PentaVision's "What's Your Story?" Blog

Picture if you will, a great orchestra tuning up before a big performance. Musicians on strings, woodwinds, percussion and various types of brass instruments all playing different notes, warm up scales, random sounds and all of them playing at different tempos. We’ve all heard this “acoustic cacophony” before the beginning of a concert performance or some other show we’ve gone to see. Now enter one person, the one person who brings this disorganized group together, grabs their attention, quiets the commotion and ultimately gets this collection of talented musicians to perform beautiful music together as one team. That one person is the orchestra conductor. Now imagine preparing for a video production. Read the rest of this entry →

Awhile ago I wrote a Post-Production article about The Art of Motion Graphics. In it I discussed the attention grabbing power of animated graphics in video. Isn’t it time then, for a little visual aid? Recently I put together a simple motion graphics reel for a potential PentaVision client who wanted to see what I was capable of. I present that to you here (it’s important to note that several of these clips come from personal projects, past employers and other ghosts from the past):

Extra special thanks to Jonn Swihart for lending us an original music track to cut this to.

Have you ever been to a movie theater where the projectionist didn’t have the sound up loud enough?

Or have you ever tried to watch a movie that you really wanted to see with a talkative group of friends?

What about those times when you’ve sat in an airport terminal watching some news show on a television that was muted?

It can be pretty hard to keep the attention of a viewer when your video has audio problems. When audio is cut correctly in post production, no one notices. When audio is incorrectly cut, no one will notice anything else. Read the rest of this entry →

In case you haven’t heard, video files can take up a ton of space.

Depending on how long it is, an uncompressed (or raw) version of your video can take up anywhere between one to 100 gigs of storage space on a hard drive. Space like that is usually a hot commodity, and the time needed to transfer files that large between computers/clients is even hotter. And forget about putting a video that large on the web. Only the most patient (read: crazy) viewers will stick around long enough to watch your video if its intended to be watched in its uncompressed form from the web. Read the rest of this entry →

So your video has been budgeted, shot and edited. Only one more ingredient needs to be added before it can be proudly displayed:

Graphics.

Read the rest of this entry →

Your pre-planning is done, footage is shot, and the interviews are over. Now what?

It is at this point that everything begins to come together.

Searching for the most appropriate and interesting shots, the producer will begin to sort and log the previously shot footage. Read the rest of this entry →