(Image: Presenting his new film ‘Twixt’, Francis Ford Coppola tries on an Edgar Allan Poe mask that contains 3D glasses.)

The Past Week(s) in Review: For August 22 and August 29, 2011

This edition of TPWR covers the past two weeks of news.

We search for the more interesting and provocative news and views of the past week…just so you don’t have to.

This week we share the good news about local production, learn about a filter that can save you from DSLR headaches, and find out that an older, established filmmaker is more experimental than ever.

Mayor Bloomberg on the set of Pan Am with Media & Entertainment Commissioner Oliver and other officials. Photo credit: The Mayor’s Office.

Upbeat about Production

More good news on the growing number of prime time TV shows filming throughout the five boroughs. According to a recent press conference held by Mayor Bloomberg, we have some 23 shows now shooting regularly; eight of them were selected from 20 pilots shot in the city earlier this year.

Bloomberg made the announcement from the Steiner Studios stages of Sony Pictures Television’s “Pan Am”, set to debut on ABC this fall. Steiner, based in the Brooklyn Navy Yards, is now expanding to double its size. It is already the largest soundstage production facility on the East Coast, with the expansion adding some 2000 jobs to the 2200 jobs at throughout the Yard.

In a release, Steiner Studios Chairman Douglas C. Steiner thanked the Bloomberg administration for its continued support of the entertainment industry. “This onslaught of film and television production is a direct result of the mayor and other elected officials working together to make New York City competitive and hassle-free,” he said. This was taken from an article in The Hollywood Reporter, which you can read here.

Variety credits recently enacted long-term tax incentives granted by the state. An improvement over the previous year-by-year incentive extensions, the five year term offers a more stable environment for the studios for budgeting and other planning. The Variety article says that business boosters, including local studio heads, have learned to be “savvy in lobbying for production incentives at the state capital.”

QR Talk

Sean Durkin’s Martha Marcy May Marlene, nominated for the Grand Jury Prize at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, won the director the fest’s Directing Award. Major prize talk continues to build for Durkin as well as actors Elizabeth Olsen and John Hawkes well in advance of the film’s October 21st release. But there also seems to be a good bit of interest in Fox Searchlight’s use of QR (quick response) codes on early posters to trigger the trailers.

The gimmick here is that the previews aren’t available any other way online–you really do have to use your smartphone to scan the QR codes on posters you might find on the streets of Manhattan, Brooklyn, or Los Angeles–to get to these specific trailers. Entertainment Weekly’s Inside Movies claims to have had the scoop on the first use of these smart-phone-only posters.

Photo credit: MGM
Kubrick Invents the iPad, Personal TV Follows

Seems that it’s not the monolith from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey that garners interest these days but the “iPad like” TV notepads two of the astronauts on the Jupiter probe use. Samsung indeed cites these objects in the movie–they’re the size of a notepad and feature a functional video screen–as an example of prior art in its court case against Apple, who claims the Korean manufacturer has infringed its patented iPad design. You can read further details on Foss Patent’s blog here.

Following the lead of personal media, John Clancy, CEO at Azuki Systems, writes on Mashable that the future TV is “all about personalization.” We all knew that, and Clancy’s company makes platforms for mobile phones enabling cable companies and others to offer a good video experience on the go.

The basic argument isn’t new either: Since viewers no longer make plans to sit down and view specific content on a regular basis–we all want content whenever and wherever we happen to be–cable companies and channels like HBO want to offer video service alternatives that keeps up with their viewer’s habits.

While content creators and service providers are “making a mad dash to get screen time on mobile and other connected devices”, these new delivery options are stumbling because experience is not seamless when using the various devices. Azuki, of course, provides the one item Clancy says is lacking–the “key ingredient for success — personalization.” Metadata behind the video is used to split longer shows into smaller chunks so that viewers can catch clips on the go. Worth a read if just to learn how much control can be exerted over your distributed video.

Photo credit: metaio
Siggraph Notes, AR, & ARRI

Over at Studio Daily, editor Beth Marchant offers a quick take on SIGGRAPH 2011. Top tech presentations at the show in Vancouver, says Marchant, included Nvidia’s Project Maximus (a graphics technology that allows users to access and scale different parts of the GPU as needed) and Amazon’s “Cluster GPU Instance for its EC2″ –this service allows smaller facilities to rent processing power to render scenes. Meanwhile, BlackSky Computing ups the ante on cloud computing schemes like Amazon’s EC2 cloud by claiming it isn’t very effective beyond the capability of working with short sequences. BlackSky may enter the market for high-performance processing and rendering with its own competing service.

Augmented reality may offer a whole new way to use smartphones, or it could just be a gimmick for gamers. With that conclusion still up for grabs, you might take a look at an intriguing video “Roadmap of AR and the Vision of an Augmented City” to get a better idea of what the latest developments offer. Created by the Media Processing Division of chipmaker ARM and the R&D department of German-based AR company metaio, the video shows how more powerful smartphones capable of realtime 3D motion tracking will provide real-time contextual, digital information overlaying urban scenes.

You have to wonder why they haven’t offered this already since the Munich-based company has been around for much of the history of cinema, but ARRI CSC has launched its own Expendables Online Shop. Found at arricscstore.com, the store offers all the items you’ll need for handling camera, lighting, and grip work.

Photo credit: Kevin Brown
Wormholes, CDN Woes, & Bird Talk

In an area within MIT’s student cafeteria, you can find a Plexiglas dome that sits over a video screen. You can find the exact similar setup in Stanford University’s cafeteria. What is it? First, consider that there is an always on, high-speed link between the two conversation areas. (The plexi dome acts as a chamber to funnel audio while not disturbing others nearby.) Meant to make realtime long-distance interactions casual and arbitrary, the designers of the system act all science-fictioney by calling the link a wormhole. See if it heralds the future of long distance interactive communication by reading the the rest of the article on the Boston Globe’s site.

