Marvel Style Animatic

Acme Corporation are at the leading edge of their industry and have recently appointed a CPO to the board. Within the organisation, opinion is split. What's in store for the new CPO? Find out in this episode of CPO Agenda... 

Dreambase Studios were commissioned to produce a series of Marvel style animatic clips based on characters created by the companies creative director, Tim Carrier. "The videos produced by Dreambase Studios have really helped us to get our message across in an entertaining way. We really like what they have done with our storyboard and especially love the sound design and score that accompanies the video. We've already played the HD clip at a few conferences which went down very well indeed. Dreambase Studios also helped us with our social network presence and created a YouTube channel for future content too. It's a bit of fun with a very important message that is a little different from most of the other promotional marketing videos out there. We aim to produce a further 3 clips over the coming months and look forward to working with Dreambase on future projects."

Coffin Fit - Teaser Trailer: Behind the Scenes PT1

'Coffin Fit' was originally a short story that formed part of a horror anthology, written by award-winning director, David Hawk ('Special Delivery', 2010). The story was written with the lead character as both the protagonist and the antagonist to see if its possible to sympathise and be horrified at the same time.

The 'Behind the Scenes - Montage' clip was produced by Dreambase Studios who provided filming, edit and score. Dreambase Studios are providing sound post production for the teaser trailer and short film that will be shot over the summer.

ADR Session for Pleasure Droid 3000

Last weekend saw Dreambase Studios recording an ADR session for new high-profile short film, 'Pleasure Droid 3000'. The film is produced and directed by Oliver Purches and was written by Stephen Scott-Hayward. Set in the near future this sci-fi comedy is about a guy who takes his robot girlfriend back to the shop were he bought her, complaining that he bought the 'pleasure model', but his robot is acting like a real woman! The film is cast with James Harrison, Richard Cambridge, and Jessica-Jane Clements, star of BBC series 'The Real Hustle'. Pictured from L-R are: James Harrison, Jessica-Jane Clements, Stephen Scott-Hayward, Kate Timmons and Oliver Purches.

For those not familiar with the term, ADR stands for Automatic Dialogue Replacment or Additional Dialogue Recording, and happens when production dialogue recorded when the cameras were rolling is unsuitable for the final version of the film, perhaps because there was too much background interference for instance.

Buffalo Black and Asian Film Festival

The film Our Time Alone, directed by Gurchetan Singh and produced by Hank Starrs came runner up as Best Short film at the Buffalo Black and Asian Film Festival, held at the Battersea Arts Centre on 6th June. The festival presents the very best of Black and Asian short films and is attended by development executives from Channel 4, BBC Drama, UKFC, Miramax and Working Title, amongst other media professionals.

Dreambase Studios provided sound design and mix for the film, which has been consistently well received at all screenings. Watch the trailer for the film here.

Classic Car Event

Over 40 classic cars and motorbikes parked around the town hall on Saturday 5th June for the 'Brilliant Bassett' event organised by volunteers from the Wootton Bassett Chamber of Commerce.

Visitors wandered amongst a variety of vintage cars including a 1935 Austin 7, 1951 Daimler, 1963 Humber Super Snipe, 1966 Mini Riley, replica AC Cobra, a range of MG’s, as well as more modern classics such as a Ferrari 348 Spider and Morgan Areo 8. Additional motorbikes were also welcomed along this year, including Royal Enfield and Douglas motorcycles, and a 1917 Alldays & Onions which has been in the owner’s family from new.

You can see the little video we made for the Chamber website here, which includes one of our music tracks.

School Celebrates St. George's Day!

We filmed 450 children at a local school over a 1 hour period from 40ft crane to create a short film displaying the children make up the coast of GB using the EX1 time-lapse function.

["The film is fab", Terri Menham - Headteacher, Red Oaks Primary School]

RED ONE Workflow

Lighting cameraman David Read provides a comprehensive Red Camera package plus the services of a talented and experienced cinematographer with over twenty years in the business.

“The idea behind the RED camera system is simple. Design and build a high performance digital cine camera with the quality of 35mm film and convenience of pure digital. RED delivers unmatched image quality with no recording system limitations.” - taken from www.red.com

David visited our studios for the day to test the RED ONE workflow with Final Cut Pro 7 in our HD edit suite. After setting up a few shots, making full use of David's knowledge and lighting, we then ingested the footage via firewire 800 using the RED drive RAID and FCS 3 Installer that Provides native REDCODE media (R3D) support for Final Cut Pro and Color. Includes: RED QuickTime Codec (v3.8.0), Log and Transfer (v20.0.0), REDCODE plugin for Color (v2.9), and Final Cut Studio RED workflow whitepaper. Note: Supports RED ONE cameras up through Build 20.

The results were stunning, working in ProRes 4:4:4:4 was not an issue for FCP7, we could easily edit multiple HD streams using our G|RAID's and had no issues streaming HD direct from our RAID5 server to HD Plasma for client screenings. The 2k stills were impressive and the detail when grading in colour and zoom in motion was impressive to say the least.

A Young Film Student With Ideas

Alex Neville approached our studios for a weeks work experience in post production. He's in his second year of studying BA(Hons) Digital Film Production at the University of Gloucestershire and has worked on around 10 short student films over the last few years. His most recent documentaries are: "King Cone" and "Laundrette" which were well received.

