: Were you remaining in the RAW? In other words, for editing you edited the RAW format that the Blackmagic camera would shoot?

Tim Buttner: After I color graded it, I exported it out as a ProRes 4444 version in the full resolution of 2.5K.

Larry Jordan: So you would shoot RAW, color grade RAW, export as ProRes four by four and edited that and then were overlaying the animation on the ProRes files?

Tim Buttner: Yes.

Larry Jordan: How long did the whole process take, first to shoot and second to do post?

Tim Buttner: We shot it maybe over two nights. The first night was generally just the bike sequences and the time-lapses and the speculas. Then we did the dancers the next night; and editing wise, once it was all graded – grading took no more than a day, so grading and exporting of the 4444 ProRes was about a day and then editing wise, I can’t exactly remember, it’s been a while. It was pretty quick. We put this one out a lot faster. We did a different music video that took a lot longer for us to release and one of the things that took me longest, I remember, in terms of any of the effects was in After Effects I had to go in and this one girl who was a dancer was wearing kind of a tube top thing and we were told we needed to cover that up. Luckily, because of the yellow effects, we could make it kind of like a artistic glow kind of thing, so I had to go in there and frame by frame kind of key frame up a kind of shirt thing to put on a couple of shots. I know that one took me about ten or so hours to do all the different shots that were in that, and then it depends on how long Andrew took doing each of the animation ones, but I would say it probably didn’t take us more than two weeks to do the whole project.

Larry Jordan: Well, it has a very interesting, a very unique look and very stylized. For people who haven’t seen it, check it out on YouTube, do a search for Owl City and look for Wolf Bite. As you wear your multimedia hat, what are some of the trends that you’re looking at, things that you can take advantage of creatively this year?

Tim Buttner: I’m looking a lot at 4K still, like everyone else. It’s a tool that is important. I’ve shot RED before and I know the extra resolution really helps, especially with reframing. It’s a great tool. I actually just saw that RED’s going to release this new little firmware thing where you can actually pick out dynamic range wise, so like, “Oh, I want to see everything at this F stop within the dynamic range.” That’s a really cool new little tool. They’ve called it… I’d have to actually look it up, but it was something scope, so that’s pretty cool. The MoVI is something that’s very interesting to me as a tool for a lot of the various ways in which we’re going around shooting stuff. In terms of post, I’m very excited with where everything’s going, especially performance capture. I had the pleasure of meeting and interviewing Andy Serkis for MarketSaw the 3D blog I wrote at… and just hearing what he had to say with what’s coming up and through with that technology, it’s very exciting. There’s a lot of exciting things in the future and I still have a strong belief in stereo 3D and I believe that, with 4K and the further pushes technology wise, 3D is, especially once James Cameron gets his Avatar 2, we’re going to see people saying, “Yes, 3D is still around, it’s still punching and it’s not giving up.”

Larry Jordan: Some of your work, maybe not all of it, but some of it is in music videos, which are notorious for having low budgets. Can things like motion capture or 3D even apply to a music video when there’s not a lot of money there to begin with?

Tim Buttner: That is an interesting question and when I worked for the 3D company in LA, we did… the people don’t stop color on the walls. Music video, we were the 3D company that shot that in 3D and that was released on a Nintendo 3DS. Now, that was actually a pretty big budget, a lot bigger budget than a lot of music videos. A lot of small independent music videos don’t really go that big, but that’s definitely something where 3D and certain VFX are definitely usually able to be applied. In terms of performance capture, that’s an interesting one. I would actually be very interested to see someone do a performance capture music video. I mean, it would be costly but I think it would be something that would be crazy cool.

Larry Jordan: Yes, but sometimes finding the dollars to fund crazy cool can be difficult.

Tim Buttner: Well, that’s why you need an artist who has deep pockets who’s just willing to say, “Yes, I have this great song that I’ve made. I want to do a music video and I’m going to put all my money into it. I don’t care if I make money back.” I know that’s something a lot of people don’t want to hear but it’s like, “I want to do something cool,” and they are doing it for the artistic reasons. That would be nice but, yes, generally at the end of the day it’s how much money can you spend and how much money can you get back from spending that money?

Larry Jordan: Yes, I know that equation very, very well. What projects are you working on next that we should keep our eyes open for?

Tim Buttner: There are a variety of different projects. I’ve got a couple of things I shot for the local newspaper and I’m helping them build a video section to their website. I shot the Spartan Race and NBC was also there and maybe possibly, because they saw the camera shooting, they actually asked me for the finish line footage that I shot, because I shot some really good finish line footage, so possibly some of that might end up in that show, which would be cool. I have no idea if that’s official yet though.

Larry Jordan: It’s still nice to think about though.

Tim Buttner: Still nice to think about, yes. Then there’s just a couple of other projects that people are talking to me about, some things I can’t say, it’s kind of under the radar, kind of like we’re talking to you, just don’t mention this kind of thing; and possibly some of my own narrative shorts in the future as well.

Larry Jordan: Very cool. Tim, for people who want to keep track of what you’re up to, what website can they check out?

Tim Buttner: Timbutt2.com.

Larry Jordan: That’s timbutt2.com and Tim Buttner is the Founder of Tim Butt 2 Productions. Tim, thanks for joining us. This has been fun. I appreciate your time.

Tim Buttner: Thank you very much.

Larry Jordan: Take care, bye bye.

Larry Jordan: One of the things I’ve been struck by as we talk with companies over the last several years is the sea change that’s occurred inside the visual effects industry. It’s one of the reasons I enjoyed chatting with Brian Drewes and Sean Devereaux today, the Co-Founders of ZEROvfx, to see how they’re changing their business model to be able to keep up with the constant changes in film making and the effects industry.

It’s always fun chatting with Dan Berube. The last time that we talked with him, he was here in the studios talking about a Supermeet that he was about ready to do. He’s the President of the Boston Creative Pro User Group and I agree with Dan, the chance to get out of the office, get out of the edit suite and meet people and learn and get some new ideas is always a good one.

And Tim Buttner of Tim Butt 2 Productions talking about multimedia from inexpensive music videos to much more interesting stuff. If you haven’t had a chance to check out the Owl City video called Wolf Bite, do take a look at it.

Thinking of demo reels, the demo reel at ZEROvfx will suck the eyes out of your head and put them back. Amazing, amazing stuff.

There’s a lot happening at The Buzz between shows. It’s all posted to our website at digitalproductionbuzz.com. You can talk with us on Twitter, @DPBuZZ, and Facebook, at digitalproductionbuzz.com. Music on The Buzz is provided by SmartSound; The Buzz is streamed by wehostmacs.com.

