flanders

Broadcast Finishing for Bank of America

We pride ourselves on a being a nimble production outfit capable of shepherding a project from planning to premiere, whether that means web, tv, or theatrical. Recently, we worked on a series of mini documentaries for Bank of America with our friends over at ib5k. The documentaries were part of an overarching web campaign called the Opportunity Effect. The campaign showcases people involved with good causes made possible with the banks help.

This post is to spotlight three of those videos, specifically the three that aired as TV spots on Plum TV. We delivered dozens of finished videos for the project, but because these spots were destined for television broadcast, they required a slightly different finishing workflow with an eye towards broadcast standards. That gave us the opportunity to give them a little more love from a color grading stand point as well, and we were excited to do so.

We performed both the broadcast finishing and color grading of these spots on our new MacPro 12 Core using Final Cut Pro 7 and a 17 inch Flanders Scientific broadcast monitor.

mayorbooker

Redford Center: Cory Booker Art of Activism

On November 11th we had the honor of covering the Redford Center’s annual Art of Activism Event at the Sundance Kabuki Cinema in San Francisco. This years guest of honor was Newark, New Jersey Mayor Cory Booker. You might be familiar with Mayor Booker from his many television appearances, or from the excellent documentary film Street Fight. (If you haven’t seen that film, definitely check it out.)

YouTube Preview Image

The video posted above is Mayor Bookers talk, moderated by Lee Bycel in it’s entirety. Give it a listen. Here’s the description from Redford Center’s Vimeo page:

“The Redford Center’s November 2010 Art of Activism program featured Newark, New Jersey Mayor, and star of the Emmy-nominated TV show Brick City, Cory Booker. One of four shorts from his interview with Executive Director Lee Bycel, Cory discusses why crazy people sometimes make the best leaders.”

Look out for more excerpts from the night in the next few days.

Credits:
Producer/ Director: Jeremey Lavoi
Camera: Abby Berendt Lavoi, Whit Scott, Ben Youngerman
Production Tech: Cory Boldt
Audio Engineer: Jeffrey Kane
Production Assistant: Angelo Hjelm

Toad and Salmon's Chili Bowl Cook-Off 2009 ESPN version

Toad & Salmon’s Chili Bowl Cookoff

Produced for ESPN.com Shot by Jeremey Lavoi & Abby Berendt Lavoi Edited by Jeremey Lavoi

Royalty Free Music

I want my Royalty Free Music

If you’ve ever worked on a video or film project, then you’ve probably run up against the wonderful world of music licensing. Filmmakers need awesome music for their work. A good track can make a decent project great, and a bad track can make a good project suck. Unfortunately licensing music is expensive, and can be a huge pain in the ass. And if you’re thinking about doing it renegade style, and going license free, expect a cease and desist (or even a lawsuit) from the whiny music industry. At the very least YouTube will probably strip your audio track and that is major bummer.

So what do you do if you have a masochistic obsession with music cue sheets, and/or you absolutely must obtain legal rights to your tracks, BUT you’re not swimming Scrooge McDuck style in a pool of Ad Agency gold coins?


Well TeamJaded has some answers.

Quick Reference of Stock Music Sites (Full write up below):

We’ve worked on projects ranging from television news documentaries to web 2.0 (3.0?) interactive hybrid videos, and our clients generally have one thing in common… free lunch syndrome. Everybody wants awesome video and audio, but nobody wants to cough up the cash to pay for it. We’re just as guilty with personal projects. We want the rad, but we just don’t have the funds to license 36 Chambers.

With that in mind we’d like to present to you, dear reader, with some of TeamJaded’s solutions for Royalty Free Music. We encourage you to explore them, and if you have better solutions, please send them our way. We need them.

The cheap and dirty way to get free music is to just make it yourself, DIY style. If you read our blog than you know we’re DIY evangelists. Theoretically, you could use Garageband, Soundtrack Pro, Logic Pro, or any number of other software programs, not to mention playing a freaking instrument to score your own films, but we wouldn’t know, we’re not musicians. In this one instance we’re going to distance our selves from DIY.

Why should you make the music anyway? If you’re like us, you probably already Produced, Directed, and Shot the project. Now you’re staring down a Final Cut Project that you’re going to edit, and you’re thinking, “maybe there was something to that old media division of labor thing. This one man band draws the line at actually being the band.” We’re with you.