We have many innovative project ideas and decided that we would complete one of our projects within the week Alex was at the studios (as well as completing the wiring of the ADR/foley booth.) Shooting all the scenes with the EX1, we completed a rough edit and bounced a ProRes version across the network to the 5.1 audio suite where Alex really got stuck into the sound design, recording ADR/Foley and mix. After colour correcting, he rendered out the short film which was demonstrated to a local special needs school and received some fantastic feedback.

"I just wanted to thank you again for having me down last week. On reflection I think I learned a lot and had a great time in the process. I will defiantly keep in touch and I would love to come and visit again in the future." [Alex Neville - Student, Digital Film Production, Gloucester University]

Magic Mathworks Travelling Circus

The Magic Mathworks is a travelling hands-on maths exhibition for schools, museums and discovery centres. This touring maths lab demonstrates and explores a multisensory approach to the learning of mathematics based on the Multiple Embodiment Principle of Z P Dienes.

As part of an on-going project with a local school, we are filmng a series of events that will be used to promote and highlight the ethos of the school for the interest of new parents and governing bodies.

Change Your World

Sustrans is the UK's leading sustainable transport charity. Change Your World is an annual campaign run by Sustrans which invites people across the UK to swap just one car trip during the first week of July and to walk, cycle, take public transport or car-share instead.

Sustainable transport charity Sustrans were delighted with the results of their project with Dreambase Studios:

"Mark and his team came in at very short notice, quickly grasped our concept and worked at breakneck speed to produce a short promotional film. We instantly felt we were in safe hands with people who were happy to work with our ideas and blend with their own creative thoughts and experience to get the finished product. Their enthusiasm and commitment exceeded our expectations and made them a pleasure to work with." [Gill Harrison, Sustrans Press and PR Manager]

Filming is 'The Dogs' at Lucy Pet Carer

Lucy Pet Carer is growing and expanding every year to meet new clients demands and have now relocated to new premises as a more intimate family business set in a 3 half acre estate overlooking the countryside around Wootton Bassett. Providing professional service to clients who want peace of mind when they're away from their pets. They offer free range play and boarding, no kennelling. They also have cat and rabbit hotel facilities!

Dreambase Studios produced a promotional video for the business to add to the website as a follow up to the annual Doggie Christmas Party held at the facility. The content was shot on our EX1 and both operator and equipment got very muddy! And they say never work with children or animals...

The Fire Service College

The Fire Gateway is a web portal which has been developed to allow businesses and the general public to access, and interact with, an array of fire-related services on-line. The Fire Service College are the responsible body for the Fire Gateway. Nomos Media were responsible for providing a full-time 1st line support function for the Gateway, for providing an interface between the public and all 44 Fire and Rescue Services in England, for managing all 3rd party suppliers and contracts and for designing and managing all developments across the Portal.

We provided Nomos with a short testimonial for use at trade shows and events. Nomos, being a web technologies organisation specialising in the production of provision of internet based services filmed the content on the Canon 7D and provided the footage on hard drive. We ingested, transcoded and creatively edited the footage to a 3 minute video and delivered on both HD and SD.

Picture courtesy of Fire Service College

Greek TV Commercial

WIND Hellas is today one of Greece’s largest telecommunications operators with an annual turnover of €1,26 billion for 2008 and more than 6 million customers in mobile and fixed telephony as well as in broadband services.

We were asked to provide recordings for this Greek TV commercial by our friends at DNA Labs which aired in Greece throughout the month of December. They approached us in the final hour, requesting a recording of English children singing the traditional "1-2 Buckle My Shoe" rhyme. We managed to turn the recording around the same day and deliver via our FTP account, an edited recording the next day. The guys at DNA Labs did a wonderful job with sound on the final commercial.

"The client was super happy with the latest version, thanks a lot" [George Lowtronik Ramantanis, Mixer/Sound Designer DNA Labs, Greece]

Wootton Bassett Repatriation

A grey mist hung over the market town of Wootton Bassett and seemed to match the mood of the people who lined the High Street. Click here to read the full article:

Filming this particular repatriation, the plan was to turn around a newscast edit in the same day using Sony's EX1 tapeless workflow. We were able to work quickly and efficiently ingesting the XDCAM clips into the workstation and edit seamlessly. We also discovered a neat little add-on for the firefox browser that allows you to capture flash content from websites such as YouTube. We used the Flash Video Resources add-on to capture some stock footage for the newscast. We then up-scaled the footage to HD using MPEG Streamclip which worked well.

Ubisoft: Assassin's Creed II

Ubisoft is a leading international developer, publisher and distributor of interactive entertainment products.

Dolby approached Dreambase Studios for the editing of elements and HD title overlays of Ubisoft's 'Assassin's Creed' demo pod at the IFA consumer electronics show. (A showcase for innovation and the technology of tomorrow.)

Picture courtesy of Ubisoft Entertainment.

Radio In Schools

Radio In Schools is an independent, not for profit organisation. It offers a safe podcasting platform to allow schools, children and a new generation of listeners to get their voice heard in their own communities.

Dreambase Studios provided 100% post production creating a promotional video for the nationwide launch of Radio In Schools. A high definition version was used at trade shows and a standard definition version for the Radio In Schools website. We provided video capture, ingest, upscaling, transcoding and editing as well as sound design, mix and music composition delivered to a very tight schedule. The promo can be viewed in full on Dreambase Studios' Vimeo and YouTube channels.

"I love the ident, sounding fantastic and really like the direction of it." [Melissa Thom - Director, Radio In Schools]

Picture courtesy of Radio In Schools.