Text transcripts are provided by Take 1 Transcription. You can email us at info@digitalproductionbuzz.com. Our producer is Cirina Catania, our engineers are Adrian Price and Megan Paulos. On behalf of Mike Horton, my name is Larry Jordan and thanks for listening to the Digital Production Buzz.

Voiceover: The Digital Production Buzz was brought to you by Blackmagic Design, creators of the world’s highest quality solutions for the feature film, post production and television broadcast industries; and by shuttterstock.com, a global marketplace for royalty free images and videos. With over two million royalty free HD and 4K video clips, Shutterstock helps you take your creative projects to the next level; and by Other World Computing, providing quality hardware solutions and extensive technical support to the worldwide computer industry since 1988.

Digital Production Buzz

October 2, 2014

[Transcripts provided by Take 1 Transcription]

[

to listen to this show.]

HOSTS

Larry Jordan

Michael Horton

GUESTS

Luis Barreto, Producer/Director

George Olver, Founder, Movidiam

Oliver Meiseberg, Product Manager, Cinema 4D, Maxon

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Voiceover: The Digital Production Buzz is brought to you by Blackmagic Design, creators of the world’s highest quality solutions for the feature film, post production and television broadcast industries; and by shutterstock.com, a global marketplace for royalty free images and videos. With over two million royalty free HD and 4K video clips, Shutterstock helps you take your creative projects to the next level; and by Other World Computing, providing quality hardware solutions and extensive technical support to the worldwide computer industry since 1988.

Voiceover: Live from Ralph’s Maytag Museum and Podcast Studio in beautiful downtown Burbank, it’s the Digital Production Buzz.

Voiceover: Production, post production, distribution.

Voiceover: What’s really happening now and in your digital future?

Voiceover: The Buzz is live now.

Larry Jordan: Welcome to The Digital Production Buzz, the world’s longest running podcast covering digital media production, post production and distribution around the world. Hi, my name is Larry Jordan. Our ever-handsome co-host, Mr. Mike Horton, joins us as well.

Larry Jordan: This is a very special day in The Buzz history. We are in the Moviola Studios and we are videotaping – filming, if you were – today’s episode. It’s going to be broadcast on November 6^th and we are delighted to be sharing both video and audio with you for The Buzz.

Larry Jordan: Our first guest is Luis Barreto. He is amazing. Look at this. Have you seen his… I mean, it’s amazing.

Mike Horton: He’s got a resume this long.

Larry Jordan: Unbelievable. He’s built a career creating reality TV programs and tonight we want to learn more about how he does it. Then, George Oliver is the Founder and CEO of Movidiam, a creative network that allows film makers and clients to collaborate around the globe; and finally, earlier this month, Buzz producer Cirina Catania took our microphones to IBC in Amsterdam, where she interviewed some amazing visual artists in the Maxon Cinema 4D booth.

Larry Jordan: Just a reminder that we are offering text transcripts for this show, courtesy of Take 1 Transcription. Now you can both search and print every single word from every single broadcast. You can learn more at take1.tv and thanks, Take 1, for making these transcripts possible.

Larry Jordan: Mike.

Mike Horton: Larry.

Larry Jordan: You look different on camera. Who knew you had color in your face? I’m very impressed.

Mike Horton: This is different. By the way, the lighting makes you look a lot younger. A lot younger and I love your hair. This is the first time a lot of people have ever seen you.

Larry Jordan: And it’ll be the last time they ever look, too. I can see now. And look at this, a black shirt and a black jacket against a black background. What is this floating head business?

Mike Horton: This chair is a little uncomfortable though. But other than that… we’ll talk to the producer afterwards.

Larry Jordan: I was just thinking, Moviola’s a place you hang out a lot.

Mike Horton: I do, I do, and it’s nice to be back here.

Larry Jordan: What are you doing at Moviola when you’re not with The Buzz?

Mike Horton: I do the webinars there, which I know you do every week at the Maytag Museum, but I do them at Moviola every Tuesday and so this is comfortable. It feels just really nice. I know everybody.

Larry Jordan: You’ve been in front of the camera for more years than we want to talk about.

Mike Horton: Yes, but I haven’t been in front of the camera in a long time, so this is a little different. You’ve been in front of the camera, at least the computer camera. Now we’ve got real cameras here. In fact, we ought to do a show one time just to show everybody what we have here. We have these gorgeous…

Larry Jordan: What’s interesting, have you looked out there? We’ve got a crew of 75 people. 75 people. I’ve never seen such a mass or mess, actually, in my life.

Mike Horton: Yes, it’s a mess. There are a lot of boxes back there.

Larry Jordan: By the way, I want to remind you to visit with us on Facebook, at digitalproductionbuzz.com. You can also hang out with us on Twitter, @dpbuzz, and whenever you want information about the show between the shows, be sure to visit our website at digitalproductionbuzz.com. We are going to be talking reality, and it’s going to be amazing, with Luis Barreto, right after this.

Larry Jordan: Blackmagic Design is now shipping its production camera 4K, a super high resolution 4K digital production camera for ultra HD television production. Featuring a large super 35 sensor with a professional global shutter, it also offers EF and ZE compatible lens mounts and records to a super fast SSD drive. Capturing high quality ProRes files, the Blackmagic production camera 4K gives customers a complete solution to shoot amazing high resolution music videos, episodic television productions, television commercials, sports, documentaries and much more.

Larry Jordan: The Blackmagic production camera 4K also features an incredibly tempting price of $2995. Learn more about the Blackmagic production camera 4K that is definitely priced to move, visit blackmagicdesign.com today. That’s blackmagicdesign.com.

Larry Jordan: Luis Barreto is an Emmy nominated producer, director and editor. He specializes in creating reality television, which is what we want to spend today talking about. Luis, thanks for joining us today.

Luis Barreto: Very welcome.

Larry Jordan: What was it that got you involved in media in the first place?

Luis Barreto: It really is I love television, I grew up watching TV and I think that when I was younger I used to sneak in NBC and watch them make all these TV shows and I just became completely engaged and enchanted with the whole process and really from junior high school, since I started sneaking into NBC I wanted to do it, so it’s really been a lifelong journey.

Mike Horton: Seriously, you snuck into NBC? You got through the gates? Back in the ‘80s, it was actually pretty easy.

Luis Barreto: I was a big boy in junior high school and I’d have a clipboard, I’m serious, and I’d walk by the gate and wave to the guard and walk right in and they’d wave back and just let me in.

Larry Jordan: Are you serious?

