Posts Tagged ‘Studio B Films

11
Jan
12

New Year’s Resolutions

Happy 2012 everyone! With the new year rolling around, we’re all brimming with New Year’s resolutions around here. Here’s a peek at the plans:

David (Owner/CEO/DP): “My New Year’s resolutions are to sponsor and run a half marathon with the studio b team, create a company retreat, to get my kids to put the dishes in the dishwasher, and to take more creative risks.”

Jane (Producer/Director): “My New Year’s resolution is to do yoga and meditate every day. Stress management all the way, baby!”

Aaron (Post Production Manager): “My New Year’s resolution is to make a piece of furniture by hand, and forage for seafood with the crab net that I got from my wife for Christmas.”

Rebecca (Editor): “This year, I’m going to sit down and write creatively in my journal every night. I used to write a lot, but I haven’t in a while. It will be fun to see what comes out!”

Kevin (Editor): “Uh, I’ll get back to you.”

Tim (Post Production): “I’m going to be a better husband. I don’t know how I’m going to quantify that one. I guess I’ll have to ask my wife. I think I have to listen better.”

Devin (Motion Graphics / Post Production): “Half Marathon!”

Rachel (Production Coordinator): “This year, I’ll tackle the backyard garden. Hopefully, I don’t kill everything in my path!”

Alrik (Rentals Manager): “To be able to do reps of 20 pull ups! Currently, I do three reps of 4. I gotta get that number up!”

In the sprit of getting carried away with things, we set some goals as a studio too!

We resolve to:

  1. Do a mini-makeover of our website
  2. Establish an annual company retreat
  3. Get organized with basecamp
  4. Run a half marathon together!
  5. Not loose or break any rental gear in the year 2012!

There it is all in writing. Now we’ve got to stick to it!
What are your new year’s resolutions? What’s the likelihood you’ll follow through?

16
Sep
10

Clif Bar & Studio B Films Lovin’ the Ladies: Film Festival Trailer for Lunafest

What do all-natural, organic energy bars and Studio B Films have in common?

We both support women in film! Clif Bar, makers of Luna, the whole-grain power bars for women, premieres LunaFest this fall in San Francisco. Lunafest is a traveling film festival by, for and about women that raises money for the Breast Cancer Fund. We were honored when Clif asked us to produce the trailer and teaser for this inspirational event.

The concept was to hear various LunaFest participants tell their stories – since that’s the essence of the film festival – storytelling. We wanted a beautiful but relevant setting and settled on Alameda’s vacant Art Deco theater. The strong and striking aesthetic of the building perfectly framed our subjects who were lit with flares to give them an ethereal, rock star quality. We then incorporated hand-written text to give the video an intimate touch that sparks an added element of intrigue.

We’re proud of the outcome, and even prouder to participate in such a great cause. Visit the Lunafest website for tickets and theater location information. But first, take a look at our trailer for a bit of inspiration.

23
Jul
10

Broadcasting Live from Your Backpack with the Tricaster TCDX300: Studio B Films now offers multicamera HD webcasting

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New toy! One of our latest additions is the Tricaster TCDX300 and we were psyched last April when we had the chance to try it out on our fellow nerds at the Twitter Chirp Conference. This amazing little black box is small but mighty: it has the power of network-style TV broadcasting, jammed in its 20lb body – so light in can fit in your backpack. It’s completely self- contained and we were able to live cut a three-camera shoot of Twitter’s live event.


These portable tricasters are really revolutionizing the capacity of independent production companies to offer a higher caliber of live capture at conferences, concerts, sports events and just about any other live video multi-camera event. At the Chirp Conference it was readily apparent how much viewers rely on webcasting – even though they were at the actual event, the entire audience had our webcast running on their laptops and were watching online for a better view.


Check out the surrealist photo below taken by our Rental Manager, Josef Shafer – those are all the laptops, tablets and handheld devices broadcasting our video.

Chirp Conference

Take a look at this clip and see the TCDX300 in action…



19
Feb
10

Studio B produces video to celebrate Sierra Nevada’s 30th Anniversary

To celebrate its 30th anniversary, Sierra Nevada Brewery is releasing a series of specialty beers made by and honoring pioneers from the craft beer movement. A percentage of the proceeds go to charity.

Studio B shot the video commemorating the project and the luminaries of the movement. We spent a day at Anchor Brewing Company in San Francisco with Fred Grossman, Founder of Sierra Nevada, Fritz Maytag, Founder, Anchor Brewing Company, Charlie Papazian, President of the Brewers Association and Fred Eckhardt, Author, “A Treatise on Lager Beers.” We learned about the history of craft beer and tasted some too!

