Creative Draw
Apr 1, 2008 12:00 PM, By Trevor Boyer
How to make it in Philadelphia.
Shooters Post & Transfer
A 10-minute subway ride takes you from Penn's Landing to Old City — home of Independence Hall, the Liberty Bell, and Washington Square Park. Across from the park is the Curtis Building, a grand Georgian Revival building that was home to The Saturday Evening Post. The 10th floor was once the ballroom and top floor; now one wing of it is the home of Shooters Post & Transfer.
With 48 permanent employees, Shooters is the largest production/postproduction facility in Philadelphia. Also housed in the Curtis Building space are additional employees who work on the Food Network's popular Dinner: Impossible, now in its fourth season. They're technically part of a separate company of which Shooters is a partner. “This is the first [show] where we are the production company dealing directly with network,” says Shooters Chief Operating Officer Ray Carballada.
It's a long way from Shooters' beginnings in the early '80s as a crewing company that would provide gear and manpower for commercials, political spots, and TV shows. The company's founders — Dave West (president), Craig Needelman (vice president), and Jay Hartigan (vice president) — are still the owners, and all work on Dinner: Impossible — two as DPs and one as a field audio engineer. (According to Carballada, they also work a lot on the political advertisements that make up a large portion of Shooters' work in campaign years such as this one.)
Carballada says that location production work was once a majority of Shooters' business; now, he estimates, it makes up approximately 20 percent. Still, Shooters crews are flown all over the country — especially for agency creative directors that are directing their own spots. They'll ship gear or rent it locally. “There's some situations where we do ship gear because it's technically set up the way they need it to be set up,” Carballada says.
The majority of Shooters' work now has to do with postproduction. That includes editing, broadcast/3D graphics, visual effects, audio post, color correction and finishing, and format transfer. This means five combined Apple Final Cut Pro and Avid Media Composer (with Avid Unity storage) suites, five Autodesk Smoke/Inferno suites, three full surround-sound Digidesign Pro Tools HD rooms (a couple with recording booths), and a film transfer suite — and then there's a separate graphics department.
When I visited, Tim Bowman was working in Adobe After Effects on an animation for a pharmaceutical agency, a “high-end tradeshow piece.” Within LightWave, Kevin Fanning was cycling through an animation of a helicopter carrying a giant “W” — this was a graphic for Washington Nationals games televised on the Mid-Atlantic Sports Network. “They operate individually, but they're also all integrated,” Carballada says. “So then we save the client a lot of money on markup, typically.”
(There's no interactive division at Shooters, “and there probably won't ever be,” Carballada says. “We really feel that our niche is motion media delivered over a network.” The Internet will become more like television, he says, and not vice versa.)
Also integrated into the Shooters space but technically a separate company is the Dive film division, which was started last year to handle visual effects, titling, and DI for in-theater advertising, cinematic commercial work, and feature-film projects — basically anything that originates as film. Mark Forker, formerly visual-effects supervisor at Digital Domain in Los Angeles, was hired to head up this division. The division has a room that features a Thomson Grass Valley Spirit 2K realtime film scanner and Da Vinci Resolve RT and Resolve Conform systems for DI and color correction. There's also a screening room with 34 seats and an NEC Starus digital cinema projector.
Everyone works from the office-wide Bright Systems SAN that's partitioned to serve the various divisions of Shooters. “On top of what we have for graphics, I think we have enough storage for three 2K films,” Carballada says. Good thing, because by late February, Dive had posted three films and had another three inhouse, among them Explicit Ills and The Bridge to Nowhere.
As for corporate work, Carballada says that Shooters gets the “high-end tradeshow stuff,” because most large companies keep their run-of-the-mill inhouse video projects inhouse. For AstraZeneca, Shooters recently created (with Smoke and Inferno) a piece that spread video across several plasma screens stacked atop one another.
As with Noir, most of Shooters' work is for out-of-state clients. (Although Pennsylvania's tax incentives reward projects that keep their postproduction in-state.) Carballada says that Shooters' Philly location is an attractive option for out-of-state clients because hotels are much cheaper than in New York, and the city itself is more “manageable.”