Mike Horton: I used to do that at Universal.

Luis Barreto: Yes. Well, that’s the way, yes.

Mike Horton: Yes.

Luis Barreto: Pre-9/11, life was sweet.

Mike Horton: A lot of us did, a lot of us snuck in. It was a great way to get started.

Luis Barreto: Mhmm, and you met people and, you know, if you were smart and engaging, people gave you the time of day. It was really a magical time.

Larry Jordan: Ok, so now we’ve got you sneaking into NBC, all right? And you’re crawling along the floor trying to meet people. What made you decide that reality television was the career you wanted to pursue?

Luis Barreto: Ok, that’s a great question. What ended up happening is I eventually fell into editing and I became an Avid editor and I had a friend who was at a company called Bunim Murray, who really started the whole reality business, and they were looking for a Spanish speaking producer to go and do a series called Road Rules in South America and my friend said, “Oh, I know somebody,” and he called me and said, “Listen, you’ve got to try this out.”

Luis Barreto: I called Bunim Murray, they said, “We’d love to hear from you.” I had to write three missions, so that weekend I watched a bunch of episodes of Road Rules, I’d never seen the show, and became an expert and then Sunday I sat down, I started writing three missions and I submitted them on Monday. Wednesday, I was part of the staff.

Larry Jordan: Wow.

Mike Horton: What’s a mission?

Luis Barreto: Mission was what they had to do to receive what they called a handsome reward. Each episode would involve a mission that the kids would have to do. If they accomplished the mission, they would move forward to the next place. They always accomplished their mission, and then at the end they would receive some sort of prize, a $5,000 to $7,000 prize of some sort.

Larry Jordan: So that becomes essentially the dramatic hook for the show, which is can they make the mission? Are they going to do it in time? So that becomes what you hang the suspense on.

Luis Barreto: And it was fish out of water, because this particular season was a South American season which we started in Chihuahua, Mexico and went all the way down to Costa Rica. Finished in Costa Rica; and then the next year we did an around the world trip with Semester at Sea, which was phenomenal. I mean, that was just an amazing experience. Went to Cuba, went to India, went to…

Mike Horton: It’s like your first gig, reality gig, you travel all over the world.

Luis Barreto: Yes, it was phenomenal.

Mike Horton: You wrote a couple of missions and, oh man, what a nice thing. Was everything downhill from there?

Luis Barreto: You know, it’s hard because there were 18 of us managing seven cast members. That never happened again for me.

Mike Horton: And these are kids, right?

Luis Barreto: Yes. I did The Mole after that for ABC. That was 75 people on set with a lawyer and it was much more controlled. We didn’t have anybody whisper in our ear saying, “Listen, that mission’s really dangerous. You can’t do that.” I mean, I had them bullfighting without anybody calling me and saying, “Are you sure you want to have them bullfighting? These kids don’t even know how to tie their shoes, practically,” and it worked out really great.

Mike Horton: And these kids are still alive today.

Luis Barreto: Absolutely.

Mike Horton: Ok.

Luis Barreto: Absolutely.

Larry Jordan: I was looking at some of your titles. Let’s see, we’ve got American Jungle, which was in Hawaii, Turn and Burn, which is auto reclamation, Texas Ranch House, which is the punishment of Tenderfeet, Los Golden Boys, which is boxing I think.

Luis Barreto: Yes.

Larry Jordan: From Beyond, which is paranormal. What is it that people find so fascinating about reality TV?

Luis Barreto: You have to create something that people can relate to. The key to really…

Larry Jordan: Digging old Chevys out of mud is something people can relate to?

Luis Barreto: Yes. Here’s what it is. What you can relate to is the possibility of finding your uncle’s car buried under the garage and saying, “You know what? I could make a lot of money off of this,” and it’s the notion that you can find things and turn them into money in this economy that really, I think, appeals to people.

Luis Barreto: A lot of these shows are really built on turning trash into gold, basically, and I think that that’s something that people want to see. You have to find a hook, not just with characters but the actual format of what you’re doing to engage people. But really, it’s all about people. At the end of the day, I don’t care what format you talk about, it’s the people.

Larry Jordan: But some of the people are a little odd, you know? I’ve decided that the only person that stars in reality TV programs are people that have beards that are about a foot and a half long. Is this a casting requirement, that if they don’t have a long beard – and clearly, Mike, you’re out of luck – but you don’t have a long beard, you don’t make it in the show?

Luis Barreto: Beards are definitely a requirement.

Mike Horton: That’s the casting process.

Luis Barreto: No, I mean, I think it’s the in vogue thing, but you take the beards off, they’re still the same people, you know? I’m pitched probably three or four shows a day, people send me a reel or whatever, and the first thing I do is look at the people that are in the reel and I realize, “Oh, they’re stiff. I can’t even hear them talk.”

Luis Barreto: I don’t know who these people are.  The thing you’re trying to do is really, at the end of the day, you sell people. I’m trying to pitch a show right now about these writers that go to the North Pole on motorcycles. My reel isn’t about the North Pole, it’s about these three people and it’s really my interviewing them and getting them to give me the sound bites I know the network wants to hear.

Luis Barreto: I’ve done enough shows to understand what beats the network wants to hear from a cast member in order to say, “That person can represent me. I see him on a billboard. I can see how they can make a show because how they speak and what story they tell makes sense for me and my viewers.”

Larry Jordan: It sounds like the two key things to successful reality shows are casting and mission.

Luis Barreto: Yes, in that order.

Larry Jordan: Really?

Luis Barreto: Yes.

Larry Jordan: And is the casting the leads? Or is the casting all the people that revolve around them?

Luis Barreto: Everything. I’ve got this kid who wants to do a jewelry show. I said, “Who’s the Chumlee in your group?” If you know Pawn Stars, there’s one guy, Chumlee, who’s kind of like the butt of every joke and the two leads are smart, the dad and the son and the grandpa, but Chumlee really is the comedy that kind of sets everything off.

Luis Barreto: You need that element, so it’s really finding three or four people that your viewers relate to. Not everyone’s going to like Chumlee. They’re going to like the grandpa or the father or the son and thus we had a multi-generational split so that I can sit with my dad and my son and watch the show and all three of us will love it.

Mike Horton: These three guys that want to ride their motorcycles to the North Pole, it’s got you excited, you want to pitch it. Is it because of those three guys?

Luis Barreto: Yes. Absolutely.

Mike Horton: Not because of the three guys just going to the North Pole?

