Producers

In 2012 Jason and I took a tour of the Warner Bros. public lot. During the tour we got to see stages, props, actors, warehouses and everything in between. Our tour guide told us many "lot stories" including one of studio producers. In sitcoms producers come in, listen to a story, tell the writers to fix it, arrange for advertising sponsors, tell the show runners they needed to fix things again and repeat. Listening to our tour guide I thought that these "producer people" were kind of bossy and obnoxious.

Fast forward to 2013 when Jessica steps into her own shoes of a producer. I would not say I asked to be a producer, but it just happened.

Time and time again Jason thinks of an idea for a video, writes it down, mulls it over and finally is ready to bring it to me to discuss. He reads me his idea and I tell him what to change or how we need to scrap the whole thing (Sorry, Jason). 

When we are shooting the video I come in and oversee how everything is going. I make sure our crew gets breaks and has food and drinks. I constantly tell Jason that something is in his shot or point something out that he does not hear or realize. I am Captain Jason's First Mate.

After production, Jason edits the video and I step in to watch it and tell him how I think it should be reworked to include shots he forgot he even had. He plays it for me again after he gets lost in the edit room and I give him another list of changes. Step and repeat.

Once the video is uploaded it is my job to post it to our Twitter, Facebook and Blog to get our viewers to watch it for the very first, and hopefully many more, times.

Looking back I realize that "producer people" are not bossy or obnoxious; instead they are people who facilitate getting a product from point A to Z in an efficient and effective way. Producers have to have a certain skillset to be able to think of all of the possible issues that may even slightly arise. And more than anything, producers have to be great managers who are strong and assertive.

-Posted by Jessica

Technical Breakdown: Zipped

We released "Zipped" as our official entry into Bloody Cut Films' BCHorrorChallenge a couple of days ago. The short is about the battle between sanity and psychosis after being kidnapped and left alone.

This short is definitely our best to date and we are very happy and excited to share it with all of you. Now for the good stuff. Here is our technical breakdown:

Production: Rigs, Cameras & Lenses

This short was shot on our Canon T3i with a Tokina 11-16mm F2.8, Canon T2i with a Tamron 17-50mm F2.8, & a GoPro Black using various mounts (although none of the GoPro footage was ultimately used in the final edit). Ninety percent of the garage shots are completely handheld and rigless, while the other ten percent were shot on a tripod. The outside scenes were shot using a Glidecam. 

We shot with both cameras set wide open at F2.8 to let in as much light as possible and ISO was set between 800 and 1250. Both Canon cameras were tuned to Prolost Flat picture styles. Originally, I intended to use the Flaat picture profile since we shot everything in very low light.

Unfortunately, I was rushing on set and did not double check equipment before we started rolling. Luckily, I had both cameras already set in Prolost as a habit. Since this short was going to be highly stylized in post, this could have been a huge problem if the cameras were set to different picture profiles; this would have resulted in numerous additional hours of color correcting.

Post Production: Edit & Sound Design

This was my second project working on Adobe Premiere CC, and it was a decently smooth experience. Sound Design was first done in Premiere, and then moved to Adobe Audition for sweetening. While I wanted to color in DaVinci Resolve, I simply did not have enough time so it was colored & graded in Premiere using a combination of the Colorista, Filmconvert, LUTs, and Lumetri plug-ins layered together.

Here are some of our before and afters for the color correction/grade:

The biggest challenge for me as an editor on this project was the rapid cutting and the sound mixing. Since I am not a huge horror fanatic, this was an extremely fun, educational and experimental short. To start, I watched a bunch of horror shorts on Vimeo and took note of themes in sound design and editing I liked. I used the popular television show, "American Horror Story", as a reference to how I wanted our short to feel and sound. My goal for the short was to making it feel and look weird, strange and creepy. 

Even after filming the short, it really did not come alive until I went crazy with the sound mixing. Little aspects like warping the fog machine sound, adding the zip tie sound effect at ten percent and increasing the volume of the music as the short progresses all subconsciously guided viewers towards the finale.

Just for fun, here is our finished timeline:

We hope you enjoyed "Zipped". We are currently working on the Behind The Motion for YouTube so stayed tuned for scenes that ended up on the "cutting room floor".

-Posted by Jason