Aiming High
Jul 1, 2007 12:00 PM, By Cynthia Wisehart
Four modern content producers play the angles.
Ron “Snow” Shai
Preproduction was done in secret, because parkour is barely legal. The filmmakers were as elusive as the athletes — one step ahead of anybody in authority with a thing against people plummeting to the pavement from a rooftop-to-rooftop jump. Grab the shot, vanish on the Vespa. Pass the baton to the next videographer in a six-shooter chain across the whole of Tel Aviv, Israel, as the Israel Parkour Team ran, coiled, and leapt like panthers across the urban landscape at the dawn of a sweet, sunny, perfect day. Six shooters and a chopper team, two hours, 130 points of shooting — talk about hitting your mark. (See the Red Bull-sponsored documentary on Sony's AXN channel, axn.com).
The combination of extreme sports and music is a specialty for Ron “Snow” Shai and his co-conspirators at Snowdrum. Snowdrum is a collective — not the last time you'll read that word in this story. Like other modern videographers (he's also a composer), Snow is rethinking everything: production, distribution, business plans, partnerships. Don't look for a consistent average profit margin or a “best practice” for every project. Some are decent budgets, some less so; some are for-hire, some entrepreneurial (or both) in the content marketplace where a filmmaker may or may not find an audience.
Ron “Snow” Shai and his team at Snowdrum prefer to use Panasonic AG-DVX200 P2 cameras—always at 25p and with 35mm lenses.
It was not always so. Snow came up through a postproduction system that used to be ubiquitous, training his eye and hand on a million-dollar Quantel Henry in the traditional commercial industry. His Snowdrum co-founder/director Ram Matza came from the same world. But these days, a videographer's fancy turns to thoughts of independence. Driven by affordable HD, laptop post, and the widening — let's say — “web” of digital distribution, the career path for content producers is less defined than ever. In this new world, 1,000ft. of HDV tape or a quartet of P2 cards can be shot on spec. If you take that for granted, you likely just got your drivers' license, but it's fast becoming the norm for a large segment of the content creation marketplace. The potential is there, if not the security, to invent marketing and entertainment content in new ways or tangent off into a new form.
For Snowdrum, that form will be extreme sports- and music-driven — not necessarily music videos in the traditional sense, but more like visual concept albums. In 2005, for example, Snow and Matza took cameras and snowboards to The Battle in Falun, Sweden, capturing the best riders in the world, shooting alongside their higher-budget brethren from Matinee Film and Television, who were there for Extreme TV. With Volvo sponsorship, backstage access, and a generous rough cut from Matinee, Snowdrum acquired the assets that would become both a short promotional video for Volvo and now the abstract film The Battle, set to music from the vibrant Israeli club scene.
Meanwhile, back at the bread-and-butter line, Snow, Matza, composer Doron Barness, DP Adi Borkin, and compositor/editor Alex Gitler pay the bills with a variety of local and national commercials, music videos, and corporate image films for clients including DHL and Coca Cola. Nearly all are on wafer-thin budgets — sometimes too small for the Panasonic AG-DVX200 P2 camera they love to use (always at 25p and with 35mm lenses). The economics are not surprising for a tiny country and a tiny audience (6 million if everyone watches), although viewer expectations are just as high as anywhere else. For the Snowdrum partners — who have lived and worked for years in London, San Francisco, New York, and Los Angeles — international production standards come naturally, and they are well supported by Snowdrum's approach to progressive DV.
For Snow, who does most of Snowdrum's postproduction and teaches editing at Shenkar College of Engineering and Design, it's about Apple Final Cut Pro, Shake, and Motion. With his Henry history, he's a power user, always pushing the filters and transfer modes to deliver what he remembers from the crystalline BVM monitors in the edit bay. Like a lot of editors, his main frustration is horsepower; even with Moore's law, the platforms are just at the fingertips of affordability, often out of reach for the specs that really make the software sing.
“If it wasn't for the years of color experience, it wouldn't work,” Snow says of the high-end look he wrings out of DV. “On the Henry, you learn to work by hand — everything manual, no filters, no sliders. That gave me a real edge to learning how the filters and color techniques in Final Cut Pro can really work. I modify them, pile them up, play a bit with opacity, find some really nice looks and styles.” As long as it's progressive, of course.
“I've been looking at high-end monitors for so long, I can see when DV has reached that point where it becomes something else,” Snow says.
Ben Young
Conspiracy theories
No one dreams specifically of distributing their film on Indonesian state TV. But you'd be a fool to say no, right? That's how Ben Young's short film The Culinary Conspiracy got its first wide audience.
Like Snowdrum, Young's Daylight Productions is a collective of professionals with a range of skills — although Young's network is larger and looser. “When you're starting out a business it's hard to get a steady flow,” he says. “So this lets people do their own thing and then come together.” It also helps attract a wider range of clients. For example, partner Chad Carico in North Carolina is focusing on photography and videography; Young in San Francisco is building animation, visual effects, and games. He says he thinks the diversity of clients will one day merge as media becomes more integrated.