Over on the GigaOM site, reporter Stacey Higginbotham offers us an inside look at content delivery specialist Akamai and the “scary future of streaming video.” Seems that within two to five years, the throughput requirement for certain single video events will reach some 50 to 100 terabits per second. That is about the equivalent bandwidth of what it takes to distribute a TV quality stream to a large prime time audience today. Problem is that this is an “order of magnitude” beyond the largest online video events held today, according to Higginbotham, and that’s without adding all of bells & whistles of interactivity, which many claim we desperately want. See what you think by reading the article here.

The LA Times interviews Pixar’s Brad Bird for an article entitled “Hollywood isn’t Brave Enough to Copy Pixar’s Process”. While Pixar has become “the gold standard among popcorn films”, Bird opines, Hollywood studios are doing everything to copy the famed animation studio except actually taking the time and effort to really, truly develop a good story first. A good storyline is a central tenet of the vaunted Pixar process. Read more about Bird’s thoughts on current trends in animation by clicking here.

Photo credit: Mosaic Engineering
DSLR’s Savior, Flash & Jobs

In short review/article on his site, DSLR enthusiast Philip Bloom claims a new anti-aliasing and moire filter from Mosaic Engineering solves the two most serious problems–aliasing and moire generation–you will face when shooting with Canon’s 5DmkII. It seems the filter removes the interference patterns on details that are generated by the camera’s line skipping. Is this a simple cure for what Bloom calls the “bane of shooting with DSLRs and the single biggest problem”? Read it here and decide.

Fast and efficient Flash memory rules in the world of consumer computing (i.e. iPads, smartphones, digital cameras). Except in limited cases, the price of solid-state storage has remained too high to allow it to move into the world of large-scale computing like data centers. Now, Pure Storage, a new start up, says that it can use consumer level flash storage along with its software to pull the price of Flash storage down to less than that of hard drives. That’s a mighty achievement if true. Read more here in Steve Lohr’s article in the Times’ Bits blog.

There have been plenty of testimonials to Steve Jobs on his resignation from Apple. At least read one of them from someone who has something to do with our industry: Here’s a note from George Lucas, who sold Lucasfilm’s computer graphics division to Jobs, a sale which famously created Pixar Animation Studios. But of course that only came after a number of years of development and many millions invested in the new operation. Read more of Nick Wingfield’s article in the reporter’s Wall Street Journal blog by clicking here.

Elle Fanning & Coppola on the set of ‘Twixt’
Still Going Strong

Francis Ford Coppola brought Val Kilmer and the composer of his latest film Twixt to the recent Comic Con convention for a talk. What made that panel more than just the usual dog and pony, says reporter Jason Adams on JoBlo.com, is that this original horror tale-said to be inspired by one of Coppola’s own dreams–will be presented as a live performance. That’s right–Coppola claims to be returning to the early days of cinema when things weren’t so locked down to present some of the “magic and spontaneity of live performance art”.

Coppola, working with electronic musician and soundtrack composer Dan Deacon will “change the experience to suit the audience” in real time. Read more about the ever experimenting FFC and his new idea for presentation by clicking here. Twixt premieres at next month’s Toronto International Film Festival.

As an aside: If you would be curious to see how an earlier, eager Coppola marked up a page from “The Godfather”–and a heavily marked up page it is with “Hit hard and bloody!!” among the exhortations he made to himself–then click here.

Raul Ruiz
Memories of a Cine Magician

Raul Ruiz, the little heralded filmmaker (at least in the U.S.), passed away recently. (If you haven’t had a chance to see one of his many intriguing works, check out his transfixing Mysteries of Lisbon, which is still showing at Lincoln Center’s Elinor Bunin Monroe Film Center.)

Producer James Schamus posted a touching remembrance on Scott Macauley’s IndieWIRE blog, calling the director/author “one of the truly great, idiosyncratic and visionary voices of world cinema.” Both Schamus and Macauley—along with a raft of downtown notables of the time including Christine Vachon, Michael Kirby, John Zorn, Kathy Acker, and Jim Jarmusch—worked or acted in Ruiz’s 1987 film The Golden Boat, a goof on the New York art scene at the time.

This bit from AP’s obit sums up his career neatly: “A favorite of cinephiles, Ruiz rebelled against the conventions of moviemaking in an extensive, varied body of work that didn’t result in a widely-known masterpiece, but left behind a vast, labyrinthine collection of experiments, curiosities and innovations.”

At last year’s NAB, DaVinci released the first software-only version of Resolve, which it had acquired earlier from the renowned color correction company. Pricing at only $995, the Mac-based software brought a recognized name from high end color finishing suites down to where the average editor and color finisher could afford it.

DaVinci Resolve 8 released at this year’s NAB. Important new features include multi-layer timeline support with editing, XML import and export with Apple Final Cut Pro 7 and Adobe Premiere Pro, support for OpenCL processing (improved results on Apple iMac and MacBook Pro computers), real time noise reduction, curve grading, advanced multi-point stabilization, and automatic stereoscopic 3D image alignment.

Also announced that the show was a free version of the color correction program: DaVinci Resolve Lite. Available for download this past month, the app is in a crippleware version but instead limits projects to SD and HD resolutions, two color correction nodes, a single processing GPU and a single RED rocket card.

Now a useful video has been uploaded to Vimeo. This is a pretty good place to start, as the instructor Warren Eagles of International Colorist Academy takes you on a straightforward path to setting up for your first session.

You can find more help by visiting Blackmagic Design’s page devoted to the freeware version. Creative Cow’s page devoted to DaVinci also has info on using the Lite version.

For anyone involved in the postproduction industry, the news this past week that HP would potentially sell off its computer division was a wake-up call. Sure, this is a fast changing industry and some at the company fear a future of ever diminished profits. But HP is a key player in the film and video industries. Now one of largest IT companies in the world, it also has a proud history of innovation that began in a humble one-car Palo Alto garage owned by Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard that in turn sparked the growth of Silicon Valley.

