Finally!
Hearken Creative now is shooting in HD on a Canon 7d camera. We have several lenses and filters, and can make your next project shine, whether for the big screen, the small screen, or even a web screen.
Additionally, not only can we do full-blown ProTools audio for location sound, but we now have a small Zoom H4N 4-channel audio recorder for interviews, small cast shoots, and field recording. Put the two pieces together, and you have a wonderfully small setup for mobile filming!
Call us to discuss your next video/film project.
Q4 of 2009 has seen a number of wonderful projects wrap up and get distributed.
Winnetka Story is a feature-length documentary about the history of Winnetka and the North Shore area, outside of Chicago. Once again I worked with the wonderful John Newcombe, with whom we authored the DVD for Rancho La Cañada: Then and Now a few years ago. Hearken Creative did all of the DVD authoring and DVD menu design, as well as managing the production for the packaging.
Servant Partners launched several new videos prior to the Urbana missions convention that Hearken Creative produced. Most of the interview footage was interviewed and shot by Loren A. Roberts, with video from around the world provided to us by Servant Partners in various formats. HCS brought it all together and turned it into several promotional videos, for use both online as well as looping on plasmas in the organization’s booth at the 20,000-person convention. In addition, HCS authored the DVD, designed DVD menus, and duplicated copies of the DVD for all staff members. Below is one of the four videos produced:
And finally, Dave Schultze of Schultzeworks created a video promoting a computer design that he calls the “Philco PC,” an homage to the Philco Predicta television set from the 1950′s. I was able to work with Dave, consulting on camera movement, editing, and pacing for the video (Dave occupies my old office space, and we have become good friends over the past few years). We were stunned at the response after releasing the video: Vimeo shows that it has close to 100k views of the video, the design has been featured on EnGadget and the NY Times, and Dave has received calls from news outlets and potential clients. This was a great collaboration for us, and HCS looks forward to consulting in the future for other friends and clients! See the video below:
http://www.vimeo.com/7951005
There are many changes coming to Hearken Creative in the new year, but the one thing that will not change is our passion and dedication to making our clients look awesome, bringing creative and powerful solutions to the world of advertising design and corporate video.
It’s been a really long time since I’ve posted here, so this will cover a few things.
First, posting images to iStockphoto has been going well. Now, I just need to start making more money from them. Here are a few recent uploads:
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So is the economy up or down? I don’t think anyone can decide. Even Wall Street was bipolar this past week — way up one day and way down the next. We are considering ways to drastically cut expenses for the company, like moving to a smaller office and using fewer computers, or even temporarily closing the post-production side of the business (entertainment industry has been hit hard). But, on the other hand, I added more job numbers to my jobs list this week than I have in recent memory, and completed several large projects as well. So I’m feeling cautiously hopeful, at least in the short term.
While we’re talking about the business, I found an elegant little program called TimeTagger for tracking my time spent on projects throughout the workday. It’s going to help me track profitability much better than I have been able to previously.
And, in the “covet” department, I’m really wanting a Canon 7D. Great photography and HD filmmaking at multiple frame rates, with lots of upsides. Expensive, but possibly worth it. We’re not ready financially to make a big purchase like this, but if the right project comes along, this is the one that I would purchase right now. If you want to buy it for me, the link is here
…thanks!
StudioDaily reports today that Panasonic is releasing a new, cheaper line of P2 memory cards for their video cameras. The P2 is a card, kinda like an SD or CompactFlash, but bigger. It does away with tapes in the production workflow, and, more importantly, can completely eliminate the “capture” process (where you have to play the tape back off of a deck to ingest the footage into the computer) — instead, you just dump the video files over from the P2 card onto the computer!
P2 cards originally were as expensive or more expensive than the cameras, making them prohibitively expensive. But with this new announcement, it looks like Panasonic is truly trying to carve out a niche for this technology. One of the cameras I am interested in is an HVX200, and the price-cut in P2 cards makes this option even more lucrative.
I wonder what will happen with Panasonic and Sony and Canon when Red releases its incredible Red Scarlet camera? It completely bypasses tapes or cards, and works direct to hard drive (I believe), and has a higher resolution than most of the current offerings.
So maybe there is a silver lining to not being able to buy a new camera just yet: there will be several new offerings by the time we are ready to acquire some new equipment…
This newsletter was produced quarterly for almost a decade. The Banning Residence Museum (I didn’t do the website!) has a fabulous collection of early California art, artifacts, and household items. We created this newsletter to highlight both the collection and the important educational work the Museum was doing.