This is the moment to sucker… we mean gently ask a friend who is musically inclined to score your project for you… for free… ok for beer, but no credit… ok, beer and credit… fine. This is the model favored by our friend Whit Scott who often uses his friend Carl Atilano for scoring video projects. If you do sucker… convince one of your friends to score your project, the relationship doesn’t need to be one sided. Exposure in a popular film can be a great way for musicians to get their name out. We’ve often snuck our friends Mothership into projects for exactly that reason. (Kinda like we’re doing right now.)

If you don’t have any friends, a clever way to get free music is to design your project around a particular song, band, or music scene. That way the artists volunteer their tracks. On that same note, you could produce a project that is near and dear to a group of musicians, which has almost the same effect. This model is working well for our friend Pete Koff on his project Supercharged, the Life and Times of Tim Brauch. So many Bay Area musicians were friends with Tim that they are lining up to donate music to Pete’s documentary.

Another option is MySpace Music. We’re sure that just reading the words MySpace practically sends you into a seizure imagining all those custom pages. We all know what sucks about MySpace. The signal to noise ratio is terrible. If you’re searching for artists to work with, rather than bands to listen to, then the search function is pretty much worthless. Sometimes, you can’t even listen to an artists tracks because their page is peppered with annoying comments and apps that are spewing audio of their own, and you simply can’t track them all down to turn them off… You could end up dealing with some clueless sixteen-year-old kid in Kansas, or even worse his mom. Unless you want to screen capture the track, you’re going to be at their mercy to send you a high quality file. Then you’ll probably have to deal with an ever-growing list of insane demands like gold doubloons, or even producer credits.

On the other hand, there are thousands of bands in every genre imaginable. Some of them are good, and many of them are small or even unsigned. If you’ve got the time, you can find great tracks on a compensation scale ranging from inexpensive to just credit. If you’re really lucky you could develop a relationship with an up and coming artist that will be mutually beneficial for years to come. We’ve had some luck with MySpace, finding bands like Hightower, Hottub, and Bad Strip to work with us on a recent project.

If you denounced MySpace after you signed up to Facebook, then what you need is a Royalty Free music library.

A small library that we use is Incompetech. Kevin MacLeod produces all music on Incompetech. He offers his music for credit under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license. This site was passed to us by our friend Joey Rabier of Tech TV and Revision 3 fame. We’ve used it for projects produced for Seesmic and HarperCollins. Incompetech is easy to navigate. It’s also relatively painless to preview and then download tracks. The downside is that the even though Mr. MacLeod produces songs in a variety of styles, one man can only do so much. If you need a wide variety of music, this might not be the best solution… but it sure does work on a deadline.

The daddy of all Creative Commons libraries is CC Mixter.org. This is a substantial resource full of free music… sort of. The tricky part about using Creative Commons music is that you need to pay close attention to exactly what rights the artist is granting you. Be careful because some artists might want more than credit, some definitely want cash, and others have specific wishes about what kind of projects the track can be used in. That’s all fine and good, but you could quickly find yourself in trouble ala the MySpace episode with the kid from Kansas and his mom.

On the upside, there is a wide variety of music here, and the site is conscious of people with differing navigation styles. We love the tag cloud. As with MySpace, if you spend some time searching you can find great tracks.

We do recommend CC Mixter, but before we move on, we feel that it is necessary to leave you with one cautionary tale. Popular artists have been known to upload tracks to the site for remixing. It’s a great way for an artist to build social media cred while giving something valuable to the user community. Unfortunately it can be rather sticky for fil
mmakers looking for tracks with few strings attached, especially if you’re not familiar with the “popular” artist.

Last year we were eviscerated by the kindly folks over on the Slap Message Board for using a track in a skateboarding promo that shockingly turned out to be a remixed Linkin Park song. In our defense, we were far less familiar with the band than our knowledgeable critics who could cite the exact title of the original track… but hey, what do we know? We listen to NPR. The beat worked with the clips, the price was right… and yeah we caved and switched the track.

Another Creative Commons site is Jamendo. For our money, this is the one. We recently rediscovered Jamendo after it was first passed to Jeremey over a year ago by Loic LeMeur, the CEO of Seesmic. Seesmic was using Pump Audio (which we’ll get to in a minute) and Loic was looking for a music solution that was a little closer to free.

At the time Jeremey was pretty busy working on multiple Seesmic projects so he only gave Jamendo a quick look. He thought it was similar to CC Mixter, with way more singing in languages that aren’t English, and it was way harder to isolate instrumental tracks with the appropriate licensing conditions… so he passed. That was a mistake.