Just ask DreamWorks or any number of animation houses how important HP gear is to their work. That doesn’t touch on other companies doing CAD, architectural or car design, gas and oil exploration or anyone that edits or does compositing or special effects. The speculation that this innovative maker of quality PCs, servers and workstations would be sold off to the highest bidder–as some speculated–was unsettling, even in an industry known and celebrated for constant, destructive change.

There’s an interesting analysis of HP’s situation by Forbes magazine staff writer Quentin Hardy. The article makes its conclusions known upfront via its title-“HP: The Case For Incoherence”-with a first sentence that reads “You don’t see this much bad news in one place very often.”

The gist of the article, which details the losses incurred by the recent purchase of Palm, the turmoil in the PC industry (HP and Dell are said to make around a 7-percent profit margin on computers while Apple sails by with an estimated 30-percent margin), and the precarious future of the company’s important printer division all lead Hardy to conclude that “changing this company will cause a lot of turmoil and take a long time.”

As chance had it however, I was meeting with a group of HP upper managers and product specialists on tour in the city to present their 3rd major launch of new PC gear this year. “Our situation is no where near as dire as some make it out to be,” said Jim Christiensen, director of media relations of HP’s personal systems group.

“We have over $40 billion of revenue in the personal systems group, making us a Fortune 60 company” says Christiensen. “While our CEO has announced plans that will bring some significant changes, our group is going stronger than ever. Whatever happens, we’re still a very viable part of a $140 billion company. We’re in this business for our customers, and we won’t be letting them down.”

Indeed, September will see the launch of a range of new, innovative computer products at lower, more competitive price points. While I can’t yet go into detail, let’s just say the technology I saw and the calm, confident manner in which it was presented makes me think that HP’s computer division will be doing well no matter what happens.

HP’s innovation lives on: Here’s a PC Mag article that shows how the valuable WebOS ecosystem obtained from HP’s acquisition of Palm will turn up in PCs and other gear.

As long as we’re on subject of changes to one of the US tech industries star players, you might want to read a disturbing analysis of why the US is loosing out on the creation of the next generation of technology. Steve Denning, in a series of Forbes magazine articles that begins with “Why Amazon Can’t Make A Kindle In the USA,” faults—among other issues—traditional cost accounting, which focuses too much attention on increasing short-term profits by continually cutting costs even while this destroys the underlying strength of a technology company.

This inexorable logic is how whole industries disappear, says Denning. Instead we should correct short term thinking with, for example, approaches like “throughput accounting” that puts the emphasis on how companies can add new value, rather than just cut costs. Investors too need to change their thinking to “realize that short-term financial gains are ephemeral: the companies that will generate real value are those that do what is necessary to continuously innovate.” Apple and Amazon are two companies Denning gives credit to for their mantra of continuous innovation.

American tech companies dropping out of a market after creating innovative technology isn’t anything new, of course. Ampex is a good example. The California-based company perfected the audio tape recorder, invented the studio VTR, a portable videotape recorder, high-fidelity movie theater audio systems, multi-track audio recording and video editing. After all of these successes however, over the years Ampex divested itself of video and audio products for both the pro and consumer markets–”We’re just an engineering company” was their new tune. But they didn’t have that huge revenue engine anymore. Ampex finally made only tape recorders for storage–the Space Shuttle and the military were customers. But that wasn’t enough; it went into Chapter 11 in 2008. The Japanese bought a number of these patents and slowly, methodically built successful, worldwide consumer and professional industries from inventions we cast off.

Settles In" />

(Image (L to R): Dean Mathiesen, manager client services, Company 3, NY; Marcelo Gandola, SVP, Creative Services, NY; and Randy Swanberg, creative director, Company 3′s Beauty division (which specializes in VFX for commercials/videos) enjoy a stunning sunset on Company 3′s rooftop lounge.)

You’d be forgiven for missing Company 3 at first.

There’s no huge logo emblazoned on the West 18th St. building in Chelsea. Unless you’ve been relying on them for telecine, color grading or DI, you might not realize that Company 3—after some 10 years in other digs in Manhattan—has been sitting in fine style on top of a classic but now totally refurbished telco building for over a year.

Company 3 might also be easy to miss at first glance since the Santa Monica-based company didn’t issue the usual flurry of tub-thumping press releases or host a flashy opening party that might bring you to their airy space on the 11-13th floors (the eleventh is occupied by sister VFX company Method Studios. Company 3′s 13th floor rooftop penthouse and deck offers sweeping views of the NY skyline.) Chalk it up to modesty. After all, colorists and those working in DI—much like editors—will often move to the background, ceding the bright lights to directors and producers.

That would be a shame, since there’s some real talent here working on top line projects across features, commercials and music videos.

If you’re not familiar with the name yet, you might take the time to note that Company 3′s president is Stefan Sonnenfeld. Practically since the company’s start in 1997, he became one of the top go-to industry colorists for music videos and commercials. A few years following that Sonnenfeld moved Company 3 into feature-film grading and DI work.

Tom Poole did final color grading on Nicholas Winding Refn’s “Drive” at Company 3′s DI suite in Chelsea. The film won Refn a Best Director award at Cannes.

DI Unleashed

We’d argue that it’s the DI work that built the reputation of Sonnenfeld and Company 3. No real argument: the company wooed top directors even while it aggressively embraced the latest color manipulation technologies. Color grading had started in the 1980s with devices such as the da Vinci Classic controlling the output of telecines like Fernseh’s FDL 60 and the Rank Cintel. That gave some control over the signal in post, but it was based on analog technology which had considerable limits. Not until the release of the da Vinci 2K in 1998 did computer technology enable colorists to gain enough control and subtlety to inaugurate a new stage of postproduction that was soon christened DI or digital intermediate.

Now a colorist could go beyond tweaking the general colors in a scene to imperceptibly change the colors of a costume or a background, or add lighting where there was none or paint a wall when there wasn’t the time to do it on set.