Luis Barreto: No. It would take me a long time to find these three. What I have is I have two guys and a young lady, basically, so I’m covering a lot of different demos in that regard. The leader of the expedition’s in his early 50s. The wounded warrior guy is in his mid-30s and my lady, what am I going to I call her? The…

Larry Jordan: Female lead.

Luis Barreto: Yes, the American sweetheart, she’s 29 and so I’ve got this great spread of demo that will cover a wide swath that a network can say, “Wow, I could really have a lot of different viewers on this one project because I’ve done a great job of casting them.” But to find those three people on my own, that would have cost me a lot of money. Lots of money, and that’s the key. I mean, the companies I compete with, they’ve got the resources to go out and find the right writers and they can spend, 50, 60 thousand dollars just finding one person, literally.

Larry Jordan: This opens up a different question. How real is reality TV? Is it really as much of a misnomer as I think it is?

Luis Barreto: Absolutely. I’ll give you an example. I did a show…

Mike Horton: Don’t be political here.

Luis Barreto: No, no, no. This is an example. I did a show where we were supposed to find people that found models, ok? So agencies have these scouts that go out and scout for models. Before we left the office here to go on location to find these people, the network wanted to see who our cast was going to be. So you see, that’s…

Larry Jordan: You’ve got to know the answer before you start.

Luis Barreto: Yes. The whole concept just went out the window, because I’d have to present to you who they are. Now, the thing is I could present them to you, you can approve them, but when I get out in the field I’m not going to tell them what to say. They’re going to say whatever they say and we’re going to deal with that as a story element. That’s where the reality really comes in.

Luis Barreto: We no longer have the time to really set up these extended eight to ten week shoots like Real World, where you live with the kids 24/7, out of all that media you find story, you comb through all that and you find the stories and you build. Now we’re shooting that in three weeks, so you have to compress everything. The way you compress everything is by creating situations where the people deal with them and that is the reality, is how they deal.

Larry Jordan: But creating a situation is very similar to giving them a storyline, isn’t it? You’re playing the bad guy, you’re playing the good guy?

Luis Barreto: No, not in that sense. In the sense of, let’s say, tomorrow we’re going to go meet a guy who’s training horses, ok? Well, I’ve never been on horse. Ok, well, we’ll find out how that goes tomorrow; so tomorrow we show up and there’s the guy training the horses and the guy gets on and he’s talking all kinds of stuff about how the horses are, I’m not telling him what to say, I’m not telling him how to react. That’s all him.

Luis Barreto: He’s come to me and said, “I’m willing to be on your show and be open to the situations you bring to me,” and in the casting process that’s what you have to vet out. It’s like how open is this person to what I set up so that when I do set it up, I have something to…

Larry Jordan: So you’re really looking for people that are good at improv.

Luis Barreto: No. I’m looking for narcissists.

Larry Jordan: You’re looking for?

Luis Barreto: Narcissists.

Larry Jordan: Ah.

Mike Horton: But are the situations, though, when it gets dull, manipulated into being dramatic? Otherwise we have no drama, we have no conflict.

Luis Barreto: Yes, but we as producers don’t have to manufacture that. That’s human nature. It’s totally human nature and, because we’ve always been around…

Mike Horton: A lot of people start whining and bitching and moaning on reality and they always do it in this kind of situation.

Luis Barreto: Yes, because they’re preloaded.

Mike Horton: And commenting on what the situation is.

Luis Barreto: Right. I know, because they’re…

Mike Horton: Is that real? Which goes back to the question.

Luis Barreto: Yes. No, it’s real because they’re preloaded. Reality’s been around so long now, a full generation, that people grow up and they are seeing the conventions of what reality TV is. Again, getting back to people pitching me ideas, “I got this great dramatic group of people. They’re real, they’re dramatic.” Well, I run from those people. I don’t need that because they think they know what I want.

Mike Horton: Uh-huh, because they’ve seen those reality shows.

Luis Barreto: It gets back to narcissism. See, here’s the thing with narcissists. They don’t care what they sound like. They’re too self involved to really care and edit themselves. That’s the gold right there, a person in whatever situation they happen to want to step in, that will step in as themselves, that are so good, and that’s what good casting is about, that you know that that person is going to be themselves. That’s different than somebody who says, “I’m dramatic, let me be dramatic. I know what you want.”

Luis Barreto: I don’t want that person because they’re going to give me plastic, they’re going to give me the stuff that I’m absolutely going to look at and go, “Oh, that’s blocked and staged. Who wants to see that?” I don’t want to see that. I don’t want to be in a situation where I’m telling my participants what to say. They’re not cast members either, they’re participants. They’re not stars, they’re participants. They’re participating in my experiment.

Larry Jordan: Let’s come back a step. You were talking about the fact that when you were pitching a show, you need to pitch the concept of a mission, a task or a goal, which involves writing. Where does writing factor into organizing a team of self absorbed narcissists?

Luis Barreto: Writing would be that I would have to initially write the concept and then, in pre-production…

Larry Jordan: Pick one of your shows. Texas Ranch House.

Luis Barreto: Texas Ranch House is perfect.

Larry Jordan: Walk me through that concept.

Luis Barreto: Ok. A British company’s hiring a producer, they hire me, and they hand me literally a book about this big that is their research on what it takes to run an circa 1867 cowboy ranch, so I look through all the junk they give me and I go, “Ok,” then I sit down and I take a board of cards, just like any other producer does, and I produce, based on their research, how the flow is.

Luis Barreto: I’ve got to build a ranch, I’ve got to hire the blah, blah, blah and every show has ten or 12 cards with beats on them. You know, episode three, I cast one woman who was the maid. I knew by episode three she would be to here being the maid. She was Upper East Side, well educated, from New York City, she loved horses, but I knew that she was way too smart… By episode four, I was off by one episode, she made her own chaps and started riding horses bareback, which drove my cowboys nuts. They were like, “Well, she can’t do that. She’s the maid,” you know? And then they were apoplectic, they couldn’t deal with it, and she was a great rider and she ended up riding the round-up, because they needed her.

Luis Barreto: But it was something that I knew in my heart was going to happen because I’d been around reality enough to know, but I never told those people what to say. I learned how to build an adobe ranch house, hired a guy to make the bricks to make the adobe ranch house. I learned that those ranch houses are built with stone in the first room and then after that comes the adobe.

Luis Barreto: If you look on Google maps and find the house, you’ll see it exactly like that. The corral was built out of raw materials. Everything we did was 1867. They ate beans and jerky for two and a half months. They wore scratchy clothes. I mean, everything was, but I had to learn all that on my own and then write all the episodes, turn them into the network and say, “Here’s what the show is probably going to happen.” Now, no-one’s holding my feet to the fire saying, “Well, that didn’t happen,” but now they feel comfortable.

