Jobs at Red Pine Studios – Tips for job searchers

Is it spring? Or is it the economy? I don’t know, but we are getting a TON of unsolicited requests for employment.

If you are looking for a production job, then I will want to see an online demo reel. Next to word-of-mouth and your connections in the local industry, this is the single most important tool that you will need for a successful job search in film and video production. Your portfolio is your ticket to ride.

If you don’t have one, you should be out there shooting every free project that you can, until you have enough material to put an online demo together and have also figured out how to get it online in a viewable form. (Hint: Myspace, while viewable, doesn’t speak favorably towards your professionalism, put it on Vimeo, if you must use one of the free sites…) That is how it is done. 

The second thing is, you need to research a bit about who we are and what we do and show us why what we do is a fit with your skills and interests. If you are just pulling names from CPRG and sending around generic requests for employment, it will show. Your description of your experiences should have something to do with your perception of what we do.

I probably received over 50 unsolicited requests in the past year. I considered only 5 of those people, based on the “second thing”. They didn’t just want a job. They wanted to work with us and they could tell me exactly why. 

This is not just relevant to our studio. This is how it is done. This is the pathway to a job in this field, working with people who you will enjoy. This is a profession that is built around passion for what we do – let your light shine down.

Missing Jonny’s Call…

This is the time of year that our friend Jonny Copp would be turning his thoughts to growing and improving the Boulder Adventure Film Festival. He’d give a call, and we’d grab a cup of coffee at the Cup and talk about how to put together the video producer’s workshop, what worked, what could be improved, who we could call to round out the panel.

Jonny embodied the spirit of adventure, and it was a privilege to have worked with him on projects that we loved: UWOL, where he lent me a hand several times, and BAFF.

My heart goes out to his family and his close friends.

NAB ‘09

 

Motorola booth at Nab '09

 

Another view of the booth

The National Association of Broadcasters is one of the film and video industry’s biggest trade shows. So it was a real treat and an unexpected surprise to see some of my footage showing on the trade show floor in the Motorola booth. It was just two clips of slo-mo kayaking footage, a bit of stock footage that I had placed with a distributor, but still fun to see it in a public space, especially a public space frequented by my colleagues and associates.

Also fun was recognizing some other stock footage showing on the floor, a bit by my friend and UWOL partner Kevin Railsback, shot in Africa and screened in the Panasonic booth and also a short video which included footage of my friend and Steadicam operater Alan Dague-Green, in the Tiffen booth. It is wonderful to be part of such a talented community of image makers.

Productions Stills – “Grand Canyon By Nature: River of Life”

Preparing to shoot a green screen interview

With Roderick Nash, Author of "Wilderness and the American Mind"

With Vance Howard, producer and landscape photographer

We have been working on an interesting project in collaboration with a friend of mine, Vance Howard. He is fabulous landscape photographer, and his work can be seen at http://www.vancehoward.com. Vance’s latest project is a multimedia presentation, which is being shot for the fulldome (planetarium) screen at the Denver Nature and Science Museum. The project is a collaboration with several well known photographers, in addition to Vance, who specialize in panoramic and spherical landscape photography.

Vance and I traveled down the Grand Canyon on a private raft trip many years ago, and our paths crossed once again at the 2008 Boulder Adventure Film Festival’s producer’s workshop, where he was sitting in the front row and caught my attention while I was setting up for the workshop. We spent some time talking after the workshop and shared our common interest in producing for the dome in Denver. Because the dome is typically comprised of 4 separate, stitched high-definition 1080p images, the 4K RED Digital Cinema cameras seem to be a natural fit for fulldome production.

Vance’s vision is to incorporate Canyon vistas with interviews of some of the elders of Canyon conservation. We are using the RED cameras to shoot these interviews, so that Vance can obtain the most flexible image possible for the production.

It was my great honor and privilege to shoot Vance’s interview with Roderick Nash, author of several books, including the well-known “Wilderness and the American Mind.” When I was getting my doctorate back in the early ’90s, I used Rod’s groundbreaking book as the foundation for some of my own research, so it was a lot of fun to meet the man behind the mind. He has been down the Grand Canyon 60 times, so he was loaded with Canyon wisdom and interesting anecdotes about his adventures. He also, coincidentally, had been on a river trip down the Yampa with my best friend and college roommate. What a tiny little globe we inhabit, at times.

