•postbrooklyn•

Sometimes… but, today, it seems to be working with me. I made the mistake of “downloading” some models of neurons for our latest show “The Brain Fitness Program.” And after playing around with those very capable little models, I discovered that the kind of animation I needed to do would require a bit more flexibility than those models could provide. Rather than trying to tinker with that and risk blowing it all up… I figured, “Heck, why not reinvent the wheel?”

This is the kind of thinking that usually gets you into trouble. However, after a few cautious experiments, I found that I could place a glowing orb in a semi-transparent rough cell body…and voila, nucleus! And then, a few more shaders, and the neuron axon looked kind of electron microscopic and bumpy. And with this, I could actually make my pre-synaptic neuron ends partially transparent and put little baubles inside them to be neurotransmitter stand-ins. And the coup de grace? Finally figuring out how to make a little pulsing trace of volumetric light to show the nerve impulse. And the result:

postbrooklyn recently did the HD layback for the AICP opening all for Lifelong Friendship Society out of Williamsburg, Brooklyn, NYC.

We’re doing the finish for “Shut Up and Do It” which is screening at the NY Latino Film Festival after a successful showing at the Chicago Latino Film Festival.

We’ve also just put the finishing touches on “Fair Enough” a short film by Jim Hoppin, premiering at the Philadelphia International Gay & Lesbian film festival. Congrats to all! Hope to continue to be a part of everyone’s success…

We also welcomed a new sofa to our facility and our latest HD upgrades — 2 Pro Tools HD suites adding onto our two new Final Cut Studio 2 suites, also featuring the latest Adobe CS3 software. It’s all nice and shiny and new.

And that’s pretty much where things are.

I’ve been sadly neglecting the blog as of late, so I’m going to do my best to make it a point to at least make an end of the week update. In the news this past week:

• A short digitize job of “Pilgrim State” going to DVCPro HD. Still one of the most impressive formats out there. I’m very interested to see how the Apple ProRes format takes it to another level, though. Especially since I end up doing a lot of my post and storage on external FW800 drives (purchased through OWC — one of the most mac friendly sites on the web, I think, and with a solid reasonably priced product, too. Can’t recommend them enough so far).

• Finished the last minute layback for LFS via MTV for spots relating to Real World Reunion Las Vegas. The spots were a nice mash-up of the Grindhouse style with some 3-D in 2-D space work done in for good measure.

• Began the graphics work on “Beauty Sleep with Dr. Michael Breus” which should be airing on PBS nationally starting in December. It promises to be a pretty interesting and educational show. The post starts in earnest July 20th, so right now we’re just beginning to generate the appropriate assets.

And that’s about the size of it. We’re still working by word of mouth, but hopefully we’ll start doing some external marketing in the hopes to get into some new arenas and more interesting projects. Always looking for an interesting project or two.

So, we’re putting the finishing touches on some of our upgrades. The most exciting of which still hasn’t arrived — the new FCP Suite 2 — but, hopefully, apple will stop tinkering with cell phone technology long enough to actually ship something halfway useful somewhat soon (it was supposed to start shipping around now, I heard, but so far nary a peep).

That might be the most anticipated little entry, but the other upgrades to postbrooklyn are equally exciting, I think. We’ve added an internal drive to our G5 to alleviate some project space tightness. We upgraded the G5 to also include a brand spankin’ new Pro Tools HD system, to further our interest and approaches to sound design and mixing into the HD world (7.1 surround here we come!). We’ve created a duplication station all by itself that can consistently knock out 50 DVDs at a time, printed and everything. And we added a new MacPro to the mix – quite literally! It has all the same programs and capabilities as the G5, thus making our ability to handle any workload and work seamlessly between edit bays quite transparent. The MacPro even takes advantage of a little Pro Tools Jr. — better known as Pro Tools LE and 002 rack — but it’ll work with the same Pro Tools panache that the big brother does. All of that and 2TB of internal RAID space operating in a very quiet new tower. These are all very exciting and promise to become even more impressive once the new suite of Apple tools does, in fact, arrive.

But perhaps most exciting to me from a post engineering standpoint is that we’ve violated several laws of audiophilology by wiring our video patchbay… with audio cables. Yep. It sure as hell wouldn’t pass muster in any broadcast stickler’s home — but for what we use an audio patchbay for (mostly to get some of our d/a conversion out to speakers) it works very well. Just be sure not to patch a video signal to an audio one of vice-versa. That’s a wee bit dangerous. Regardless, it makes working in our facility much more workable. And really, that’s sort of what we’re all about ’round here.

Well, not outright thrilling, but it is nice to see our facility offerings expanding to keep pace with some demand. We now offer CD and DVD duplication with full color printing of discs. We can even throw together a sleeve and a case for relatively inexpensive duplication possibilities.

Along with that we’ve started to duplicate using the Taiyo-Yuden watershield dvds. In our tests with them, they produce an incredible looking, glossy, and truly waterproof smudge-proof disc. They’re slightly more expensive, but frankly worth every single penny when you look at the cost differential versus the other options of purchasing a laminating machine. I predict the price on these will drop at some point a bit and laminators will probably be out of business.

And now a word from our sponsor…

I’ve shied away from blogs — I’ll admit it. In fact, I’ve tried them. I’ll even admit that. But, a few weeks ago, I stumbled on a blog of a filmmaker that I found incredibly useful (unfortunately, I can’t seem to recall where that is) and I realized that having an outlet where you could actually describe what you were doing in the post world might be of some value to other people. It might even be an interesting place for people to create a dialogue about how to make better films, less expensively, and in a sense, get the word out a little bit easier. When it really comes down to it, that’s what this site, and this particular venture — postbrooklyn — is really all about.

•postbrooklyn•, the place, is an extension of that philosophy and I hope will manage to help a few random filmmakers be able to put their projects together on budget and with the kind of high-quality sheen that we try to deliver to all of our programs. We’ve got some exciting plans in the future and hopefully, we’ll be able to give the indie producer a friendly, resourceful and sane outlet for cutting through the mishegoss and voodoo that often surrounds the filmmaking experience. And by imparting some knowledge along the way — often reflected in this little blog — maybe someone across the globe will have a better sense of what to do when they’re faced with similar filmmaking fogginess.