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August 2014

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www.postmagazine.com 4 POST AUGUST 2014 ELECTRIC PICTURES RESTORES RARE MOTORCYCLE MEDIA FOR 'JOHN PENTON STORY' LAKE FOREST, CA — Electric Pictures (www.elec tricpictures.tv) recently provided telecine and film restoration services for Penton: The John Penton Story, a feature-length documentary about the American icon and motorcycling pioneer who revolutionized the motorcycle industry in the 1960s and 1970s. The company transferred and restored dozens of hours of Super 8mm and 16mm film, including rare racing and test footage, interviews and home movies, dating back more than 50 years for the film, which was produced by Pipeline Digital Media (producers of The Motocross Files and The Carlsbad USGP:1980) and directed by Todd Huffman. At Electric Pictures, Super 8mm and 16mm film elements, both black & white and color, were transferred to video using the company's DFT Shadow telecine systems. Additional archival ma- terial from video sources (primarily Betacam) was up-converted using Blackmagic Design's Teranex standards conversion technology. Video trans- fers were delivered in the form of high resolution (1920x1080), high bit-rate ProRes files suitable for editorial purposes and of sufficient resolution to be used in DCP masters shown in theaters. The work continued over a six-month period as Pipeline Digital Media continued to collect film and video assets. Ultimately, Electric Pictures trans- ferred more than 5,000 feet of film to HD video. "The technology we used helped a lot," says Electric Pictures president, Grace McKay. "We were able to enhance the look and feel of the film material to a remarkable extent, especially compared with what could be achieved with more conventional technology. We produced images that looked very good, even when the film itself had problems." CARBON VFX TURNS CARTER'S WORLD UPSIDE DOWN IN MTV PROMO NEW YORK/LOS ANGELES — Finding Carter, MTV's newest scripted drama series, tells the story of 16-year-old Carter and her life-changing discov- ery that the woman she thought was her mother actually kidnapped her when she was three-years-old. To visualize the complete shock of Carter's news, MTV teamed up with Carbon VFX (www.carbonvfx.com), a full-service creative studio with offices in New York and Los Angeles, to literally turn her life upside down in the image promo. MTV built a rig that flipped the set of Carter's bedroom 180 degrees while the actress stood in front, creating an effect fully in-camera. Kieran Walsh, partner and creative director at Carbon, led the shoot in Atlanta using a Phantom Flex at 4K, mostly at 1,000fps, and composited additional elements of falling items in Flame, to enhance the devastat- ing effect. "While we were shooting and the camera had to dolly so fast at 1,000 fps, it was really challenge to hold focus on the talent all the way through the move," explains Walsh. "Additionally, the talent blinked and reacted slightly to all the noise and chaotic falling objects behind her. The solve was to track a new face and body over the middle of the take to correct these issues." According to Walsh, there was a lot of invisible cleanup work on the backplates; in addition to set exten- sions in the wide shots and blending the foreground static section of floor with the portion that rotated. The breaking picture frame, which was a combination of CG and live action plates, had additional glass shards and particles added via Cin- ema 4D. Color grading was done at The Mill on a Baselight system. BITS & PIECES

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