There’s DI work from a swath of epic-sized productions (Super 8; Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides; Alice in Wonderland, the first two Transformers films, Star Trek) to smaller scale (Bridesmaids) or even animated (Rango).

Sonnenfeld might equally be regarded for his ability to keep a post facility growing and relevant in an ever competitive, ever changing industry. After beginning as an independent, the company became part of Ascent Media’s wide-ranging empire. Just this past December, Deluxe bought most of Ascent Media’s creative services and media services holdings, including Beast, Method, Rushes, Encore and Level 3 Post. (Sonnenfeld now also holds the title of president of creative services for Deluxe.)

Billionaire John Malone owned Ascent Media, which itself was spun out from previous owner Discovery Communications. But even his fabled management failed to make a profit in 2008 despite group-wide yearly income of over $200 million, according to reports in the Hollywood Reporter and TVB Europe.

(Known for years via the end title “Color by Deluxe” on thousands of feature films, Deluxe actually started in the NYC area in 1915 as part of the Fox Film Corporation in Fort Lee, New Jersey, then a hub of filmmaking. The Deluxe Entertainment Services Group is now a worldwide operation that offers everything from digital intermediates, mastering and subtitling services and digital restoration to media deliverables from Blu-ray to 35mm theatrical release prints.)

This past year, Sonnenfeld’s ability to draw top commercial and music video talent to his facilities was among the reasons he’s garnered a first-look producing deal with Paramount Pictures. Reporting to Paramount Film Group president Adam Goodman, Sonnenfeld and his Sunny Field Entertainment is said to have several film and television projects in development.

Indies & Music Videos

The 18th Street facility has been busy. Besides the many commercials and music videos that have passed through the suites recently, Indie features are picking up, and gaining notice. One example: Tom Poole provided final color grading for Danish director Nicholas Winding Refn’s Drive, which won the Best Director Award at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. “I flat out loved this smart throwback to the neon lit, stylish and smart genre movies of the ’80s,” says Filmmaker Magazine’s Scott Macaulay in a review. The film releases theatrically this September.

Tom Poole at the controls in Company 3′s DI suite.

Company 3 also recently finished color grading on a project from long-time New York institution the Beastie Boys. Spike Jonze directed their latest music video “Don’t Play No Game That I Can’t Win,” done up as an 80′s-style action movie like “First Blood”, according to press information. Company 3 Colorist Tim Masick, working closely with Jonze and DP Wyatt Troll, handled dailies and final color on the video.

Company 3′s rooftop lounge offers great views in a relaxed setting.

There’s a Method to their Management

Down a floor in the same 18th Street building sits Method Studios, one of Deluxe’s visual effects divisions. Earlier this year, Deluxe combined Method Studios—which has four locations, including New York and Los Angeles—with its CIS Visual Effects division. The multiple facilities will be networked to enable shared work. Sonnenfeld was quoted in the Hollywood Reporter as noting that the integration would provide clients with “a broader range of visual effects services with an integrated workflow across Deluxe’s multiple locations.”

Integrating Deluxe’s many divisions over high-speed links is part of the newly configured company’s strategic plans. Tapping into Deluxe’s wide-flung operations also enables Company 3 to offer Virtual Services. Virtual Services is an amalgam of technologies that allows Company 3 colorists—whether in Santa Monica or New York—to collaborate, for example, with sister company Beast Editorial in Chicago to offer live grading sessions. Maximizing resources makes sense: a smaller market facility like Beast can offer access to name colorists, while Company 3 has a way to spread the salaries of top talent across a wider group of clients.

You’ll get a laid back vibe from Company 3′s reception area.

Chicago’s virtual outpost is situated in Beast’s recently installed Smoke room, which features a calibrated high-res monitor along with a video-conference system. This combo allows the Chicago creative’s feedback to reach the Company 3 colorist in L.A. or New York without delays or worries about possible color discrepancies. This setup and technology is also used for streaming in visual effects from Method Studio.

Hourly rates on the Virtual Telecine are said to be the same as a regular telecine session and competitive to rates charged in the Chicago market, with the service also on tap at Deluxe-related outposts in Atlanta, Boston, Dallas, Minneapolis, Tokyo and London.

“We do a lot of virtual sessions between East Coast and West Coast,” says Jackie Lee, Company 3′s vice-president of feature services. “We have outposts around the country and overseas. Facilities use our decoder in each location so that everything is secure during transmission. This now means that clients simply don’t have to worry about the expense of flying to LA, New York or London.”

Company 3 and Method Studios are now offering an integrated workflow for stereoscopic 3D feature film digital intermediates. Method’s dedicated stereography division enable fixes of left/right “eye” alignment from stereoscopic cinematography.

Working together, Company 3 and Method Studios will be able to offer a “uniquely streamlined approach” that integrates the work into the DI process, says Steven Shapiro, lead stereographer and director of software and pipeline at Method Studios. If alignment issues that occurred on set are discovered during the color grading process, notes Shapiro, the closeness of the two facilities—whether in the New York or Santa Monica facility—allows a stereo technician to view the problem footage in Company 3′s DI theater, and “ascertain the problem, fix it and drop it back into the timeline while the color grading session continues.”

Deluxe is serious about getting a strong position in other aspects of stereographic post; it recently purchased 2D-to-3D stereo conversion specialist StereoD.

Joining up with Sister Companies

We spoke with Marcelo Gandola, SVP, Creative Services, NY. Gandola oversees Deluxe NY, Company 3 NY, Beast NY, Method NY, EFILM NY and Riot Atlanta and is keen to make use of the expanded infrastructure he has to work with under the Deluxe umbrella. Besides the top-rung feature work, Company 3 has strong roots in commercials and music videos. “We probably touch more than 50-percent of the Super Bowl commercials in one-way or the other,” says Gandola. “I think we probably touch 90-percent of all high-end music videos. In fact I think we’re one of the few if only facilities that works on high-end feature films, high-end commercials, and high-end music videos and manages to do those really, really well.”

