Some News Is Good News…Right?

February 3rd, 2011

Hey everybody. IGF has been busy with work, school, and its various projects, so sorry about the lack of updating.

We wanted to share with you our latest goings ons and what we’ve been working on.

Early in January, IGF shot two new projects. On New Year’s Day we had the opportunity to shoot an entire set of local musical group The Standback Band. We had three cameras running and had a blast shooting their show. We’re in the process of putting together a couple songs to showcase for them as they are playing the Florida’s famed Wanee Music Festival in mid-April. This was the third shoot IGF has done with the band, the first being a video shoot of a live on-air performance on WMNF 88.5 Radio last year, and the second being a photo shoot of their October show at State Theater in downtown St. Petersburg opening for The Outlaws. You can check out that work and their music at www.standbackband.com. They are an awesome group of guys and can’t wait to get this latest project done for them.

The other 2011 project that IGF has complete is another contest video for The Who. Live From Your Living Room was a contest promoting The Who’s new collector’s box set. We got a great group of people together to help us shoot this amazing music video contained in a to scale polaroid photo frame that we had built specially for the shoot. I’ll be posting an update with the video and some insight as to how we made it soon, so check it out!

In Other News:

Over the past year or so, Jay has worked with fellow filmmakers Sara Gross and Wil Magness in crafting the second and third parts of their feature length film titled “All Ear is Dread Hear”, and is excited that the film has been completed and is ready for the festival circuit. Check out the trailer at www.allearisdreadhearmovie.com and follow them on Facebook and Twitter so you can make sure you attend the next festival screening.

Speaking of Facebook and Twitter, did you know IGF is on Facebook and Twitter? Follow us on Twitter @IGFilmmakers and Like us on Facebook using that awesome button below!

Also last year, Jay had the opportunity to work with the award-winning Liberty Lane Productions and fellow filmmakers R. Presley Stephens and Stephen McKendree on a short film called “You’ve Got Hell” and recently learned that it was chosen as a selection of the 2011 Gasparilla Film Festival.

Coming Soon:

In March, Jay will be taking a short trip Washington D.C. for a much needed vacation. Hopefully shooting lots of video and photos to share when he returns.

Also in the works are a couple of small short films that will hopefully get some momentum going and finally made!

So much to shoot, so little time!

Take care everyone and keep watching.

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Casting Call

September 10th, 2010

Attention Actresses and Actors: Industrial Grade Films is in pre-production of a short narrative film to be shot on the weekends in early to mid October in the Clearwater/St. Petersburg area. Open roles are one lead roles, 4 supporting roles, and 6 to 8 extras.

The short is titled “Inside Voice”. It is satire piece about the experiences of a young man who cannot quite control the tone of his voice.

Also note that this is an non-union, non-paying role. Strictly for the credit and experience.

I have a look in mind for the roles, but it’s by no means set in stone, so if you don’t fit the look but are still interested, contact me anyways.

Roles:

Lead Role “Yelling Girl”: Female, 20 – 25 years of age. Attractive. Preferably tall(ish), between 5’7″ and 5’10″. Acting experience preferred.

Supporting role, “Date #1″: Female, 20 – 25 years of age.

Supporting role, “Date #2″: Female, 20 – 25 years of age.

Supporting role, “Librarian”: Female, 30 – 65 years of age.

Supporting role, “Marsha”: Female, 45 – 55 years of age.

Extras: Male or female, ages 18 – 70

My only real requirement is that you have an open mind and a sense of adventure – we are going to have lots of fun shooting this. Most of the parts are going to be one day, only a few hours.

If you are interested in any of the parts or knowing more, please email me at jay@industrialgradefilms.com. Please have a resume and headshot if you have acting experience, or if you don’t have either of those, a recent photograph and short description of any previous experience will be fine, too.

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Contest Video

September 10th, 2010

Hey everyone,

Here is a short that I made with my cousin Josh for a contest. The contest was sponsored by The Who and the object was to do your best windmill in 30 seconds or less. Our original concept was a sort of reverse stop-motion piece, where the camera would follow Josh’s arm as it went around. The logistics then blew our mind, so we scaled it back a bit. Here’s the video:

Our first decision that we had to make was creating the medley of  Who songs for the video. Josh, in all his musical wisdom, found the three songs that were the same key and how they would segue to one another. We wanted to start and end with energy, so we started with “My Generation” and ended with the epic ending of “Won’t Get Fooled Again”. The next best windmill song that we could thing of to look good with stop-motion was “Baba O’Riley”. We then set out finding the sections of the song and cutting them together to make the clip an exact 30 seconds.

With the medley done, we then started listening to the song and brainstorming ideas of where to go and a basic outline of how it was going to be edited. Our first two areas that we had decided on were this awesome red brick wall that belonged to Hattrick’s, a sports bar in downtown Tampa. For the second, I wanted a dark parking lot, under a streetlight, so we used the empty back lot of our office building that night. We went and shot the brick building, then we shot the opening and closing video. When nightfall hit, we went down the office and shot the part under the streetlight.

With a week to recharge and rethink, our thoughts drifted away from the urban areas. I immediately thought of the beach because we could have Josh humorously roll his jeans up, and the rolling waves would look super cool with the stop-motion. Of course then the next location was a park, something that is quite opposite of the beach. We kind of had a joint vision of him between two trees, and we were lucky enough to find a place that had a bunch of trees that were all roughly the same size.

The last location was tough because we were running out of time, ideas, and energy. Josh had remembered a park near his house that had a kind of band shell that he thought would look cool. There wasn’t really a good angle to get up close and really show that it was a band shell, but I felt the wide shot with the whole stage and its metal room was really cool looking.

I had originally wanted to do the stop-motion where we had Josh in the same position in the frame and the location, clothes, and guitars would change. When we started thinking logistically of how to do that, I became a little intimidated and scaled it down a bit. We then decided it would be cool to add video to the opening and closing with Josh in his room, kind of playing on the idea that the music took him on a journey. As we started getting the photos into editing after the first day, we realized that they would all need to be cropped to fit our 1080 video resolution, we kind of abandoned the idea of keeping Josh in the same part of the frame.

Once in full on editing mode, we came across another challenge. My hardware didn’t like to play nice with the 200+ photos and HD footage I had crammed into the 30 second Adobe Premiere timeline. Editing became a task of setting a certain number of pictures in and getting them to be an equal length, then mixing down the timeline and watching it back at full speed. This made the process extremely tedious, and towards the end I kind of got sloppy and rushed it.

Josh did an amazing job selling the windmilling in slow motion. I’m glad he found the contest and pushed me to collaborate with him and create something.

All in all I think it turned out really well, and the judges agreed; we were one of five runners up. It was really cool to think that Pete and Roger watched our video and thought it worth to award us with some free swag.

We shot the video with a Canon VIXIA HV30, the stills with a Nikon D40x. All the post was done with Adobe Photoshop, Soundbooth, and Premiere.

Hope you enjoy it!

Jay

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Greetings!

September 10th, 2010

And salutations world! Welcome to the Industrial Grade Films website. It will be changing ever so much in the next few months, but keep dropping by to keep up with our up and coming projects.

Ciao,
Jay

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