Luis Barreto: Now everyone goes, “Ok, here’s a guy that understands how the show’s going to flow and he gets what the beats are. He doesn’t have to write beats.” I know I’m going to get something and that’s what they’re looking for. They’re risk averse. They’re looking for guarantees of what’s going to happen. The same thing with anything I pitch. I have to write scenarios of what I think is going to happen in order for them to feel like there’s somebody that understands what the property is and how they’re going to deliver it.

Mike Horton: So each of these cast members each day knows what’s going to happen? Or, here, this is what’s going to happen…

Luis Barreto: No, I don’t reveal to them what it is that is going to happen. I don’t show my cast members what I’ve written out. All that stuff is just between myself and the network. The cast members don’t see the pitch, they don’t see any of that stuff. They’re literally participants who are coming and saying, “Listen, I love what you’ve cast me for. I’m ready to go, whatever that is going to be,” and I can’t stress enough, it gets back to narcissism. They want to be on TV. Right now, we’ve shifted our society, I think, from manufacturing to celebritydom. Everyone wants to be a celebrity. “I want to be a celebrity. I want to be on a reality show.”

Luis Barreto: Some people go, “Oh, I’ve got a great company, it’ll make a great reality show.” What? How does that figure? “Well, my guys are so funny in the back, it’s great,” you know? Or I get the…

Mike Horton: Look at the Kardashians, for God’s sakes.

Luis Barreto: You’d be amazed how many people come to me and say, “Listen, I’ve got the next Kardashians. Me and my boys were hysterical,” and you get there and they start talking and they’re laughing and you’re like, “I don’t get it.” There are all these inside jokes that we have as we grow up and stuff, but they’re our jokes, they’re not everyone’s jokes. No-one gets it.

Larry Jordan: So the writing really is to help you organize the flow, but the writing is not shared with the participants?

Luis Barreto: No. No.

Larry Jordan: Let’s go back to Texas Ranch House. How much time do you have for pre-production before you start to roll camera?

Luis Barreto: Seven months.

Larry Jordan: Seven months. You need that much?

Luis Barreto: I had to buy 25 ponies, I had to buy 100 head of longhorn cattle, I had to build a ranch house. Well, I had to find a ranch first. Finding the ranch took me a month and a half because I had to find a ranch that was big enough so that they could not take a horse and ride out off the ranch. I leased a 75,000 acre parcel inside a 400 square mile ranch, ok? So they were really marooned. There’s no way they can go anywhere. They found the outhouse eventually that I had for my crew and they used that, but…

Mike Horton: And, yes, 1867, there’s no electricity, there’s no…

Luis Barreto: There’s no paper, there’s no toilet paper.

Mike Horton: No paper? Oh my gosh. You wouldn’t get me on that show.

Larry Jordan: I was gone at the scratchy clothes part. I was not going to show up.

Mike Horton: I don’t ride horses, I don’t wear chaps.

Luis Barreto: One of the most amazing things was the women of the ranch didn’t clean very well and within maybe 12 hours, they were overcome by flies to the point where you walked in the house, if your mouth was open, they would fly in. It was just like a gray cloud, you know? It was just really crazy. But, again, I never shared any of that stuff with them. Never, ever, ever.

Larry Jordan: Seven months of preparation and you’re ready to start to roll cameras.

Luis Barreto: Then I had to cast the people, that took me three months, so between finding the ranch, building the ranch, finding the vendors to actually execute the ranch, finding the horses, finding the cattle, finding a wrangler that was willing to believe we could turn pedestrians into cowboys in 12 days, that’s all I had in the budget for the boot camp was 12 days, so literally I had guys that walked off just regular jobs, never been on horses, that were turned into cowboys in 12 days. We did it.

Larry Jordan: And they were saddle sore for weeks after.

Luis Barreto: Oh, it was precious. It was so wonderful, yes.

Larry Jordan: Luis, there is so much that I want to talk about with you. I’d like to invite you back for a second time. Can you come back and join us again?

Luis Barreto: Oh, absolutely.

Larry Jordan: And for people who want to learn more about the work that you’re doing, where can they go on the web?

Luis Barreto: I’m a big believer in networking and electronic networking particularly, so LinkedIn would be the best way to keep track of what I’m doing and the best way to communicate with me, also LinkedIn. I really believe in that network and use it. Exclusive.

Larry Jordan: Luis, thank you. This has been great.

Luis Barreto: You’re very welcome.

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Larry Jordan: George Olver is the Founder and CEO of Movidiam, a creative network that allows brands, agencies and film makers across the globe to connect, collaborate and create files. Welcome, George, good to have you with us.

 

George Olver: Larry, great to be here.

Larry Jordan: What is Movidiam?

George Olver: Movidiam is a creative network that allows brands, agencies and film makers to connect, collaborate and create films, so it’s really simplifying the process of collaboration.

Larry Jordan: So it’s a place where everybody sits round and talks to each other?

George Olver: There’s one element of that, Larry, and we’re asking film makers across the globe to build profiles and display their work and connect with each other and share what they’re up to, and so there’s the social profiling element to it and then there’s the project management side of it.

Larry Jordan: Would this be like Facebook for film makers?

George Olver: There are some really interesting social networks out there, but what we’re looking at is making something very, very bespoke for film makers. We’ve all used various networks and various tools to make the processes more efficient and what we’re looking to do is put these tools and things all in one domain, custom built with the film maker in mind.

Larry Jordan: Is the website live? Or is it still in beta?

George Olver: The stage we’re at at the moment is pre-registration, so we put out some films which explain what Movidiam is and how it’s going to work and we’re really excited about the interest and enthusiasm from the global community of film makers that have pre-registered. We’re working round the clock to bring a beta version to market and to start showing people and inviting people onto the platform and we’re really determined to get feedback from film makers and understand exactly the pain points that they have in the processes that they do on a daily basis and then try and iterate and build our program around those needs.

George Olver: Obviously, we’ve had ten years of experience producing corporates and commercials for various businesses around the world and we’ve taken that insight and that understanding and we’ve mind mapped that into a technology platform which we believe is going to really service the needs of many film makers.

Larry Jordan: The cynic in me has to ask, I swear every week another ad agency who’s looking to expand their business says, “We’ve been doing ads for the last X years and we realized that we need to put a website together,” and everybody and his cousin is doing websites to enable film makers to make films. Why did you decide to go to this effort and what makes yours unique?