— Details: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 —
We had a lot of fun with this account. Professional photography was shot of individual pieces, as well as photos taken at Museum events. The extra-large tabloid format of the newsletter made for a great read and good presence when it showed up in the mail.
http://www.vimeo.com/4604196
Buddy Zapata is a good friend, a great collaborator, and one helluva musician. We took a few cameras over to Beantown in Sierra Madre, set up, and let Buddy play for a few hours. It was a magical evening. Not only have we filmed him, but
- Hearken Creative built the Buddy Zapata website,
- Mr. Zapata collaborated with Loren A. Roberts on The Fair Trade soundtrack, and
- we’re now working on some new material for the upcoming Buddy Zapata album.
Pretty cool? Yes, but even more so when your business colleagues become some great friends in the process.
See more Buddy Zapata music clips here!
So I’m doing a lot more music recording these days. And one of my favorite tools is a wonderful little program called Auto-Tune, which, if used correctly, does exactly what its name implies: automatically pull a note that is out-of-tune back to perfect pitch. Let’s say there’s one note out of a whole phrase that’s a bit off-pitch: why re-record the whole verse for that one note? I just punch-in the plug for that one note, and we’re back in business. [TIME did an article on Auto-Tune, and the company has its own
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so you can hear how the program works.]
I do the same thing with Photoshop a lot right now because I am now selling stock on iStockphoto. They need every photo submitted to be as close to perfect as possible, so I go in and “airbrush” all the little imperfections out, creating (hopefully) a more marketable/usable photo.
But I’m also conflicted. Overuse of Auto-Tune turns out lifeless vocals. And I love to “grunge” up my graphic design work, when the project calls for it. Imperfections are what make things human, and removing all of the human element isn’t always a good thing.
That said, I will never throw the tool out [like these people want to, or here’s Neko Case complaining about Auto-Tune towards the end of the interview, or these studio engineers who are as conflicted about using it as I am). If I can use it when needed but make it practically invisible, and then not use it when we have the time to get it right, then I think everything will be okay.
But taking the time to get things right is another concept that is dying right now — budgets are way too tight to actually try to do something right. So I work overtime even when the client isn’t paying for it, just so that I can be happy with the final result. Unfortunately, that cuts into the time that I’m supposed to be recording…
SEO by the Sea has a nifty little post about a patent approval Google just received for a data-center that could be located offshore, and maybe even powered by waves, or wind, or solar. Pretty cool, no?
Now bandwidth issues are sure to be the immediate issue that comes up: how to get data to and from an offshore center? But knowing Google they are already working on that. And it’s nice to see that they are thinking way ahead of most companies.
I heard an NPR story this morning on power companies nationwide, and the struggle internally between “simply keeping the lights on” and innovation. They are charged with keeping everything running, but must try and look forward to when their grids will be more distributed and, possibly, less dependent on coal and oil.
Similarly, Google runs a good portion of the internet. What would life be without Google, YouTube, etc., even for one day? So they have to keep the lights on. But if they don’t innovate — on many fronts simultaneously — their prominence in the marketplace will be quickly dwarfed by those who can seize the opportunity.
I wonder what lessons my company can take from these musings on innovation?
In my ever-expanding quest for synergy between all media, Hearken Creative is now selling stock photography (mostly scenics) through iStockPhoto. This company has a wonderful business model, and was so successful that they were eventually bought by Getty Images (probably because iStock was taking away all their business).
So check out all of my photos — new ones are being added every week — and please purchase them if you need for design projects!
Over the years, we have done literally thousands of projects for lots and lots of clients. And most of those didn’t make it into the portfolio. That loss is your gain, because now I can pull some of them out and show them off one at a time here on the blog.
This first one is a postcard that I did for Salvation Army Southern California. They needed a hip, active look for their “Army of Stars” campaign. I designed a style and look, and then built postcards, newsletters, letterheads, and all matter of materials that the could use to communicate with the Hollywood community (here’s the front cover of the newsletter).
What I remember about this project is how quick the turnaround was, and how important it was to establish an identity for the Army of Stars program. We were successful beyond our wildest dreams, and were able to introduce a whole new generation of Hollywood stars to the joy of serving in the Salvation Army.
Flickr Photos
