Archive for July, 2008

Well, amazingly, this week we have had a few extremely great meetings with people making, or planning to make feature films.

These talented folk have some great ideas, and would like their films to feature 3D animation and visual effects – but they DO NOT want to go to London to achieve this.

Excellent – are people starting to hear the drum we have been banging for 4 years now??!!

We can’t say much more because, well obviously, these things have to remain secret and under wraps, if only to make you people desperate to hear more. You… do… want to hear more, right??

Good! Well, hopefully Eight Eyed Sea Bass will be working on these projects and who knows (God-willing), get some recognition for Birmingham.

Wouldn’t that make a nice change?

Simon Woods, lover of all plays historic, put his heart (and for a while, his life) into creating a feature film of a play from the 1500s, called The Mandrake Root.

The project which was filmed in Sardinia last year, on HDCAM, finally was completed a little earlier this year.

However, Simon, with whom we have worked on a few DVD titles in the past, came to us for the authoring of his DVD which would be used for retail.

Having described our proposal to him of what we would do to give the menus their full context and life, he gave us the go ahead simply saying “I trust you guys – I’m sure it’ll be fine!”.

The disc contained menus leading directly to chapter points, to info about Simon’s company – European Drama Network, and to choose between English or Italian subtitles.

When approving the work that had been done, Simon did comment that the picture quality of the video was so much better than what other people had done for him in other ‘quick’ versions of the film. Well, we don’t use an encoder formerly exclusively licensed to Sony of Japan for nothing…

The completed DVDs are being shipped directly to Sardinia for their launch in early August.

Below is a sample of the main menu, and a clip from the films – used with Simon’s kind permission.

Good luck Simon – hope everybody buys a copy!
Anyway, everybody please visit http://www.europeandrama.net/

Today was the second day of filming for BCU (Birmingham City University). Once more we filmed numerous interviews in front of a green screen in HD.

Edit work has already begun, and the green screen removed very quickly with our real-time HD chromakeying we have here.

It is looking like the finished project wil be delivered on DVD around the end of August or so. That’s good then.

No doubt we’ll sling it up here when the times comes.

Keep well, all.

There are numerous things going on here at the moment, but one we just sorted was for our chums over at The Gyst was a quick revamp of a promo video for Ducati.

The motorcycle-making Italian firm wanted 1,000 DVDs to be replicated with this altered video, specifically for their Manchester dealer, for use at an event.

So that’s precisely what we sorted out. To the client’s surprise, the discs even turned up a day earlie than scheduled.

How’s that for service?!