Most Recent Blog Entries
Production Attic 2.0
We celebrated our 2nd birthday recently. The 27th of April marked the beginning of our third year as an incorporated company and, as is generally the case around such occasions, I found myself looking back over the past two years of our company.
We’ve changed a lot since our inception. When we began Production Attic our aim was to be a very general video production company. We would cover weddings, music videos, corporate and promotional. It was only as time went on, and we gained experience, that we began to specialise. Our company became less general as we moved away from a vaguely defined set of services, and instead focused on becoming a company that offered video production and media communication services; bespoke video solutions to the needs of modern businesses.
Filming 30 Seconds Apart, our award-winning entry into the Glasgow 48 Hour Film Project
Something we have recognised over the past two years is that more and more businesses are in the position that video is no longer a luxury, but a necessity. In both the public and private sector, it is becoming clearer that video offers a clarity in communication that many other mediums do not offer.
The reason that I had titled this blog post “Production Attic 2.0” is because we are moving swiftly into the next stage of our business (and also because I've just been watching Aaron Sorkin's The Newsroom). During our first two years we built a strong client base which we have been expanding ever since. This has allowed us to upgrade our post-production facilities, and to invest in new equipment that helped us to continue offering a cinematic look to our work.
Filming Black Magic for Young Lovers, our first short film on the Blackmagic Cinema Camera
Recently, again, we invested in emerging technology that could change the face of commercial video production. As early adopters of the Blackmagic Design Cinema Camera, we were some of the first in the UK to get our hands on one; an affordable camera that offers 2.5k RAW video. For all non-techies, that essentially means that we can shoot for cinema screens. This puts us in a position that we are ready to face the needs of our clients, and of the online community, as online video becomes a larger part of the way businesses communicate.
The main point is, though, that as we move into the third year of Production Attic, we are also moving into the next phase of our company which will be rolled out over the coming months. With new kit, a new direction and an upcoming re-branding, we are set to take on all the challenges of our third year.
Production Attic meet and film the First Minister of Scotland, Alex Salmond
Already we have identified markets we intend to move into, and have recommitted ourselves to producing our own creative content as regularly as we can. We’ve been working on some large projects too that, while I cannot say what they are yet, I can promise that you’ll be hearing about soon. I can speak for myself, and the rest of the Attic, when I say that we are looking forward to the coming year and everything that it will bring.
Thanks for taking the time to follow the progress of our company, and thank you to all our followers for your support! If you're feeling nostalgic, have a look at our YouTube channel and some of our work from over the last two years.
"Black Magic for Young Lovers" Production Stills
About a month ago now, the Production Attic team headed down to the village of Warenford to shoot our latest short film, Black Magic for Young Lover. This short film is of special note, as it is the first piece of creative work that we have shot on our new Blackmagic Cinema Camera.
During the three day shoot we caught a bunch of production stills of us working. We had rented a monitor, tracks and lighting kit for the shoot, so a few of the images came out looking pretty impressive.
Shooting a moving car scene at night.
The shoot was a success and we’ve been working on post-production since we returned. Since then we had been slowly releasing the production stills from the set. All the pictures are now available online on our Facebook page.
Matt directing a scene being filmed on our Blackmagic Cinema Camera.
We also released a little piece of behind-the-scenes footage. For one scene we required football to be on in the background of the action. Rather than pay for stock footage of a football match, we decided to shoot our own football punditry.
The catch was that none of use know anything about football. We enlisted the help of one of our writers to create a short script that we could run through. You can watch that here!
Filming with the chinaball.
We’re expecting to have completed all post-production work by the end of May. If you want to be kept up to date, you can head over to our Facebook page and like us to receive updates on upcoming screenshots and information relating to the film, and of course, updates about our company and work.
You can see the rest of our production still on our Facebook page, so click here to head over there now!
Blackmagic Cinema Camera First Footage
Today we received a Seagate Goflex Thunderbolt adapter.
Seagate Thunderbolt Sata Adapter
This allows us to slap an SSD from the Blackmagic Cinema Camera straight into our iMac. Which is a lot quicker than what we had previously been doing, which was cutting the power, ripping open Laura's computer, connecting the drive internally, putting everything back, and turning the power back on.
The Goflex system is supposed to use Seagate's own drives, but just so happens to work with the majority of other 2.5 inch solid state drives. I superglued some rubber onto the surface of the dock as our drives are slightly too thin for it and could potentially bend the connection pins over time.
Hence, we have uploaded some footage from today. It's nothing out of the ordinary. Some pet footage and some city shots. We've thrown in a shot with massive dynamic range, just to show how well this camera copes with large amounts of contrast. We managed to get almost the whole DR covered in one frame, but that's pretty tough to do on such a wide lens with all the flare. The next week will be great fun, being able to look back on the footage through resolve is really essential to understand how this camera reacts to light. I'm still getting my head round how I want to expose it. Thinking we're going to need some bigger lights...
Blackmagic Cinema Camera Scotland test footage
Follow us on twitter and facebook, or join our mailing list, and you'll get to see all of our content as soon as we release it!
© Production Attic LTD 2012