The infrastructure is a given, Gandola adds, you just have to have that. “But Stefan has set a real high standard for talent, and we believe it’s that that sets us apart from everyone else.”

Company 3, which sponsors an annual party for Tribeca Film Festival contestants, awards the winners post services worth many thousands of dollars.

Reaching Out & The Post New York Alliance

Community building shows itself in various ways. Company 3 is not only an active sponsor of programs directly related to their business industry event–the Tribeca Film Festival and Independent Film Week–but Stefan Sonnenfeld and Missy Papageorge (the couple started Company 3 together along with colorist Michael Pethel) are also active in other areas of the industry. Earlier this year they were honored by Scenarios USA at its REAL DEAL Awards & Gala for supporting an educational initiative that “facilitates a unique partnership between teenage writers from marginalized communities and professional film directors to produce short films for national distribution.”

For his part, Gandola has worked to build the Post New York Alliance (PNYA) and currently holds the post as the organization’s first president. As the PNYA statement has it on their website, this association of film and television postproduction facilities and labor unions operating in New York “coalesced around the belief that a unified industry presents the post production community better opportunity to develop and promote public policy that benefits the film and television industry as a whole.”

What that translates into is that this young organization has already sent a busload or two of its members to Albany to help secure the passage of the new Empire State Film Post Production Credit. As the first legislation of its kind in the country, it offers a 10-percent tax credit on postproduction costs, as long as a project spends 75-percent of its total postproduction budget in New York. The film or TV project doesn’t even have to shoot in New York, only do post work here.

“It’s an inspiring time in New York, especially on the feature film side for postproduction,” says Gandola. “With all the tax incentives, the talent base, and the infrastructure, New York is becoming an even better place for filmmakers to produce, to use for backdrops, and now increasingly for postproduction.”

That sort of vision isn’t something you’d normally associate with a top facility that must stay competitive in an ever-changing post environment. But that’s what you’ll hear. “We want to build the community up, and educate politicians as to what postproduction actually means and how it’s different from production in its needs,” says Gandola.

That includes education too. “We also want to be involved with the school systems, including SUNY and CUNY,” says Gandola. “PNYA hopes to build a pipeline of young talent outside of the traditional film schools–where [the focus is] mostly writing, directing and film production–and instead emphasize postproduction and visual effects creation. We even think we can have a farm-team like system, and grow these specialties here, which will help secure the long term growth of postproduction in the New York market.”

Company 3′s Jackie Lee and Marcelo Gandola before their talk at the Tribeca Film Festival.

A Meeting with Jackie Lee

Jackie Lee, Company 3′s vice-president of feature services, is a voluble, energetic force in the facility. I had a chance to talk with her earlier this year about Company 3′s quiet start, why the company is more a boutique than outsiders might think, and other questions to help situate this recently reinvigorated facility. Here are her edited comments.

(I hadn’t heard much about Company 3′s new facility. Was this a soft opening?)

We haven’t had a big opening, but we have had a lot of parties, so yes, you could call it a soft opening.

We have already had many different groups, directors and so on, come through the facility on a regular basis (since the fall of 2010).

It actually took three years to construct the new space, which is in the old Verizon building. The building owner had financial problems so they had to stop construction for a while.

Company 3 had already operated for 10 years in the New York post community. It wasn’t really a smaller space, but the same size. But we didn’t have Method as part of our operations at that point. Nor did we have a big DI theater.

(How are things shaping up so far?)

It looks like a good year for us with five or six independent features in-house already. There’s the Tribeca Film Festival too, of which we are big supporters. We gave out awards at the festival for best cinematographer and best new director. The winners each received $50,000 worth of posts services from us.

(Is this a good time for a big, high-end facility to open, as many previous high-end facilities were brought down by, among other things, disruptive technologies that allowed smaller boutique operations take much of that business?)

We strive to be the best there is and we want to stay at the top level. Those of us who work for Company 3 don’t feel like we work for a big facility at all. People from the outside might think that we’re a large company and that we do so much, but we think of ourselves as a boutique. We always have. There’s only a limited amount of shows we can do a year.

For example, we have one (DI) theater here in New York and three in our facility in Santa Monica. That is much less than our competitors traditionally had.

We have a small team too, while we are very flexible in the way we work. We react to the community and to our clients so that we can give them what they want, what they demand. We make every effort to keep up with technology and with workflows.

I wouldn’t say that we are always the first ones who always come up with a new concept, but we certainly are within the top two or three companies that lead the way in terms of workflow, new ways of doing things. Company 3 is all about efficiency. That’s how we can do independent films in the New York market, because we are efficient.

As with many creatives, Halloween is considered a major holiday, and fully celebrated by the locals.

([Cont'd] Can you give me more detail?)

Well, we don’t have a big team, but we’re always busy. We work 24 hours a day, yet you can come to Company 3 and be in and out in one hour. We’re not a facility that insists you book an eight-hour day every single day or whatever it is like some other facilities. We are flexible that way.

We have a single client contact (for each job). You go to that one person and they take care of everything for you.

Once you start working here you get to know that team intimately. Our DI team for example, consists of about 10 people. So in house we have producers, a conform artist, colorists who do both features and commercials, people in the back room to scan film, engineers that set everything up, and data people. That’s about it, maybe 50 to 60 staff in total in New York.

That includes Method Studios, which is on the 11th floor. We work on many projects together. Again, it’s efficient to have them in the same building. If you’re working on a feature and have something that needs to be cleaned up or have a visual effects shot, we can deal with it right here and now.

(How do you see the New York market at this point?)

I think production is going to increase, and we’re ready for that. Thank goodness. We’re in a new space at the right time and everything is up and running.

Adding Luster

Many of you might be surprised that Company 3 (the name might be from that of the original three founders, Papageorge, Pethel, and Sonnenfeld, but a spokesperson denies this) has been in business for over a decade in New York. The company’s recently opened 18th Street facility, however, with its airy luxe style so echoing that of high-end LA houses, adds a level of distinction to the post scene. Face it, many New York facilities struggle with tight spaces and tight budgets that don’t allow much stretching room.