We aren’t sure if Jeremey got smarter, or if Jamendo simplified its navigation, or increased it’s user base to include bands from the United States, or all of the above, but Jamendo rocks. It’s easy to search by genre, by country of origin, and by type of license. There is an abundance of choice in the attribution category. If you need a track for commercial use you can buy a license for prices that are so affordable, we think we must be reading it wrong. The tracks are easy to preview, easy to download, and the file icons are the album covers. That’s awesome. And did we mention that the music is good. In fact, it’s just as good or better than more established (read expensive) stock music services. We highly recommend this one. Thanks Loic.

If you’re project has a budget, there are libraries geared specifically toward high-end work. The libraries we used while working for Current TV were Pump Audio, APM, and Extreme. We aren’t going to spend too much time on these, because they are definitely more expensive. If you can afford them, you probably already know about them.

Our favorite of the three is Pump Audio. Its selection is large and its ambient and hip-hop libraries are particularly useful. The navigation is solid compared to many other libraries, and you can browse it through their website or they can even send you a hard drive. As to cost, in our experience Pump is the most affordable of these three libraries. Their fees are based on the type of project, and the intended distribution platform. They’re hip to the use of quality stock music in web video, and their web license is fairly affordable. Not affordable like Jamendo, but still affordable.

If you use Pump enough, you’ll notice their songs all over television.

When that day comes that you have a significant budget, or perhaps you just have your heart set on a popular track, then a music rights group is the way to go. We’ve never gone all the way down this road, but we have met with Brooke Wentz of the San Francisco based Rights Workshop. She was knowledgeable, professional, and had access to major artists. She was also more than willing to breakdown the many legal pitfalls along the path of music licensing. This is not a great solution when you need lots of music quickly, but a relationship with a music rights professional is invaluable for major projects.

We recognize that this list is nowhere near comprehensive. These are simply solutions that we have used in the past.

What do you use?

Websites that we’ve used:
Jamendo is our favorite.
MySpace Music
Incompetech
CC Mixter.org
Pump Audio
APM
Extreme

Other sites we haven’t used yet (this list comes from Mograph via Todd Fuller):
Ahmatron
Beat Suite
Electro Freaks
Free Play Music
Free Sound
Groove Addicts
iStock Photo now has music
Even Moby is getting in on the gratis music game.
Premium Beat
Sound Dogs
Sound Rangers
Stock Music
Tettix

As Described

TeamJaded friend and supporter Jim Horsfield has a new project: asdescribed.net.

He describes it as:

“A sometimes redundant blog site which kicks into action when and if i do something that may vaguely be interesting to someone else.. covering audio visual shenanigans and VJ/film/video production.”

Sounds familiar. At the moment he’s on a two week tour with The Bays & The Heritage Orchestra in the U.K. It looks and sounds like an interesting gig:

“The premise of the show is that the Bays never rehearse/practice and jam and create their set live in front of an audience. This is somewhat easy to do(!!) as the 4 members of the bays (Andy, Chris, Simon and Jamie) have played together in this way for nearly 10 years.”

Definitely worth checking out.

Voice of Nola (MIH 32)

Told y’all it was coming.

Rupa and the April Fishes

This is our holiday treat for y’all, produced by our friend Nicolette Bethea. Now you might be saying, this piece has nothing to do with the holiday’s… and you might be exactly right. So just think about it as our musical gift to you since we won’t be posting for a few days… it’s Christmas after all. We think this pod is sweet and heartwarming just like Rupa herself, and we hope it gets you through the Christmas madness.

However, giving props to our friend Niko isn’t the only reason we’re posting this pod. Jeremey actually helped out with the shoot. He shot the interviews and the practice stuff, and he also helped out a lot with drinking whiskey at the show. So this pod is sort of like second cousin to a TeamJaded Production. We hope you like it, and if you do, then head here and leave a comment for Nicolette, she did a rad job with it.

If you want to know more about Rupa and the April Fishes go here. They have free downloads, cd’s to buy, and all kids of other cool stuff on their website. We recommend hearing them live, their French gypsy thing is pretty enthralling. And Rupa… well she’s like some kind of musical doctor/ saint… definitely worth checking out.

In other Current TV news, their new website is all pimped out Web 2.0 steez, so we went over there and tagged all Jeremey’s old pods and the two TeamJaded pods “TeamJaded.” Now if you search for TeamJaded on Current.com all our stuff comes up. Go over there and leave us some comments.

Sisterz of the Underground

I confess. I don’t know jack about Hip Hop. I’d love to hit you up with tons of facts about rappers or throw down some statistics on Bboys. And although I received first place for my “Hip Hop and the Media” audio entry at 2004’s Broadcast Education Association Festival, I admit that does not certify my knowledge of the subject.

