Take a look at our new Demo Reel for 2012!
Author Archive for Aaron Barry
23
May
12
Studio B Films Latest Demo Reel
Most people know about ancestry.com and the ability to discover your own family history through their billions of historical records. Well, they came to Studio B Films to help announce the launch of a powerful DNA service they call AncestryDNA. It’s a pretty amazing process where you send in a sample of DNA (saliva) and they compare and match it to thousands of others, giving you a scientifically accurate map of your own ethnicity and connecting you to people with similar ethnicities from all over the world. We chose to produce a video with both live action and graphics to fully tell the story. After doing two rounds of casting, we decided that the most authentic voice would really come from experts from AncestryDNA. Sure enough Ken and John nailed the content and projected a real knowledge and passion for the process and what it means. To enhance their telling of the story, we brought in a modern take on the family tree and tied them directly to the beautiful web interface built by the AncestryDNA team. So watch, swab your cheek and let the ethnicities flow!
01
May
12
Gazing at the cloud
ADOBE CS6 STINGER from Studio B Films on Vimeo.
Adobe’s launch of CS6 and The Creative Cloud represents a huge paradigm shift for their whole creative suite line. To celebrate this re-thinking of the creative process, they reached out to some incredible artists to develop imagery for each product and each Suite family. When they came to us to develop a stinger video to introduce The Creative Cloud and CS6, they brought along all of the stunning artist imagery and a wide open playground for us to visually tell the launch story and inspire the audience. Early on it became clear that this piece shouldn’t be like previous launch videos. We stripped out any demo or specific feature aspect of the show to make it conceptual and to really honor the artistry that went into the imagery and the products themselves. Special thanks to Devin Earthman and Michael Rigley for their stunning motion design and animation wizardry on the piece. And Johnny Random’s killer audio track brings it from subtle and understated to an explosive finale.
CREDITS
producer: Jane Selle Morgan
creative director: Aaron Barry
motion designers: Devin Earthman, Michael Rigley
music: Johnny Random
After finally getting the music rights settled from The XX, the Adobe Youth Voices video that we spent many days concepting and animating is live!. You can watch it here or see it on the homepage of their site (http://youthvoices.adobe.com/f). This piece quickly turned into a labor of love for us because Adobe was offering us so much freedom and creativity in the approach and it was an opportunity to support a foundation with a mission to empower youth and promote social change. Can’t argue with that.
From the website: The Adobe Youth Voices Aspire Awards celebrates the extraordinary work of young media artists from around the world by recognizing top talent in media production. So the goal of the video is to inspire these kids to want to get out there and make something cool and get their work seen (and maybe snag a nice prize, too).
In casting, we met some amazing kids through Destiny Arts (a theater group that David is currently filming for a documentary) and through a girls group that our very own Rachel Spiers leads on the weekends. Through auditions, we found our 3 characters (a musician, a designer, and a photographer / filmmaker). The next challenge was to create a unique graphics style for each of their environments that tells a story about their creative work. While we wanted each character to really be affecting and transforming their environments (rather than just looking around at neat graphics in their world), we also wanted to show some evolution of their work over time. After several rounds of boards and motion tests, we landed on a style for each. Finally, we wanted to wrap the ending back to the branding of the event by transitioning back into a sketch world that we hinted at in the beginning.
We’re really proud of this piece and feel totally grateful to have clients like Adobe to bring us in on such a fun and challenging project. If you know any youth that would like to submit, you can send them here to register: http://youthvoices.adobe.com/awards/submissions/
We recently got to do a shoot with Adobe for John Mayer’s latest music video. Since it was to be a greenscreen shoot and placed into a pretty high-profile piece we decided to pull out all the stops. The timing worked out pretty well because it coincided with Apple releasing the nee ProRes 4444 codec which would allow us to do a 444 capture on the fly and then key directly in After Effects without super-heavy files. So, we lugged our 8-core Mac Pro with the Kona3 card down to LA and installed two 1.5TB Seagate Barracuda drives (RAID 0 for throughput) into the mac. We needed the Kona3 because we wanted to pipe the super-clean dual link image from our brand new Panasonic HPX-3700 (P2) camera. We decided on the Varicam over the RED ONE because there were some pretty great reactions to it during the ASC Camera Test that was conducted in LA. Then to help insure that we’d get a crystal clear image, we put some Digi-Prime glass in front of the full-raster 1920 X 1080 imager of the Panasonic Varicam. Also, since this was an Adobe gig, we bypassed Final Cut Pro altogether and used the Kona VTR Xchange utility to capture to ProRes 4444 and then could drop the files directly into After effects to do our test keys.
Here’s the dual-link interface from the Kona 3 control panel.
Doing an on-set test-key on the footage with imagery from the boards.
In the end, the footage was some of the cleanest we’ve seen. Even with the heavy shadowing from the dummy green furniture that we placed on set, the key came out great (with some rotoscoping here and there). All in all, it was a very smooth process combining the Panasonic HPX-3700 with the Kona 3 and the new Apple ProRes 444 codec. Bring on the next one!