But of course there has to be talent to back up all that interior design. Company 3 has it in spades.

If you would like to arrange a tour of the facility, please contact Marcelo Gandola at mgandola [at] company3.com.

But What if You’re Hungry?

If you’re visiting or working late night sessions at Company 3′s Chelsea digs, you can find some great restaurants and bars in the vicinity to solve those food and drink urges. Here are a few of our suggestions.

Bar Veloce 176 Seventh Ave. (near 20th) offers “well-crafted panini and tramezzini” that can be “washed down with easy-drinking wines” according to New York magazine.

For that caffeine connection, try Café Grumpy 224 W. 20th St. between Sixth and Seventh Ave. This local favorite offers a variety of single-origin roasts from North Carolina’s renowned Counter Culture Coffee, each ground and brewed to order using Grumpy’s unique Clover high-tech brewer.

Le Zie 172 Seventh Ave. (near 20th) Le Zie delivers, so that’s one more reason to have this “Venetian trattoria’s” tremendous spaghetti and meatballs (“Best in Manhattan” says Newsday/NY Press), fish dishes, or just about any of the lunch specials.

Socarrat Paella Bar 259 W. 19th St. between 6th and 7th Ave. Socarrat offers traditional tapas (gambas al ajillo and patatas bravas) as well as chef Felipe Camarillo’s paellas and fideuas (the latter substitute Spanish noodles for rice) in a casual communal-table setting. Paella Bar next door offers tapas, Serrano ham, artisanal cheeses and a large selection of things Portuguese to drink.

(Image: Still from “Man with a Movie Camera” (1929) Made with little money, Dziga Vertov’s silent documentary film pioneered techniques and a cinema that we’re still exploring.)

The Past Week in Review: For August 15, 2011

We search for the more interesting and provocative news and views of the past week…just so you don’t have to.

This week we hear about how the economy affects Hollywood, why we get more of the same from TV, and a technology ideal for shooting snakes and funerals.

Dollar Blues

Entertainment Weekly’s Inside Movies takes on an old chestnut in the article “Is Hollywood recession proof?” Our rapidly fluctuating economy with growing numbers of unemployed are causing some people to point to Hollywood during the Depression, when huge numbers of folks went to relatively inexpensive movies to forget bleak times. But box office analyst Karie Bible says that the reality was that for studios, only MGM was in the black; all the others were “bleeding red.”

In his article on TheWrap, Joshua L. Weinstein says that the “indie film community is jittery” while TV media buyers aren’t yet panicking over the stock markets violent ups and downs.

However over the long term those involved in the media economy are worried since tougher economic times means less investor backing for movies as well as top ad rates for TV. Tightening credit means that deal making could show the earliest problems.

Calling it Hollywood’s dirty secret, Edward Jay Epstein in this Adweek article says that it’s TV that keeps the big six studios in business, not movie profits. (Sony is the only major without a television subsidiary.)

Without ad sales on cable networks and foreign TV, even profitable companies can’t make it by the silver screen alone. For example Time Warner–the largest movie producer among the six—still makes some 87-percent of its earnings from TV.

In his blog on IndieWIRE, Ted Hope opines “Can We Create The Future Of Indie Marketing & Distribution—Or Is It Already Dead?”

The Indie producer notes that it’s the lack of PMDs (Producers of Marketing & Distribution) in the indie film scene that holds back the whole genre. While he had developed a proposal to help develop such an integral part of a films existence, none of the standard groups such as Tribeca, Sundance, or the IFP could fund it.

Hope praises Sundance’s new executive director Keri Putnam for starting up Sundance’s Artist Services as a 1st step towards building a “true Artist/Entrepreneur class.”

On GigaOM, reporter Liz Shannon Miller asks “What happens if your web series doesn’t hit it big?” Miller says that it’s the Web success stories we hear about, and not those who have put in time and money and turned out a great series of shows but still fail.

She tells the tale of Jonathan Nail, who has created and written and even starred in Solo, a sci-fi comedy series. Nail put his own money in the series, some from his parents, other money from crowd sourcing and some sponsorships. While the amounts were not huge, Nail couldn’t recoup even this modest amount.

In this GigaOM article, reporter Janko Roettgers sees a possible return to piracy as consumers start to tighten their belts and cut unnecessary expenses such as entertainment that they can get in other ways. Since Netflix is about to institute a price hike while authentication plans from broadcasters further clamp down on viewing opportunities, it might be a “perfect storm for piracy.”

More of the Same

In his AdAge article, Michael Learmonth tells us what we already know, but it’s still entertaining to see it laid out:  television really, truly is not an innovative medium. In his article “Why 500 Channels Means 19 Shows About Pawnshops” the reporter points out that that even as the FCC mulled over plans for new rules that will open up access to the airwaves and presumably allow more divergent voices to be heard, the reality is that networks continue to steal, copy, or clone whichever shows are popular and making money. You needed to hear that spelled out, didn’t you?

While cable networks have unique demographics upon launch as their rationale for being, the reality is that over time only two goals remain: a bigger audience and a younger one.

Filmmaker Kevin Knoblock

Doc Talk

You’ll get a sense of what it costs to make feature documentaries and other concerns of directors and producers if you read this interview with documentary director Kevin Knoblock on the Script site. If you are new to documentary production, Knoblock’s personal step-by-step procedure for pitching and producing a documentary will be of interest.

Good for Snakes & Funerals

AbelCine’s tech blogger Ian McCausland has a quick overview of ARRI’s Anamorphic De-squeeze for the Alexa. The capability, accessed via a purchased download license, enables the use of widescreen (2.39:1 image) lenses for the 1.78:1 Alexa imager while still allowing the image to appear normal and not squeezed in the viewfinder and for playback. And no snide asides about Fritz Lang’s comment in Godard’s Contempt, who described Cinerama as only good for filming “snakes and funerals.”