Projects run from downloadable language instruction videos to a series of animated characters for an eyewear company to a 6-minute video-game opener. Daylight has self-produced more than 30 short films and two feature-length films, with two more short films in the works.
Ben Young
How the world has changed in the decade since high school, when Young and his friends decided (as you do) that they wanted to make a movie — specifically a feature-length martial-arts/government conspiracy move. “Kind of a weird genre,” he says, and he's half serious when he calls it a genre.
That sort of thing would be ambitious in any case, but Young was caught in an odd technological void — the days of parental 8mm film cameras were fading but digital camcorders were still years off. “There was no Premiere or After Effects. We had no idea how we were going to edit. We tried to do everything in-camera with this really bad old giant VHS camera”
They carried on, building ideas and teaching themselves lighting, composition, and bluescreen. Later, they mooched off a friend who had an early version of Adobe Premiere. By college, they all hit the University of North Carolina. Young did 2D animation and illustration, then 3D animation and visual effects at the Academy of Art in San Francisco.
Now as a small business, technology is finally on his side. “You can set up a decent computer with a few software packages and you have the basics for a pretty good production,” he says. “It's much easier to get into the industry when you don't have to start off with excuses.”
He's still making martial-arts/conspiracy films.
Mostly self-taught, Matthew Jeppsen shoots everything from wedding videos to commercials to a series of technology videos for his popular blog site, freshdv.com.
Entrepreneurial reality
Matthew Jeppsen began collaborating with Cineastfilms several years after former Wal-Mart exec Rick Henshaw founded the company, and at a time when wedding videography became increasingly story-driven. That business provides a solid base from which Jeppsen can branch out from a place he has no intention of leaving — Fayetteville, Ark. His wife is a schoolteacher.
Mostly self-taught, Jeppsen was a hobbyist with a home movie camera and a copy of Premiere. Then came the weddings, then commercials, concerts, concept and performance art — and, two and a half years ago, the switch to Final Cut Pro. On a whim, he started the popular techno blog site freshdv.com, soon to feature a live video channel. This year, he won his second Telly for a Mustang GT concept video made to support a FreshDV review of a car camera-mount system. His first Telly was for a bridal short.
As a DP, Jeppsen shoots solo or film-style with a crew. It's a lot of Sony HDR-FX1 and Z1U, some HDW-F900, some Varicam, and some Panasonic AG-HVX200 — and recently, a Nikon D70 SLR still camera (for a stop-motion commercial).
Matthew Jeppsen
With all this digital flexibility, plus viral and alternative distribution options, Jeppsen sees competitive opportunity — even for a guy in northwest Arkansas. “I can go out there, shoot a web series, self-fund it, make it myself, distribute it,” he says. “I don't have to line up funding in advance. A few late nights and we're good to go.”
Jeppsen's confidence comes in part because he's already been down the entrepreneurial road with the wedding business, as it began demanding more cinematography, rhythmic editing, and highlight-driven storytelling. It's now emotionally impactful reality TV, with more interpersonal politics and emotional minefields than Cops. “When we leave, we get hugs,” Jeppsen says. Technically, the business has expanded to include preproduced elements such as emotionally rich interview biographies of the couple and video portraits of the bride. The industry in general has also seen a demand for quickly cut-together highlight films of the ceremony, turned around in time for the reception. If you can't keep up, you can't compete.
Videographers have always been resourceful and entrepreneurial, but in the past, they faced the limitations of costly production gear and limited distribution options. As all that changes, content producers change too, diversifying geographically, philosophically, technically, and as business people.
Preston Porter
Grassroots Networking
Preston Porter hits the local Chamber of Commerce mixers. “Don't laugh,” he says. At the last meeting, he met someone from Paramount who had decamped to Thurston County, Wash. Most of the time, he meets local businesses — a lot of banks — who need to buy the services of a videographer who can do business-to-business video, commercials, insurance video, or forensic video. It's business 101: Meet the decision makers, press the flesh. He networks online, of course, too.
Porter graduated in video production from the Art Institute of Seattle and is “one step away” from a bachelor's degree at Evergreen State College. Ever the pragmatist, he studied a wide range of disciplines from lighting to visual effects. His business is about two-thirds graphic design, one-third video and motion graphics, a lot of Adobe After Effects plus Photoshop and Premiere; he owns a Sony HVR-Z1U. He worked for a while at now-defunct game company Screenlife, and he still freelances around on occasion.
Preston Porter
“I was voted class clown in high school,” he says, by way of explaining his aspirations beyond forensic video. He's worked on some sitcom ideas; he and his colleagues can use HDV and After Effects, then maybe upload to BlipTV or leverage their contact at a cell phone content distributor.
At 23, Porter's career already spans an interesting window of technical time, graduating in the fading heyday of Betacam, and now owning a Z1U and self-built dual-Xeon PC full of Adobe software.
“I wouldn't have been interested if it hadn't started to become accessible for the common person,” he says of digital technology. “It was obtainable, it wasn't just a pipedream. The first job I was offered out of school was a tape room minion. I didn't want to do that, and I have a legitimate business now thanks to digital technology and network marketing.”