So, when we decided to do a story on Sisterz of the Underground, I felt a bit timid approaching these Hip Hop gurus. Now, I’ve listened to my fare share of underground Hip Hop (or more accurately, I think is underground… probably isn’t). I’ve taken Hip Hop dance classes. I’ve dabbled in spinning. But when I witnessed the talent that came out of the SOTU Six-Year Anniversary party, I knew we were in for a killer story.

These women are amazing. They hit it all- Bgirls, MC’s, DJ’s, Graf Artists, Singers, Entrepreneurs, women of all talents, skills, and trades… the list goes on. And it doesn’t stop there.

The San Francisco based all-female Hip Hop collective is empowering youth, young adults and women across the nation to get involved and make a positive difference in their culture. With different programs and events throughout the Bay Area (and beyond), SOTU is teaching a generation about the positive laurels and constructive activism that Hip Hop culture was founded upon.

A full-length documentary needs to be done on SOTU… but we only had six minutes. So we decided to explore their story through a day in the life of Crykit, SOTU’s DefEd Program Director. We also sat down with SOTU’s Founder Sarah Smalls, and Head Organizer TraciP, and learned how this collective is shaking up a culture, and challenging the Hip Hop norm.

It was an awesome experience working with and learning from these women. They have a fantastic program that’s truly influencing a generation.

We gotta thank everyone from Sisterz of the Underground for giving TeamJaded the opportunity to share such a rad story. Also, Leticia, Celine, and the awesome students at Kipp Bay Academy, everyone at Cellspace, and 111 Minna Gallery, thank you.

Stuff On My Cat Logo square

Stuff On My Cat, My Cat On Stuff


Stuff On My Cat

Updated 7/20/2007: Thank you so much to Mario at Stuff On My Cat for posting our video and linking to our blog! Thank you to everyone who commented and enjoyed Maggie’s ‘stackage’. You’re all amazing.

Although we at TeamJaded are dedicated to interesting news, people, and the occasional politics, we do enjoy our fare share of fun websites. I for one, am a huge fan of Stuff on My Cat. Everyday it makes me smile. So when we purchased a new camera (Canon XH-A1), I decided to shoot my cat while figuring out the settings. What happened was something I never expected. A video where I put stuff… on my cat. Yes, you read that right. It’s slightly amusing, as Maggie (my cat), acts as if nothing is happening.

A while back I wrote about Maggie. I thought I’d share it with you now that you know how deceivingly cute she can be.

This was written August 12, 2006, 9 days after I moved from NYC to SF.

I have a foster cat. Her name is Maggie.

Last week Maggie went on the most exciting adventure up to this point in her 2-year-old life. However, I presume the trip from east coast to west coast may have been more exciting for the passengers on Jet Blue Flight 97.

Upon boarding the plane, it was realized that the cage she was traveling in was approximately ‘yay’ centimeter too big to fit under the seat in front of me. Maggie, cage, and I proceeded to the rear of the plane hoping for a smooth transfer into the airline-supplied cage.

All goes smoothly, and Maggie pops her little head out of the top of the gated cage. Then she pops her front paws out. Then she wiggles a bit. I’m trying desperately to push her resisting body back into the cage, only to realize her harness (yes, she’s wearing a harness) is caught on the wires. She looks frantic. She’s wriggling with all her might. The passengers are now crowding around the scene like lookie-loos in an accident. Maggie is caught halfway in and halfway out of the plastic-bottom, wire-top box. Finally the man in front of me picks her and the cage up, takes her to the back and finesses her out. We lock the hole with a twisty tie. Maggie, all tuckered out from her exhausting and embarrassing endeavor, sleeps the entire 6-hour flight.

Please allow me to delve in all that is Maggie the Cat.

When I decided to house this cat for “a six week trial period”, I must admit, I wasn’t what one would call “smart” about this decision. In fact, I fully take responsibility for my somewhat ill-advised act of altruistic feline charity.

My hopes of having a companion of independent temperament, who required little to no attention was to be found in a small little ball of fur with unclipped claws.

Cute? She was. Friendly? She was not.

Twiggy was her shelter moniker. Sadly, the stick-like underfed cat that she was fit the ridiculous name. A fierce growl, squinted eyes, and turned down ears was how she welcomed my hand as I tried to pet her calico fur. No such luck. She retreated to the corner of her newspaper-lined cell, foot stepping into her water bowl.

“I’ll take her,” I say. It was as though all my intelligent senses had taken a coffee break; and while my brain cells were dipping biscotti in espresso, I accepted this miniature life into my studio apartment. For better or for worse, in sickness & in health, ’till “six weeks later” do we part.