If you’ve taken the dive and bought a copy of Final Cut Pro X as I have, you might be enjoying this radical re-written program. But you might also like to know that there is a useful and very inexpensive PDF manual available.

Hollywood composer Edgar Rothermich bests Apple’s online manual too by its extensive use of graphics. Rothermich explains how he has been making his own version of each manual that he might need when using computer-based gear. This basic 62-page manual is just what you might need too, and for the low price of $2, it’s hard to beat.

Streaming Along

Google is moving quickly into the streaming video market, says CNET in this article. An update to Google’s Video app allows some users of Android smartphones to screen movie rentals from the Android Market. Users-who must the running the 2.2 Froyo and 2.3 Gingerbread versions of Android–can also manage the movies they’ve rented.

Streaming video service Vudu meanwhile is now available on the iPad, which allows it to keep pace with Netflix, the market leader. Vudu, which just happens to be owned by retail powerhouse Wal-Mart, makes the movies and TV shows available via a browser plug-in for the iPad, rather than as an app in Apple’s App store. That keeps it free not only of Apple’s decisions on what gets him or what doesn’t, but circumvents the Cupertino-based company’s 30-percent cut on such transactions.

Read more at CNET by clicking here.

Ezra Pound (1920) Photo credit: E.O. Hoppé

Make It New

Over at the Guardian, reporter Aleks Krotoski writes about storytelling in the digital age. This isn’t another film specific story on how digital technology is enabling new production but rather how breaking up traditional linear storytelling bolstered by digital technology could place is on the verge of an exciting new era of digital storytelling. After all the gloom of our economy, it’s always refreshing to find folks still trying to ‘make it new’ as E.P. would have it.

If you’re involved in production—be it as producer, director, DP or editor—today’s multiple video formats can be confusing.

Can you talk and think coherently about the different formats, or specifics of resolution, color space, or color versus temporal compression? Well, you’ll have to if you need to make judgments about production workflow.

That’s where AbelCine’s upcoming class—it’s this Tuesday, August 16^th—might come in handy. It’s a three-hour event where you’ll get a handle on the various HD formats and what workflow each of them is best suited.

According to a post on the rental and sale house’s site, topics covered in the three-hour class include broadcast standards, frame rates, compression, color space and recording media. Formats covered include Sony XDCAM, Panasonic P2, ARRI ALEXA, RED RAW, Canon HDSLR, Canon XF, AVCHD and HDV.

Click here for more info.

Cory Doctorow, science fiction author, activist, journalist and co-editor of the ever fascinating blog at Boing Boing, delivered a very cogent keynote talk at the annual Siggraph convention, which just completed in Vancouver, B.C.

Doctorow offers some clear thinking about copyright in the digital era, what’s wrong with how we handle it (it hurts authors and creatives), and what a good copyright law would look like.

Highly recommended.

Image: Time Warner Cable and Comcast can’t rely on one steady stream of profits hanging around anymore.

The Past Week in Review: For August 9, 2011

We search for the more interesting and provocative news and views of the past week…just so you don’t have to.

This week we hear about a web mogul in the making, a gray lady learning new tricks, and why fewer people are tuning in and paying the cablers.

Lady Mogul & Lady Gray

In his article Felicia Day: Mogul In The Making, Forbes’s David Ewalt profiles the TV actress and praises her innovative work in creating small niche web videos that are both artistically satisfying for her and actually make money. Facing consistent typecasting by TV casting agents, Day struck out on her own. In 2007 she created the first few episodes of The Guild and released them free on the ‘net. She filed enough fans to support a full season of shows. By the second season production costs of over $10,000 per episode were covered by sponsorships from Sprint and Microsoft.

This was followed up by Dragon Age Redemption, a further gloss on videogame obsessed youth. Shot earlier this year, it features Tallis, an “Elven assassin” played by Day, who also co-produces. This yet to be released web series moves well towards more established pro realms in its use of sets, props, and costumes, with folks with rather impressive credentials involved including Independence Day associate producer Peter Winther as director and John Bartley (Lost) as cinematographer.

You can read Ewalt’s article by clicking here.

You can watch Day’s The Guild series here. Since it resembles a more standard sitcom, its budget doesn’t show as much as might her upcoming low budget fantasy film. Microsoft sponsors it on Xbox Live, so money and recognition are coming Day’s way. Although Dragon Age Redemption was originally scheduled to debut this summer, after Day spoke to reporters at the San Diego Comic-Con fan chatter on the web now points to a fall release.

Developments in the newspaper world are a bit further afield from our usual coverage. But since this involves media heavyweight and city icon the New York Times, I thought the Gray Lady’s web moves would be of interest.

This past week the Times introduced Beta620, a public site for its experimental projects. A bit reminiscent of Google labs in its approach, it offers consumers a way to test new Times’ Web apps that may or may not be used as a standard part of the main site.

Consumers can try out some seven different projects currently including Longitude, which locates the day’s Times articles on an interactive Google map. Here’s an article on AdAge that goes into some of the different aspects of the new project, which might finally provide the old gray lady with some decent Internet chops.

AR, Apple & Adobe

If you have ever used an augmented reality app on your smart phone, you know how intriguing the idea of combining the phone’s video camera with a data overlay can be. You might also be aware of the downside to current technology—instead of actually recognizing a scene’s elements, today’s phones actually use either a QR code that the camera can lock on to or rough sensors and not very detailed GPS info to enable that useful combination of the virtual and the real that’s the promise of AR. The result is much less precise than the hype has lead us to believe.

Now, however, Layar—the largest purveyor of mobile augmented reality platforms—has released Layar Vision. The new app better employs machine vision techniques, recognizing real world objects and layering over digital content that the user has uploaded to the company’s servers. More here.