What excites me most about this project is how Vance really understands the essence of the Grand Canyon and how committed he is to mining the richness of the Canyon experience. I think that Vance is bringing a truly fresh approach to representing the Canyon by bringing the wisdom of its human elders together in a single project. He also intends to bring some First Nation voices to the project, and I think that commitment, too, will make this a very unique and original project.

Our next interview will be with the ethnobotanist and adventurer Wade Davis, who will be speaking at the Nature and Science Museum in February. He also appeared in the 3D IMAX film “Grand Canyon Adventure: River at Risk”

In another odd synergy, I sponsored Wade Davis’ appearance at the Telluride Film Festival in conjunction with the amazing film, From the Heart of the World, the BBC documentary about the Kogi people of Colombia. He canceled his appearance at the film festival, so I am excited to finally have a chance to meet him and listen to his stories.

This project has already presented me with many unexpected intersections with several people whose work I have known well yet never met. It promises to be a most interesting journey.

Teaching Schedule

 

Two classes that I’m teaching in 2009 for Boulder Digital Arts:

Getting Started with Outdoor Filmmaking

http://www.boulderdigitalarts.com/training/details.asp?offering=195

Getting Started with RED Digital Cinema

http://www.boulderdigitalarts.com/training/details.asp?offering=218

Both subjects that I love! 

I taught the outdoor filmmaking class last year, once at the BDA facility and twice in the REI multimedia center. These classes are loaded with all that I have learned, not only from my own experiences, but also from the mother lode of wisdom that the Under Water, Over Land players have shared with me. If you’ve been thinking about making short films of your own — or even if you already have a strong background — I’ll give you plenty to think about. Since I’m a big gearhead, there will be plenty of new gear tips and tricks for everybody.

Boulder Adventure Film Festival – Outdoor Video Producer’s Workshop

This is our 2nd annual event, and we will have a RED underwater shooter on the panel this year…

The Boulder Adventure Film Festival (www.adventurefilm.org) presents….

Under Water and Over Land: An Outdoor Video Producer’s Workshop

The only community conversation of its kind — producers talking directly with producers!
Join some of our area’s most talented adventure and outdoors shooter, directors, and producers for the only conversation that puts all of us together in one room.

This year’s speaker panel will include Zachary Fink & Alyssa Fedele from Soul Fabric Films, who have been working on a documentary about outrigger canoeing in Hawaii, Ed Sauer from Watering Life Productions & Design LLC, who shoots underwater footage with a RED Digital cinema camera for major broadcasters, and Brendan Kiernan from Futuristic Films, who has produced projects on the Himalayas, El Salvador, and regional mountain town culture.

The panel has shot all over the world, in all kinds of fast and extreme environments, both underwater and over land. Each panelist will give a short presentation with clips from recent projects and then be available to talk with you about gear advice, developing your own productions, and marketing your masterpiece. This is an opportunity for you to ask local pros questions about how to hone your craft and take it to the next level.

The panel will be moderated by Meryem Ersoz from Red Pine Studios, who also runs the planet’s largest nature and outdoors video contest, and will be handing out information on other resources that you can use to improve your production skills.

There will also be a free gear raffle/giveaway after the presentation. This is your chance to score some new toys.

Date: Thursday, Nov. 6
Time: 6-8 pm
Location: The B-Side Lounge theater (the b.side lounge | restaurant and music venue in boulder colorado | 2017 13th street | boulder, co 80302)
Cost: You can buy a festival pass, or $20 at the door

The Boulder Peak Triathlon on TV – Watch it August 26

We just put the finishing touches on our first national television broadcast, the Boulder Peak Triathlon, which we shot on July 20th. Air date is August 26 on Versus, 4-5 pm.

Here is the complete listing (note that it re-plays on September 5, if the August date doesn’t work for you): 

http://www.versus.com/nw/article/view/72558/?UserDef=true&catID=76

The same folks who bring you the Tour de France and the NHL games are broadcasting our show. That’s Channel 73 in Boulder. Shooting, editing, and delivering an eight-camera production (while making it look like twice as many cameras…) in three weeks’ time is no small feat! Not to even mention all of the pre-production and pre-roll that goes into telling the story of a triathlon and its athletes. We had our cameras out on 18 different shoots before July 20 even rolled around….