George Olver: That’s a very good question, Larry, and I think the barriers to entry to make a website are very low. That’s part of the joy of the web. Alex, my business partner, and I have been film makers from the very grass roots of film making so we’ve been around post production houses, making coffee and building up an understanding of how the editorial process works, building up an understanding of the editing systems, building understanding of the camera, so we’ve really been through the whole process of making films.

George Olver: I think what we’ve really focused on is a very, very design-centric approach, really trying to drill down on what a film maker as a visual person wants to see and where they want to hang out and operate. Many of the sites that we see out there are gray in their nature and list based. What we’ve tried to do with some exciting new technologies which have only recently become possible because of the nature of Web 2.0 Plus is really build an immersive experience for film makers to profile and really connect with others who are looking for their skill sets.

Larry Jordan: Film makers encompasses a wide range of work from people that are doing weddings all the way up through hundred million dollar feature films and all kinds of stuff in between. How would you define your typical customer?

George Olver: I think, certainly to begin with, the typical customer is a team of three to ten people wanting to crew up quickly to create a film. Yes, Hollywood has many established routines and practices etcetera and obviously initially we’re not going to be focusing on that. But really what we’ve looked at is throughout the whole process of making films, whether you’re an agency or whether you’re a single shooter or whether you’re a business that wants a film made, there’s a place for you on Movidiam to find talent or, indeed, to profile your offering and your skills. Across the board, it will be a very useful tool.

Larry Jordan: Is this a website that a client would come to to find crew to create a corporate video? Or is this a place where a director would post a reel to find crew? Or is this a place where a crew member would try to find projects they can become a member of? Help me understand a scenario here.

George Olver: Again, I think it’s very wide reaching. An editor, a cameraman, a DOP, a director, a stuntman, all people involved in the production mix can register and build a profile for free, showcasing their activity, showcasing what they do and also referencing themselves in a credit and testimonial system which validates their involvement in that production. That’s the profiling bit of it and the validation of the credit bit of it.

George Olver: If we look at the Hollywood Cinema, the last 100 years, the white lines have gone up at the end of the film. They are not dynamic, they’re not pickable and you can’t see who else was involved very easily. With Movidiam’s profiling system, we have the ability to quickly build a visible transparency on who’s worked on what and what skill sets might be transferrable to other films and other teams.

Larry Jordan: It sounds like, and again I’m trying to get my brain wrapped around this, it sounds like this is principally a website geared toward crewing a production. Is that true?

George Olver: Yes, indeed you can certainly find talent. I think if we go back a little bit and think about the incredible thing that’s happened in the production industry with ultimately quality of cameras going up and costs going down, it’s meant that there’s a great range of incredibly talented people now that have the ability to make films and, really, we’re trying to build visibility on those people, whether they’re producing stuff for Burton snowboards or Red Bull, or whether they’re producing stuff more locally in a small town, perhaps in the wedding space.

George Olver: Really throughout the whole spectrum of producing films, there is a position for you here and we’re just looking to try and streamline the processes and the production management that you need to go through to deliver those films.

Larry Jordan: As part of this, does Movidiam keep track of contracts and deliverables? Or just staff?

George Olver: Talking about the project management side of it, I think this is where it gets really interesting, and this is what is, I think, very different about Movidiam. Not only have we got the social and the profile and the community side, but we’re very focused on the project management side, again, looking at the experiences that we’ve had in project managing a whole range of different films. There is a process for reviewing final films and we’ve developed some technology to review and have a very concise review platform.

George Olver: We’ve developed a call sheet feature which can be dynamically populated, so a location can be dynamically populated with the local taxi companies, the local hospitals. Anyone can contribute to that and so we’re trying to bring the call sheet into the new tablet based world.

Larry Jordan: An interactive call sheet. How does it work?

George Olver: It works much in the same way as the traditional call sheet, as in you populate it. But again, with our team system and having visibility of people’s profiles, you can quickly populate them in and their contact information and website and data about them is auto-populated. Locations, postcodes and zip codes will automatically generate maps into the system, so again the process of creating the call sheet will be a lot more streamlined and data will be pulled out and give you much more visibility and options. It will no longer be a list based thing which is crumpled up in the rucksack with coffee spilt on it.

Larry Jordan: Ah, but where would we put the coffee if we can’t spill it on a call sheet?

George Olver: It’s actually very essential, I agree. Coffee’s very essential on a film set.

Larry Jordan: You’ve mentioned the fact that the profiles are free, so how does Movidiam make money?

George Olver: A key part of it is that people coming to access project management tools will pay a subscription of $25 per month to run the project management element, so project managers, if you like to call them that, are going to pay a subscription to access the project management features such as the call sheet, storyboard, file review etcetera.

Larry Jordan: Now, is that per project, per month?  So I could have ten projects going for 25?

George Olver: It’s on a monthly basis and people who pre-register with us are going to receive two months of that for free.

Larry Jordan: Ok, so regardless of how many projects I’ve got going, it’s a flat $25 fee?

George Olver: Yes, exactly.

Larry Jordan: I was looking at your website. What is Project Pro?

George Olver: Project Pro is very much that, the subscription opportunity to have access to more features and more project management tools. That’s the feature set that we’re offering which is behind the subscription.

Larry Jordan: What I think I’m hearing – let me make sure I’ve got this right – is that we’ve got two sides. We’ve got people who are involved in production, loosely termed crew at all of its different levels and ramifications, who are able to post profiles so they can expand their visibility to an international audience to say not only, “Here I am,” but people can then endorse them and say, “This guy’s a really good camera guy because I worked with him,” so we get the endorsement of a person who’s listed, and that part’s free.

Larry Jordan: On the other side, we’ve got the project management, where people who are putting projects together can keep track of all the different elements that are involved. Do I have that right?

George Olver: You’ve got that spot on, Larry, yes, exactly that. I think if we look at those two sides, film makers use a lot of different tools for the project management side of it and we want to build a centralized place which will streamline that, so one home destination to produce the film, and also visibility on talent.

George Olver: A lot of freelancers – we use the term freelancers in Europe – work very, very hard on their skills and buying their equipment and refining their natural talents and abilities as film makers, but in doing that perhaps it’s more difficult to focus at the same time as to how you find opportunity and how you find work. We’re really trying to raise their visibility by building searchable information around their skill sets, around their equipment, around their profile offering and the films they’ve made.

Larry Jordan: You’ve mentioned the fact that you’ve got a preview up but you’ve not yet launched the site. What can people do now and when do you expect to turn this into an ongoing operation?

