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www.postmagazine.com 4 POST AUGUST 2015 BITS & PIECES PROMOTING HBO'S BESSIE NEW YORK — Design/animation studio One Fine Day (www.ofdny.com) created the promo for HBO's latest original film, Bessie, starring Queen Latifah as the legendary blues singer Bessie Smith. Led by One Fine Day creative director Nathalie de La Gorce (who co-founded the studio with VFX director Chris Haak), the team created a promo that features feathers gently falling in an empty theater where a boa lays wrapped around an antique microphone. HBO called for a piece that was glamor- ous at first, but not so beautiful as viewers looked more closely, resulting in a moody, evocative graphic tease that was so well received that the elements became the 'look' for all of the digital assets HBO produced for all media platforms supporting the project. With a look that HBO described in their creative brief as 'gilded de- cay,' the spot opens with a mysterious shot of an array of blue feathers slowly falling through the air while the haunting strains of Latifah, singing mournfully as Smith, can be heard. The camera slowly tracks back as the color of the feathers change from bright blue to a de-saturated gray, a symbolic nod to the dark turns in Bessie Smith's own life story. The spot ends with a shot revealing the feathers are from a feather boa, falling gracefully around an empty stage, except for an exquisitely 3D animated old-fashioned microphone and footlights. Working closely with New York-based production company House of Nod on the high-speed photography, Haak explains that it took some experimenting to find the right frame rate to shoot the falling feathers, in the end, striking a balance, shooting around 500-700fps for most shots. Although the microphone and stand are based on period-authen- tic props seen in the film, the actual props were in LA and similar ones couldn't be found in New York, which led to Haak and the creative team reconstructing them in 3D. The piece was shot using a Phantom camera; 3D was done in Light- Wave; After Effects was the primary compositing tool; Syntheyes was used for matchmoving. PIE TOWN ADOPTS AVID EVERYWHERE FOR REALITY TV SHOWS BURLINGTON, MA — Avid (www.avid.com) announced that Pie Town Pro- ductions, a reality television production company based in North Hollywood, CA, has embraced Avid Everywhere to handle the high volumes of footage and deliverables while meeting the tight deadlines and budgets of reality TV production. By investing in the Avid Artist Suite, powered by the Avid Medi- aCentral Platform, Pie Town has also been able to attract new talent, filling open positions with qualified candidates already familiar with the company's editing solutions. Pie Town is known for reality TV productions such as House Hunters, House Hunters Renovation, Tiny House Hunters, Joan & Melissa: Joan Knows Best, Flip or Flop, and Say It To My Face. It concurrently produces 10 series, deliver- ing more than 400 episodes a year. With a growing list of projects and highly technical network deliverables, along with video on demand (VOD) and iTunes requirements, Pie Town needed a nonlinear editing solution that could meet all of its production deadlines, handle its high-volume workflows, and handle any content format. As a long-time Avid Pro Tools customer, Pie Town made the decision to switch to the Avid Media Composer editing solution. "We now use Avid products from ingest to output and the entire post process happens internally, without going to outside facilities, which helps us save time and money," says Dana Besnoy, vice president, post production for Pie Town. "Our switch to Avid has also allowed us to expand our workforce as needed. As Avid is the industry standard for media editing, our switch to the Avid MediaCentral Platform has enabled us to significantly broaden the talent pool and find a wide array of professionals who can immediately jump in on any project." Pie Town has also deployed the Storage Suite's Avid ISIS shared storage sys- tem to facilitate project sharing and make editorial on larger productions more cohesive. According to Besnoy, Avid solutions integrate easily with third-party systems, making it easy for them to design workflows.