The mastering for a national broadcast is a ton of work. Four separate Digibeta tapes, with 3 different sets of specs, run sheets, cue sheets, closed captioning, scripts. The mastering alone is a week’s worth of work and cost around $1400 just for materials and transfers. These shows are not cheap to produce. Now I really have my arms around what it costs to make a good broadcast happen and hope that I can turn this opportunity into even greater opportunities for our studio and for the planet. I have a few amazing ideas, and if anyone is reading this and wants to be part of a truly special and inspiring project, shoot me an email at Meryem@redpinestudios.com

My thanks to Barry and Jodee Siff at 5430 Sports for giving us this opportunity to break on through to the other side of our craft. These are exciting times.

Info That Should Be Readily Accessible About RED (But Isn’t…)

I have started a list of many of the things that I think users should know — this is information that’s obvious once you know it, but since the camera does not come with a manual, you can spend hours figuring it out. Or possibly never figure it out at all. It’s a little bit like mining for gold. So I thought that I would start collating these, to centralize the information. I’ll add to these as I learn new things:

Important info that should be easily accessible but isn’t -

1) The location of Redcine tutorials are pretty well buried on Red’s support page, here’s the quick link – (http://www.red.com/support/release_history/6)

2) In your Quicktime Player preferences, you must check “Use high quality video settings when available” or else your video playback using the proxies will be soft and will freak you out

3) Shooting the maximum overcrank options will drop frames – for instance, shooting 2K at 113 fps (the max you can shoot using CF cards) resulted in the inconsistent dropping of frames and some glitchiness – switch to, say, 107 fps, and this will cease

4) It is very difficult to get information on the delivery status of the 50-150mm lens, even though the RED store quotes it as available and shipping

5) 4K 16:9 proxy playback is not enabled…this should change in Build 16, also 16:9 is generally glitchy and crashes RedCine – so you’re really better off shooting in 2:1 and cropping because the files handle more smoothly

6) Audio needs to be extracted either from FCP or compressor directly from the proxies – there’s no way to pull audio from R3D files (the RAW files) in RedCine or RedAlert

7) The most up-to-date shipping and delivery info is available at Big Jon’s FAQ – see http://www.reduser.net/forum/showthread.php?t=7464

This is a little bit of a mysterious placement for this info, but ok…it seems like something which should be prominently displayed at the red.com site, but it isn’t….

8 – RED’s replacement camera policy – they can and will turn camera repairs around in 24 hours, but if you are on a critical shoot, you should have a back-up available. In the early days, when they had 50 cameras in the field, the impression was given that replacement cameras were easily obtained, but with the numbers approaching 2,000 delivered cameras, RED has a different replacement camera policy which is not openly advertised – so you should know about it in advance and plan accordingly.

9) There’s been changes in the PL mounts – PL mounts are mounted with Torx Plus screws (switched over from Allan screws, which are more easily stripped) which require an IP10 or TP10 screwdriver. Screws for the PL mount are Torx Plus M3 x 18mm. You will need this information if you are swapping PL mounts for other mounts. Instructional video for swapping PL to Nikon mount is on youtube
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IhmolBMtDzg
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pRicc…eature=related

10) Hanns-G makes a 17” 720p monitor which allows you to see the same data that is available on the RED LCD, in addition to the image itself – there are only a couple of monitors which support this feature — as a corollary, your cheapest solid LCD monitor stand to accompany the Hanns-G is manufactured by Delvcam, the only decent one that I found for under $100.

11) 48v phantom power is not yet enabled in-camera – it creates a hiss or squeal in the audio, this should be fixed in future builds, but for now you need an external 48v power source to power your mics.

12) To eject compact flash cards without having to run through the menu system, hold down undo button and exit button at the same time – this will save you crucial time between swapping cards

14) Periodically pushing the power-up button without the battery connected will help to release residual voltage which can interfere with the function of the camera

14) Don’t mix formats on cards

15) Don’t ever separate R3D and proxies from their original file folders – if you need to muck around with them, make copies and save the originals

16) All kinds of challenges have occurred by not seating batteries properly and carefully, both on the charger and on the camera’s battery-holding accessories – you have to push the battery down on the connectors first and listen for the click, and then give it a slight tug away from the connecting device and it will click again. Two clicks are better than one! Watch the lights on the battery charger to make sure that the are blinking properly – don’t think that just because you got the right clicks that the deal is done, you still may need to re-apply them to the charger if the indicator lights are not flashing properly.

17) The battery charger has a little pull-out foot on the bottom that allows it to stand upright on its own – I saw a well-known and respected camera owner being shown this pull-out foot at NAB, and it was the first he had heard of it – so if you think you’re the only one who is not “in the know” on all of these little tips n tricks — you’re not! Little light bulbs are popping on all over the place….

Hope this helps a few folks out…I’ll add to it as I go.