George Olver: Right now, people can come and enjoy the films that we’ve made. We’ve created some films with some outstanding film makers across the globe to come and explain what Movidiam is doing. We’ve shot in America, we’ve shot in Europe and that’s a real explanation of what Movidiam plans to do, and we’ve got the brand, the agency and the freelancer film there, so please do go and investigate those films and see if Movidiam is something for you.

George Olver: As I said, we’ve had a very positive response to that. What we’d encourage people to do is pre-register for the Movidiam service. This will give you access to two months free of Project Pro; and then later on this year, we’re going to be inviting you to get on board and come and trial out this application as it comes live later on in the year.

Larry Jordan: If they pre-register, are they on the hook for any money?

George Olver: No, certainly not at this stage. Pre-registering is notifying us that you’re interested and you’re engaged and enabling us to reach out to you and invite you in to have a look at what we’ve developed.

Larry Jordan: George, where can people go on the web to learn more about Movidiam?

George Olver: www.movidiam.com. That’s our website and it’s very much open for pre-registration.

Larry Jordan: That’s movidiam.com and George Olver is the Founder and CEO of Movidiam. George, thanks for joining us today.

George Olver: Larry, it’s been wonderful.

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Cirina Catania: This is Cirina Catania reporting from the 2014 IBC for The Digital Production Buzz. I’m here with Oliver Meiseberg in front of the Cinema 4D, our favorite Maxon booth, and there have been a lot of artists here demonstrating how they use the product. Oliver, can you tell us where we are and what’s happening here today?

Oliver Meiseberg: Thanks for having me. We just announced R16, so we’re pretty excited that IBC is the first show where we can showcase R16 publicly. We have a bunch of artists here from around the world, like Ryan Summers from Imaginary Forces. He’s coming from LA. We have Pingo van der Brinkloev who’s just presenting now from Norway and a bunch of guys from Germany, Switzerland and Austria.

Oliver Meiseberg: It’s really great to have all these wonderful artists at the booth. But we’ve also had a lot of partners at the booth this time. We showcased Houdini Engine for Cinema 4D, which is coming later this year. We had the guys from The Foundry, who presented Colorway… which is a great tool for designers. Yes, it’s been a pretty good show so far.

Cirina Catania: What makes these artists so good at what they do? Obviously, they have a knowledge of the product, but can you tell me why they stand out?

Oliver Meiseberg: Because they’re very different, I would say, to the normal artists. We have exceptional artists in VFX and design. Pingo is doing, for example, a lot of really advanced production techniques and he also runs the c4dapt.com, which is the Cinema 4D advanced production techniques training session. We had guys from Munich, from Aixsponza which have done a huge high level work on all the Red Bull stuff. They showcased and they presented Dreadnaught, which is a VFX shot. It’s more the high level stuff we show here to show the users what Cinema can do and what it’s capable of.

Cirina Catania: Maxon has a whole group of very creative people around them all the time. How do you feel about that?

Oliver Meiseberg: I’m proud of all these people. It’s great to see the different flavors, the different artists. Also that they use some of our features that it’s not made for. It’s great to see all these exceptional designs and also meet all these people.

Cirina Catania: And IBC in general, why is this an important marketplace?

Oliver Meiseberg: We do three shows per year. The important shows for us are NAB… and IBC. IBC is the counterpart to the NAB here in Europe, so this is where most of our customers are. Our main market is motion graphics and so this is, let’s say, the home base for most of the motion graphics and TV guys and this is why it’s such an important show to us. Luckily, we have a bunch of new features. The big one, it’s really a full motion tracking system included into R16, which gives you a 3D… of your track footage.

Oliver Meiseberg: We have a complete new reflectance channel that gives you multilayered reflections. This is something that people have asked for for so long. Also, team render server to extend our team render that we announced in R16, now by a server application that can run on a separate computer managing all the jobs. We have a ton of smaller improvements. The solar button is also something that people have asked for. It’s a minor feature but a big thing for the workflow. It’s a really great release.

Cirina Catania: Thank you for taking the time. I know you’re rushing to the airport. Have a great trip home and wonderful success with all the new products.

Larry Jordan: The Cinema 4D website is www.maxon.net. That’s maxon.net. Cirina, who are you talking with now?

Cirina Catania: I’m here with Günter Nikodim, one of their amazing artists, and I’d like to just have him tell us a little bit about what he does. Günter, tell me where are we and what’s going to be happening here in a few minutes today?

 

Günter Nikodim: Hello, very pleased to meet you. We’re here at the Maxon booth at IBC and, yes, in a few minutes I’m going to start my speech.

Cirina Catania: Describe for our audience the type of art that you do and the tools that you use.

Günter Nikodim: Well, I’m a 3D generalist, so that means that I do basically everything starting from character animation to motion graphics, visual effects for film, retouching, painting, dynamic simulations, everything.

Cirina Catania: Well, I can hardly wait to hear what you’re going to have to say, but tell me the tools that you use. Obviously, you use Cinema 4D.

Günter Nikodim: Yes. My main tool really is Cinema 4D. I use it for modeling, animation, texturing, all that stuff, and for some special tasks I also use other tools like RealFlow for fluid simulations, a little bit of CBrush, but not that much any more because Cinema 4D now has a sculpting system, and of course for compositing I’m using After Effects and mainly Nuke, maybe Photoshop for some painting. These are my main tools, I would say.

Cirina Catania: You’re going to be showing us some of your art. Can you pick one of the pieces you’re going to be discussing and describe what it is and the tools that you used to create it?

Günter Nikodim: Yes, I’m going to talk about two films that I have done the visual effects for throughout the last year and I’m going to show some nice little workflow tricks for Cinema 4D that really open up new possibilities. I’m going to show some tools that are there for years, but if you combine them you get to know some really cool stuff.

Cirina Catania: Give me an example.

Günter Nikodim: Particle sculpting, for example. That means that we have, for example, in Cinema 4D, a very, very basic particle system, but with the combination of MoGraph and Deformers and all that stuff, we can enhance it and, yes, I’m going to show you some things that you might not have thought were possible.

Larry Jordan: That was Buzz producer Cirina Catania talking with Günter Nikodim. There is one other artist that Cirina wanted us to meet.

Lars Scholten: My name is Lars Scholten. I am a 3D producer. I am a CG artist, a freelancer, and I’m also a trainer for the College of Multimedia in Amsterdam and, as a freelancer, I create all kinds of motion graphics, I create all kinds of rigs for animators to work with. I can show you a little bit of my work. I always work in teams with other motion graphics artists and just create all these kinds of flying logos, animations for motion graphics, bumpers, leaders, trailers and just being part of a group in a very cool studio.