Eight months and 2582 miles later, Maggie Francois Scratcher, is still my foster cat. No official adoption has been made, as the shelter never called to check on their precious little demon.

Maggie has successfully wrecked a linen closet, demolished 2 large cardboard boxes, ruined the armrests of a corporate housing suede couch, and, among other things, peed on a suitcase.

She runs laps around the apartment at 5 in the morning. She will attack ankles if not fed at a proper time. She growls with a haunting, low snarl in the middle of the night, hair on end, eyes fixated on emptiness. She tries to escape every time the front door is opened… or the window on a 26-floor apartment.

Now, these things aside, Maggie has learned to be quite the friendly cat. She enjoys a nice bout of catnip therapy, a good tummy rub and a playful jaunt with a menacing ball of trash.

For those who are wondering why her name was changed, please refer to the following songs.

There’s actually a song called ‘Maggie the Cat’ by The Bangs. I have yet to hear it.

Rod Stewart: Maggie May
Oh Maggie I wish I’d never seen your face
You made a first-class fool out of me
But I’m as blind as a fool can be
You stole my heart but I love you anyway
Maggie I wish I’d never seen your face
I’ll get on back home one of these days

Beatles: Maggie Mae
Oh dirty Maggie Mae they have taken her away
And she never walk down Lime Street any more
Oh the judge he guilty found her
For robbing a homeward bounder
That dirty no good robbin’ Maggie Mae

Displace Us.

TeamJaded was fortunate to participate in Displace Me in San Francisco. Above is short documentary about the event and our experience.

Some may say this generation is apathetic. Often it is believed the privileged youth hibernate in their comfort; carefully sheltered by cell phones, wireless Internet, and Starbucks. However, on April 28th, 2007 that theory was shattered.

Local News networks may have briefly covered a glimpse of what happened that night. But the stories, the experiences and the aftermath of the evening still penetrate deep in the hearts and minds of those who raised their voices for Invisible Children.

About 2 months ago, over 68,000 people across the US attended “Displace Me,” an event to change Northern Uganda. Why Northern Uganda? And why did tens of thousands of youth and young adults care enough to leave the comfort of their homes and sleep on the ground?

Simple. They are not apathetic. They care about people they’ve never met. They rally to end a war they’ve never experienced. They raise money to create schools, they speak to congressmen to raise awareness, they contribute to a cause they desperately believe in: To end a war that’s ravaged a nation for over 21 years. It’s a war the US media and the US government have thrown aside ignorantly unable to establish a rationale to become involved. A war that has gone on longer than most who participated in Displace Me, have been alive.

For over two decades citizens of Northern Ugandan have been subject to war. The nature of what one UN official calls “the world’s worst neglected humanitarian crisis,” is complex. According to the Uganda Conflict Action Network:

The war is essentially two conflicts in one: first the fighting of the LRA [the Lord’s Resistance Army], which is waging war against the Ugandan government and terror against civilian population in the north, and second, the real grievances of Ugandans in the north against the existing government.

The statistics are appalling:
-1.7 million civilians have been displaced
-1,000 people die every week due to inhumane living conditions
-30,000 children have been abducted by the LRA and forced to join its army
-Tens of thousands of people have be maimed or killed since the war started

Invisible Children, Inc. was formed after three young filmmakers set out in search of a story. In 2003, they found a tragedy that “not only disgusted but inspired them.” Four years later, a movie, a mission, and a movement have led a nation of youth to end a war. Through compelling podcasts, national events, short documentaries, fundraising campaigns, video diaries, house parties, cross-country road trip screenings, and a mind-blowing multimedia, interactive website, Invisible Children is a non-profit that’s changing the world- literally (physically, emotionally, and mentally).

The evidence is plastered all over their site. From the detailed homepage to a microsite dedicated solely to Displace Me. There you will find everything and anything from the historic event- pictures from across the nation, attendee’s YouTube Videos, movies from the evening… the list goes on.

And it didn’t stop after April 28th. The leaders of Invisible Children, Inc. have met with Senators and Congressmen. They’ve delivered to our countries leaders the thousands upon thousands of letters written from the Displace Me attendees. They are doing everything in their power to encourage our nation and our President to become involved in the Juba peace talks.

Displace Me: The Aftermath

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The hope? To end the war. Invisible Children will not give up. The thousands of people who support their vision will not give up. They will persist until it is over. They know that every war has an end.

For more info, please visit:
www.invisiblechildren.com
www.ugandacan.org