It’s been awhile between posts, but we have been busy creating a bunch of work for a variety of clients. 10 web videos and one full-length documentary will be released in the next couple months by us. First off, is our new video for Big Cartel. Thanks to Susan and to Big Cartel for letting us produce these cool videos for them!
The Ancestry.com microsite that welikesmall created and hired us to shoot footage for was Communication Arts Web Pick of the Week and also FWA Site Of The Day. Congrats to Mike and the whole crew at welikesmall. I edited some footage together that wasn’t used on the microsite, check it out here. It’s not for everyone, but poetry fans should love it. It was fun to make and a good chance to experiment with some faux black and white footage.
We created a new site featuring Video Sliders, which may be the first interactive video sliders of its kind. Local Salt Lake paper Deseret News interviewed me about the project here. Check out videosliders.com for some recent footage from Little Cottonwood Creek here in Utah and follow VideoSliders on Twitter. We’re looking to do some more sliders around the Salt Lake area, so more content will be coming soon.
For the past two months I’ve been helping out on editing a new series for Godfrey Entertainment called Nitro Circus Live. It’s a documentary series that will be on MTV2 that shows the difficulty of producing and performing in a live tour where every night death-defying stunts are performed. I’m really impressed with the athletes and the production crew on this show….more on this when the show premieres. We’ve also been working with some long-time clients on ten or so short web videos, four different 15 second commercials, and we are starting pre-production on a documentary on a local artist and two more docs for Big Cartel. Meanwhile my knee is finally working good enough to do long shoot days after a tough recovery from ACL surgery on April 5th. Things are looking good as summer starts…
Welikesmall hired me to shoot video for their microsite on the Civil War for Ancestry.com, which is now online. They wanted to give the viewer the sensation of standing and walking around the National Military graveyards before searching online to see if their ancestors were buried there. So they asked for some handheld, gritty in-the-moment shots from me. No polished pretty shots were needed; just raw moody clips with a bit of shake to them and some simple slow movement. They also used a huge amount of crisp historical photos which are awesome to check out. As for my shots, I knew they were going to have text over the video, so I framed some shots with objects in the far-right or left side of the screen with this in mind. I was pleased to see that welikesmall used about double the amount of shots in the microsite than they originally planned. It was an awesome road trip and a great project to work on, thanks guys! There were plenty great shots they never used (always a bummer but always a reason for it) so I plan on editing something together with these shots in the future.
The busy winter season for MSI is over and we have just wrapped up our part of the work for the many tours they put on: The North Face Masters, Freeskiing World Tour, and The North Face Park and Pipe Open Series. Korey went to over 10 events to help produce and shoot while I went to about half of the events to shoot, produce and in between I edited eight TV shows for them. Props to MSI for not just putting on weather-dependent events in 4 different countries but also providing live web feeds from remote locations and creating numerous day-of web videos to top it off. It’s an amazing amount of logistical planning especially considering the many winter storms we had to endure.
I’ve started editing television content for the Nitro Circus crew this week. It’s always great to work with a well-organized production crew that puts a good amount of thought into their finished product. The action sports industry can be a bit of a disorganized mess when it comes to productions so I’m psyched to work with them. I hope it’s a start of a great partnership as they have a lot of good things brewing right now. And is there any other action sports personality better on camera than Travis Pastrana? After watching a ton of raw footage of him being interviewed I’m really impressed.
This past week I traveled from Vicksburg, MS to Gettysburg, PA doing a still and video shoot for a client of welikesmall. The 150th anniversary of the Civil War is coming up so they needed some images of from battlefields and graveyards. It was cool to visit five states I’ve never been to. Meanwhile Korey was shooting two events for MSI in California and when I got back to SLC I edited one of these events into a half hour TV show. The other one will be edited in the next few weeks along with two others. Super busy time for us…
We’ve been doing some work again with Barnhart out of Denver. We did a green screen shoot last week involving a hiker pulling down a takeover ad, and before that we rotoscoped an elk to create a moving outline for a banner ad. This week we will be keying, rotoscoping, and looping the hiker for the takeover ad which will end up on National Geographic, Disney, and a few other places. If you need any green screen work done, we now have a small studio upstairs just for this purpose.
Korey and I have been busy shooting and editing for a snowboarding comp series called The North Face Masters of snowboarding which is produced by MSI. Korey and I come up with concepts for web videos before the contests and then we shoot them to hype up the event. Then during the contest we are on-slope cameraman, and afterwards I edit the live show down into a 24 minute TV show. Lotsa work that keeps us busy…thanks to MSI!
December 7, 2011
Matt Sheridan