Lars Scholten: Besides that, I do training in Illustrator but mostly Cinema 4D. Cinema 4D is a software package in 3D animation and I’ve been using that for, well, about 15 years right now. Currently on the show, I’m presenting a presentation about using Cinema 4D in motion graphics and just in a more teacher way, so not just showing off some really, really cool stuff, but really getting into it and making sure the audience understands how they can use different kinds of techniques for their productions.

Cirina Catania: There’s some beautiful stuff here. Let’s pick one that you really love and maybe you could tell me some of the secrets of how you produced it.

Lars Scholten: Ok. Well, the first one I’m going to show here is what we call [FOREIGN DIALOGUE], which is a commercial for Sky Radio. What we did was a lot of research on paper craft and recreated a store, recreated a house, a car popping up and really wanted to give it some kind of paper look, so the first thing we did was, of course, looking at real paper craft and then I started to do all kinds of rigs, created rigs that could be animated by the animators. The secret about this is making it as easy as possible for the animators.

Lars Scholten: That’s really my job. They give me an assignment, we want to have a hand and we want to post this hand as a character animator and make sure we don’t have to use many sliders, just make it for us as easy as possible. That’s when I start working. I can show you a little bit if you want. As you can see, I just have a hand and instead of using all kinds of interface sliders and all the things I have created here, you can just click one finger and move it around.

Lars Scholten: It’s very easy for him to do all these kinds of poses without going into the technical stuff. My job is to let the artist be the artist and leave all the technical details to me. Some other stuff we do is, well, we have this clip for Radio Veronica. I can show you that as well. What we needed there was a photo of an astronaut, but the photo was too flat, so we decided to recreate a photo which was taken in the 1950s or so, and get it into a 3D space. I’ll show you.

Lars Scholten: We’ve got this nice image here of an astronaut and when we go closer with the camera, you can see we mapped the image of this photo on a 3D mesh. When I approach this, you can see it actually has some sense of depth in there. That was very nice, but it was still too static and we really didn’t want to create a static diorama, so I created a joint rig, which you can see right here. You can see, we’ve got all those little joints here. Those are like the joints of a real person and just by binding these together with a real character, we can add some movement.

Lars Scholten: You can see here, the astronaut can move his hand, which was impossible in the original picture. I’ll deliver this to the motion graphic specialist and he will composite it inside a video so we can create a cool video. You see right here, now we fly to the astronaut and he’s actually moving his hands. You see the flag flying.

Lars Scholten: We’ve got the Nirvana baby, which is also 3D; a guy who’s demolishing the Berlin Wall; Adele, of course; and some kind of weird Indian that’s flying flags. We can just composite everything together into one clip. It takes about five or six people to create something like this in, well, two weeks or so. It was kind of a hard deadline but together we created all kinds of stuff and it’s really a creative team that builds the entire animation.

Cirina Catania: I’m just very much impressed with the enthusiasm here at the booth with all of the artists. How did you get started with this and what do you like the most about it? Also, where are you from originally?

Lars Scholten: I am from Amsterdam. It’s a 20 minute bike ride from the IBC, so I’m very lucky, I don’t have to fly in. I started off in typography. I actually designed letters in a graphic art school, but something went wrong and they sent me and my internship to a different company and I came in contact with the internet, which was a very big thing then, and started to make graphics.

Lars Scholten: Then I was introduced to a little program called Extreme 3D from Macromedia, which was very blunt, to be honest. You could do some stuff in there; then I went to the College of Multimedia, the school where I’m currently teaching, did some courses and after that I just went into 3D and went mad, to be honest. Spent lots and lots of time just learning it with a lot of enthusiasm and after a while working for multimedia companies, I’d just about had enough of it. I took the first plane I could get to Australia.

Lars Scholten: I’d been traveling there for about seven months and during those months I went to a farm, which is quite a nice story because I didn’t have any money and the place where the farm was located was called Broke. It’s kind of fun. I was there and there was a very nice vineyard farmer and he asked me, “Can you build me a website?” so I was there sitting in a very big valley, middle of nowhere, and he just had a digital camera he borrowed from his neighbors 30 kilometers away.

Lars Scholten: We took some photographs of his wine bottles and I created a website for him. At a certain point I came back and said, “Yes, I really like what I’m doing but I should do it on my own so I can have these kinds of opportunities.” I started freelancing since about 2003, so almost more than 11 years ago that I started off working for myself. Then I also started teaching. The school I was working for just called me. They said they needed a teacher in 3D and I had some experience, so I started over there and got some connections with the students around there and a few of those students became really, really good and they’re now my colleagues. That’s how you create a network.

Lars Scholten: Today, I’m probably my biggest teacher. Just walk around, talk to a lot of people around, also here in the booth there a lot of excellent 3CG artists and just talk with them, see how they work, go there and see what they’re doing. It’s a really encouraging experience. If you’re very enthusiastic about your work, it’s hardly work.

Cirina Catania: And it’s beautiful work. Where can we go, where can our listeners go on the internet to actually see what you’ve been talking about here?

Lars Scholten: They can go to cybear.nl.

Cirina Catania: That’s cybear.nl and that’s the CD design and training site; and the other site is cmm.nl, the College of Multimedia, and you can see Lars’s work there. This is Lars Scholten and we’re here at the Maxon booth at IBC 2014 with some amazing artists. Thank you so much for your time.

Lars Scholten: It was fun. Thank you.

Larry Jordan: That was Buzz producer Cirina Catania talking with Lars Scholten, reporting from the 2014 IBC trade show in Amsterdam.

Larry Jordan: I want to thank our guests, Luis Barreto, the Emmy nominated producer, director and editor; George Olver, the Founder and CEO of Movidiam; Oliver Meiseberg, the Product Manager for Maxon’s Cinema 4D; and visual artists Günter Nikodim and Lars Scholten.

Larry Jordan: I also want to thank our hosts at Moviola for making this week’s videotaping possible with a special thank you to Patty Montesion.

Larry Jordan: There’s a lot happening at The Buzz between shows and it’s all posted to our website at digitalproductionbuzz.com. You can visit with us on Twitter, @dpbuzz, and Facebook, at digitalproductionbuzz.com. Music on The Buzz is provided by SmartSound; The Buzz is streamed by wehostmacs.com.

Larry Jordan: Text transcripts are provided by Take 1 Transcription, and, when you’re lonely, just email us at info@digitalproductionbuzz.com. Our producer is Cirina Catania, our ever-handsome co-host, Mr. Mike Horton. My name is Larry Jordan and thanks for listening to The Digital Production Buzz.

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