Script Writer’s Guidelines

We have had a very nice response to our video production checklist.

http://redpinestudios.wordpress.com/2008/01/02/video-production-checklist/

(or look at the “Recent Entries” box on your right and click on the “Video Production Checklist” link….

So I thought that I would post these guidelines for script writers who have never written a script. We put this together to help one of our corporate clients, who is attempting to do their own scripting. We figured these guidelines could help them to jump-start the process. It can be challenging to get your thoughts organized.

These guidelines can be freely used and distributed, but please don’t forget proper credit and attribution (listed at the bottom of the page).

——————————————————-

Some Script-Writing Guidelines

Before you Begin:

Questions to consider before you begin writing your script

Describe your target audience(s). If you have more than one, list them in the order of highest priority to your company.

List the top 3-5 points that you need your video to make. Try to narrow this down to no more than five.

What is your audience’s current perception of your company?

How is this different from the perceptions that you want them to have after viewing the video?

What feelings, emotions, and sensations do you want to leave your audience with after the video is over?

What action would you like them to take after they have viewed the video?

List the people who will appear in the program.

List the people who will be involved in generating content for the program.

Who has the final script approval?

What is the deadline for completion of the video?

1. The “Hook”

You will want to start your project with a hook – something that will want to make them watch more. It can be visual or audio-based and it should happen with the first 30 seconds – 1 minute of your program.

Some suggestions for a hook: a visual montage of images of your company, someone saying something striking to illustrate a sample of what your company has achieved, an audio testimonial under images.

2. What thread is going to take you from the beginning to the end?

What is the narrative trajectory for your project and where are you embedding this?

Some suggestions: following the experiences of one person, the repetition of a visual motif, the repetition of an audio motif, the conventional story with a beginning, middle, climax, end

3. Structure

It may help you to break down the storyline into more manageable chapters – think of the DVD selection menu on movies that you watch at home and try to make one of these for your project. Organize it according to your 3-5 main ideas.

Do you want to tell one story with a beginning, middle, end?

Do you want to weave other stories into that main story? Where would these sub-stories appear?

Do you want your project to consist of various testimonials or sub-stories? If so, how will you tie these together? Will your story be linear or non-linear?

4. The “Ah-ha” Moment

Is there one? What does it look like? Where/when would it be appropriate for your video? An “ah-ha” moment is a moment that grabs your viewer’s attention. It is the moment that either pulls it all together, or transforms your viewer’s perception, or just a moment that grabs them and pulls them back into the narrative after you have given them a lot of information. It typically appeals to raw emotion. You can have one, more than one, or sprinkle them throughout the various chapters. In the conventional sense, it is a climax or mini-climax.

5. End

Ways to think about ending your video:

Consider what action you want your audience to take.

Add something new, or a promise of a future development or service.

End with your one of your best testimonials.

End with a major achievement.

End with a visual montage/music.

© 2008 Red Pine Studios – may be freely distributed with attribution

Lots Going On…

RED camera testing and preparation has not left much time for blogging. We are winding down our testing phase. What am I saying, winding down?? DJ has just left for France, where she is spending the next two months shooting an indie feature film with our camera gear. The director is a French landscape photographer whose film is inspired by Jacques-Henri Lartigue – esque aethestics.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Henri_Lartigue

Lartigue completely inspired my dissertation back in the doctorate days, so I am completely jealous, from an artistic standpoint. But someone has to stay home and keep the studio fires burning. C’est moi….

In other news, you can see results of our testing and playing with the RED camera and also my trip to NAB to check out the array of RED accessories. We have been chatting with other video producers at various video info sites about some of the results.

Warning: this is only for gearheads who can appreciate and enjoy a lot of techie camera analysis. That’s why I didn’t post any of it here, to prevent boring our client base who may be reading this, to death.

Chris Hurd from DVinfo gave me a press pass to NAB, so that I could investigate RED accessories, and I posted a bunch of footage from the RED booth and of RED accessories…

http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthread.php?t=119334

We had a test day with another RED owner and Jim Arthurs, our cinema expert, who does VFX work for Hollywood films. He wanted to test his own recent purchase, an EX-1, against the RED, and here is a thread that he started with some of the results:

http://www.dvxuser.com/V6/showthread.php?t=133445

And lastly, a link to my DVinfo tech-head blog:

http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthread.php?t=117586

So we haven’t abandoned blogging these past few weeks, we have just been blogging our fool brains out all over the web. Bringing it all home now….