Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/145624
Using Stock Footage Infernum Productions added flying dragons to Artbeats footage for its Dragon's Prophet Europe game trailer. The Smithsonian Channel relied on stock for its shows Incredible Flying Cars and Lincoln's Washington at War. 30 The Smithsonian Channel tapped Getty Images, T3 Media, the WPA Film Library, Critical Past, Historic Films and Budget Films for clips as well as public sources such as the Smithsonian Institution's National Air and Space Museum archives, the US National Archives and Records Administration. The Smithsonian Channel also obtained footage from companies that created many of the vehicles featured in the two-episode program; the production team recorded original material detailing flying cars currently on the market. Although Lincoln's Washington at War, a look at the nation's capital during the Civil War, which debuted earlier this year, was set before the dawn of the moving image, it nevertheless included stock footage. "The program features a lot of original interviews and contemporary footage, and a fair amount of Civil War reenactments shot originally, but it also includes stock footage of reenactments," Foley says. "It can be very involved and expensive to stage a reenactment, so we can benefit from stock footage of reenactments that are very serious in their reach and attention to detail." The Smithsonian Channel went to specialty vendor Reenactment Stock Footage for those period-style clips and licensed additional stock from T3 Media. An extensive array of photos, sketches, engravings and other still imagery was sourced from the Library of Congress, the US National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), Smithsonian Institution Archives and the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery, and National Museum of American History. Nearly all the historical stock footage sourced for the Shuttle Discovery's Last Mission, which premiered last year, came from NASA. NASA also supplied several animations, including one depicting the assembly of the International Space Station. New footage documented the transfer of the Shuttle from NASA to the permanent collection of the Post • July 2013 National Air and Space Museum and the Shuttle's triumphant cross-country last flight to Washington on the back of a speciallymodified 747. Under the Radar, the working title for a program currently in production from Red Rock Films about the B-2 Stealth Bomber, has heavy stock footage needs. "The associate producer is looking at a wide variety of public and private sources, including the Department of Defense, the US Air Force, NARA and the National Air and Space Museum archives," Foley says. Those involved in the plane's development — Boeing and Northrup Grumman — may also yield footage gems from their corporate holdings. Foley notes that once stock footage libraries review and catalog their clips and offer them in a searchable online database, "it will pay off ever after. There's so much more content to search and a lot of really sophisticated tools for searching, including filters and limiters to home in on specific needs. Online tools can often give you everything you want and more." Although Foley does as thorough a search as she can by herself, she then reaches out to the account rep, librarian or archivist to ask what else might be available. "They're constantly updating their catalogs, and there will always be more clips that aren't in the database yet," she explains. "I've found material by reaching out this way. Technology can take you really far, but a lot of searches need personal interaction and expertise." INFERNUM PRODUCTIONS When Berlin-based Infernum Productions AG introduced its Dragon's Prophet Europe free-to-play fantasy MMO to games players on the continent, it wanted the trailer to capture the extent of the dragon invasion across Western Europe. What better way to do that than by compositing frightening flying dragons over shots of landmarks obtained from royalty-free stock footage library Artbeats. www.postmagazine.com "Our Open Beta trailer was the first time we actually used stock footage," says Florian Emmerich, media manager at Infernum Productions (www.infernum.com). "With the trailer we aimed for the emotions of our players and potential players: Dragons are all over Europe — come and meet them in our game! So to get people to feel involved we focused on the capitals of the largest countries in Western Europe: France, the UK, Italy and Germany. "We considered sending out camera crews, but in the end it was a matter of cost and effectiveness. As any profit-oriented company, we were aiming for the best possible result at the best possible price," he says. "The role of stock footage was clearly to form a bond between the potential players and our game — every citizen of a country is usually familiar with a few landmarks in the capital… the Eiffel Tower, the Brandenburg Gate. Because of that, we think the audience feels [the dragons] are in my capital!" Artbeats filled Infernum's needs for clips of European landmarks as well as two "random" landscapes and views that met requirements for showing the shadow of a dragon over a field and a huge mirror-like window in which to glimpse a dragon. "It took us some time to find the perfect clips, but I didn't encounter any inconvenience while searching for them," Emmerich reports. Infernum uses Autodesk's 3DS Max to model the dragons and Adobe Premiere Pro to cut and arrange the video files. "A lot of the post production for the trailer was also done in After Effects and with a few plug-ins," he says. "We worked with several layers — weather effects, stock footage, dragons, additional effects — to make the dragons look like they are part of our world." BROWNSTONE CLEARANCE John Downey III, clearance supervisor at LA's Brownstone and co-executive director of CLEAR, a guild for those working in rights