Apple, as we’ve come to know over the years, likes to control as much of its ecosystem as possible. Not relying on the kindness of strangers is one reason why they bought two ARM chipmakers over the past three years, with the technology turning up in iPods, iPhones and iPads.

Now, Apple is said to be well on the way to merging its two operating systems—the mobile world of iOS and the traditional Mac OS X–with a new custom A6 ARM chip design. According to this Appleinsider article, you can expect to see it in product by some point in 2012. Peter Misek of Wall Street analyst firm Jefferies & Co. speculates that Apple will turn out a new MacBook Air, iPad, and iPhone all running on the yet to release quad-core A6 chip. While pro-level gear like the Mac Pro desktop and MacBook Pro laptop will still use more potent Intel CPUs for now, the analyst posits that by 2016 all of these products, along with the iPad and iPhone, will be running on a single yet-to-be-designed ARM-type chipset.

If you’ve been following the ongoing battle between Apple and Adobe regarding the place of Flash on Apple’s iOS, you know that HTML 5 is the Cupertino company’s preferred app for web animation.

Of course Adobe is too savvy a company to let this simmering dispute to endanger its position as toolmaker to the creative world. This past week Adobe launched Adobe Edge, a tool to allow creators to design animated web content using a variety of standards that Apple does approve of, including HTML 5, CSS, and JavaScript. The software will coexist with Adobe Flash, and not replace it, at least initially. Edge seems especially important if Adobe expects to be a player in mobile, since Apples’ devices will probably never run Flash natively.

Click here to read Sarah Perez’s article on ReadWriteWeb.

New Cellphone Tricks

Up against fierce competition in the cellphone market from Apple and Android-based phones, Nokia continues to try lots of things to reinvent itself.

It doesn’t hurt to pair with a leading animation house either, and that’s what they did in this video. Working with UK-based Aardman Animations, Nokia charged them to create the “world’s largest stop-motion animation made with phones” which is some kind of record to shoot for, I suppose.

Shot on a beach in Wales via three Nokia N8 cellphones rigged up to a crane, video producer Sandrine Ceurstemont used ever-changing life-sized sand drawings covering some 11,000 square feet to do this simple silent narrative. Check it out on the New Scientist site here.

For those who shoot with a Canon EOS series DSLR, a new app allows you to control it via a compatible Android device over USB. There are other specifics as to which version of the phone or a Honeycomb tablet you need to pull this off at this site.

Fewer Golden Eggs

As reported by All Things Digital’s Peter Kafka and others, Time Warner Cable has a porn problem—it isn’t selling enough of the stuff these days.

Seems that even though cable companies like TWC and Comcast claim that web video (e.g. Hulu, Netflix, Apple TV) isn’t cutting into their business, their video-on-demand portion had dropped substantially over the last quarter. Reporter Kafka asked TWC CEO Glenn Britt to explain the drop; Britt revealed that there were many fewer viewers paying $10 or so for a VOD softcore video as they were now checking out XXX-rated video on the web for free. That final step to XXX rated material is something the cablers won’t touch.

A Good Deal?" />

Vimeo PRO offers users a customizable player.

Vimeo has made its name by offering free and low-cost streaming to semi-professional video producers to host their online video files since 2004. But anyone running a small business and wanting to monetize their video was out of luck: Vimeo’s site guidelines prevent advertising or other money making activities that would disrupt the community of video lovers the company has carefully tended all these years.

But with the launch of Vimeo PRO this past Monday, Vimeo, the IAC-subsidiary, figures it knows something about the market that no one else has bothered to address. The sweet spot? Video streaming for businesses that is simple to use and price competitive. Pegged at $199 a year, Vimeo PRO’s simple price structure includes 50GB of storage and 250,000 plays. Need more storage? You can buy it in increments of 50GB at $199 a pop. Found yourself with a viral video? It will cost you another $199 to purchase an added 100,000 viewings. That’s about as complex as the price matrix gets.

That’s a relief. Trying to figure out charges per stream delivered—which is how most streaming services describe their prices—is a rather opaque metric for most of us running a small business. KISS (keep it simple, stupid) rules.

That’s just what Dae Mellencamp, Vimeo’s General Manager, stated in a press release: “Until now, quality video hosting has been expensive, confusing, and extremely difficult for a small business owner to understand. Small businesses have fallen between the cracks of free video services and massive enterprise video solutions.”

Brightcove, one of the leading video streaming suppliers, pegs its lowest cost offering at $99 a month. At that price point, users are allowed to manage up to 50 videos playing out some 40 GB of bandwidth per month. Other services such as San Francisco-based VidCaster are coming to market too; they start at $39 a month for 10GB of storage and 50GB of bandwidth.

More costly services like Brightcove—one of the leading companies in the streaming video field—also offer extras that may or may not be important to you. For example, Brightcove offers “Live DVR” (Allows viewers to pause, rewind, review and replay live streaming video), realtime multi bitrate streaming and live event advertising (to monetize live events with advanced advertising capabilities).

Vimeo PRO offers customization and logo presentation for small businesses.

Vimeo PRO isn’t some bare bones offering either. Besides the exceptional video quality the company has been known for, other features include customizable Portfolio websites, extensive video player customization, Video Review Pages, advanced statistics, social media sharing and broad privacy settings.

Production companies will be able to create many separate portfolios and share rough cuts with clients, while other small businesses will find some of the related capabilities useful for their particular needs.

To get a better idea of how streaming video charges stack up, you can check this page at CyberTech Media Group. The company, which is itself a provider of streaming video services, tears down pricing structures to come up with some interesting facts. If you accept their reasoning and figures, they make the very compelling statement that “if less than 1,000 minutes of video will be watched from your web site per day, you probably don’t need to pay for additional hosting for your streaming video.” If this is the case, CyberTech states that you should just use your current ISP.

Of course that still means you will have to know how to place video on your ISPs server and install a player on your website, which a service like Vimeo PRO makes about as simple as possible to do. You’ll have to decide for yourself the best method for your particular situation.

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