As December dwindles down, there have been some great notes to play us out. We’ve had a couple of photos at local shows including the wonderful mashup of Tartufi at the the SF APA Something Personal show and the overhead shot of Alexis and Angela on the bed at Smashbox FACE/OFF. Tartufi vs. Road Demons is already hanging at the studio for local viewing pleasure.
The Day We Stopped hangs at Smashbox for the rest of the month before heading to their sister studio in Boston for the month of January.
The studio has also been becoming popular. The month of December has seemed to be an uptick in production for the local community, and quite a number of bookings for the studio. What I was thinking would be a quiet time to focus on organization and optimization has become purely management. The workflow has seemed to mostly equalized and we continue to make tweaks to improve everyone’s experience. One change has been to incorporate all of the stage grip that is open and available into the rental. It makes the management easier and helps the productions with any missing grip that could quickly solve problems. That means it needs to be a bit more accessible and complete — number one purchase will be a new slew of c-stands and subtract the non-working and non-standardized amalgamation that currently is on standby. This comes at a cost — a slight increase to our prices (but that was due anyway).
Our work has seen the close to a couple of projects that were due to finish. Not everything has moved off our plate, but some key pieces are done. We enjoyed an initial project with Y&R that served as a work up was well handled and hopes to see repeat business in 2011. A music video that was a pickup project had it’s final pass and awaits delivery specs. And we put a new segment of Up To No Good (our creepy kids, now with more baby heads) in the can … look for that next year. And our year-end reassessment has us confident in how we’ve shaped our portfolio, and focused on our future of where we’d like to see our work progress in the new year. A large part will be on commercial work, developing and honing specific pieces and pushing our other work toward our heart space. There’s a larger venture that we’re looking to undertake — it should be a ton of fun, but I’ll talk about that when it gets off the ground.
This also looks to be another year where the tech will change. I see a number of new cameras coming in and that means more (and better this time) options for doing acquisition. On the low end the Panasonic AG-AF100 is shipping and the Sony F3 is following soon. Both seem to put the last nail in the coffin of the 35mm adapter genre. The D7000 is out and labeled camera of the year as Nikon’s dSRL with video option. The Alexa is in full stride and we’re seeing custom Epics being hand machined at Red with regular options coming later this year. I’m hoping Red’s second go will have a bit better form factor for handling on set. With these new options, I hope to see less 5DmkII on set as while they do work, they are also don’t really fit into the complete production puzzle. A complete approach means less headaches and a better experience for folks visit to the stage (or on our set), and that means more business.
So thanks 2010 and welcome 2011. I hope to see more and do more with all of you as we strive to make really cool work. I’ll try and keep it a bit more updated as we go along.