Check out the video:

19
Feb
10

Studio B does Science

Recently, Studio B has been shooting science and we’re getting smarter by the day. The Chabot Science Center contacted us about making a DVD for their science afterschool program for girls, Techbridge. Studio B shot a series of three curriculum DVDs that teach circuitry, environmental science and the science of design for girls. We played with catapults, blinking robots and learned about green building materials.

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Also, we recently shot a video with renowned Neuroscientist, Robert Knight. Dr. Knight presented an overview of the field of neuroscience for a general audience. The video lecture is informative and answers many common questions about memory, brain scans and neurological disorders.

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16
Feb
10

Studio B partners with Adobe and Wired Magazine to showcase the new possibilities of a tablet magazine

wired_screenshot1The iPad was announced.  What next?  We are all thinking about applications for the tablet computer and new ways to consume media.  Well, that is exactly what Wired Magazine in partnership with Adobe has been working on in the last year.  A magazine created for the tablet computer.

Studio B had the good fortune to shoot the video announcement of the March edition of Wired magazine, designed specifically for the tablet computer.  The digital magazine uses Adobe AIR as its platform.  And it is striking!

Unlike much web content, the March issue is designed by Wired’s talented print design team, and it shows.  It’s beautiful.  The design is easy to navigate, intuitive in terms of use of UI and filled with promised 360 views, video and audio.

It’s amazing to look at the same car add in the print and tablet versions.  In the print version, the fold of the magazine hits in the middle of the car.  On the tablet version, you can spin the car around with a swipe of your finger.

Studio B had a chance to read through the magazine during the filming.  The idea behind the tablet magazine is to offer an experience as rich as viewing content on the iPhone, and judging on the prototype issue, they have delivered.  Studio B worked with Adobe’s Dan Cowles to shoot this project.  We interviewed  Scott Dadich, the Creative Director of Wired and Jeremy Clark from the Adobe Experience Design team.

Wired is one of Condé Nast’s 18 publications, so the growth potential for a tablet magazine is grand.  That is not to say that the tablet will replace the magazine, it surely will not, but as media makers, we are thrilled about the video potential of new tablet magazines.

04
Dec
09

Studio B shoots John Mayer’s New Augmented Reality Music Video

Studio B shot Grammy Award-winning musician John Mayer’s latest music video in Hollywood, CA. Mayer, who tweets, blogs and posts his own videos on his website, contacted Adobe about collaborating on a new Augmented Reality video for his newly released album, Battle Studies. Mayer wanted to make an innovative new video for his single, “Heartbreak Warfare” that was creative, new and interactive. picture-47

The video continues Mayer’s desire to include his audience as part of his process.

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Here is how the video works: Adobe’s new Flash-based Augmented Reality software works in conjunction with your computer’s camera. To watch the video unfold, you hold up an augmented reality marker (provided as a PDF) to your computer’s webcam. The marker triggers the video to begin. Because you are holding up the marker, you will see yourself as a part of the video, behind John Mayer. You can move the marker and John and his surrounds move with you.

Studio B shot the video on a Green screen stage in Hollywood and pulled the key. We worked closely with Dan Cowles from Adobe to coordinate the John’s actions so that the experience would be seamless. As you can see in the Wired video, John kept us all entertained – especially between takes. Blitz, a motion graphics company in LA, was also on set working closely with the engineers. Blitz built the 3-D experience.  Studio B was thrilled to work with Mayer on this new Augmented Reality Video.

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04
Dec
09

John Mayer in ProRes 4444 with the Panasonic HPX-3700 (P2 Varicam)

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.

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Here’s the dual-link interface from the Kona 3 control panel.

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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!

19
Oct
09

Comedian Rex Navarrate celebrates 20 years of Stand-up with a New DVD produced by Studio B

Studio B has had the pleasure to work (and laugh with) the Filipino
King of comedy, Rex Navarrete.  Rex decided to celebrate his 20-year
anniversary in the business with a hilarious new DVD.  Studio B shot
four live shows at the San Jose Improv in the end of August and are
currently editing away.  The crew was laughing as hard during the
fourth show as the first!

The DVDs will be on sale by Thanksgiving.

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08
Oct
09

John Mayer Augmented Reality Music video – “Heartbreak Warfare”

Studio B got to work with Adobe on another fantastic project for John Mayer’s next music video. We shot him performing his new single “Heartbreak Warfare” for an augmented reality piece that is built by the agency Blitz in LA. We’ll have more details to come once the project is released! In the meantime, here is the link to the Wired Magazine behind the scenes footage from the shoot.