Post-Production Summary: Degree Final Four Videos

The first few months of 2016 have been loaded with new projects for ASL Productions. We have been working with companies such as, American Express, Lincoln Financial, and Degree just to name a few. Our video productions have taken us to Florida, Arizona, and California, all in the name of producing and filming corporate video content. But when the cameras are turned off and the footage gets back to the office, the work is just beginning. This is when the editing and post production team at ASL Productions gets to work.

There were two main videos that our editors were working on in post-production this week but in this posting we’d like to focus on our work with Degree for the NCAA men’s basketball tournament. Degree was looking for a series of social advertisements to excite the audience for the games and connect their sponsorship with the event.

We were contracted by Degree’s PR agency, Weber Shandwick with the task of delivering exciting, quick content for social media, specifically Degree’s Twitter page. We shot this at Stony Brook University about two weeks ago with the assistance of two SAG actors playing the parts of NCAA tournament participants. A 15 person crew that included director, producer, photographer, two camera operators with different tasks, digital transfer technician, gaffers, grips, camera and production assistants was on set helping us bring it all to life. In addition to creating 8, 15-second videos we needed to capture a large variety of product video, product photography and evergreen footage of an NCAA tournament basketball environment. Needles to say it was an action packed shoot day and took tremendous hustle to capture everything within a 10 hour shoot window.

We had the luxury of having our on-site director also serve as the project editor. It’s the rare find to have talent that can visualize a project coming together in their head, instruct a crew to deliver that vision and then insure it comes to life through their own key pushing in edit. ASL is very fortunate to work with these types of talents.

Even though we had filmed amazing stylized content with an Arri Amira and a Canon C300 Mark II, there was still a lot of post production work to enhance the product. Music and audio are often times undervalued driving forces behind a production. For the Degree project we needed to develop a sound design that took you inside the game and was larger than life. The cuts and angles of our video were planned out via our shot-list and mood boards. We still need to source sound effects and create a sound design that would really take the pieces to the next level. That was the early focus of our edit.

Once our video and audio was laid out and approved by agency and client it was time to take the video for color correction. Professional color grading can make a $30,000 video look like $300,000. In our rough edits we had designed a cool blue look that gave our videos a dream like feel. However after working with our colorist and viewing everything on his 65-inch flat screen, warmer tones had a better effect taking you inside the game. The warmer red and orange colors balanced out the moody, shadowy way the pieces were filmed. Crushing the black levels even further in post combined with that saturated look, really put you inside an arena, enhancing abstract lights that would hit the court and helping to build drama. Once color correction was complete, we matched it with enhanced audio from our post production mixer. The last step was adding in graphics and animation. We worked with Weber Shandwick’s creative team and our animator for quick/stylish animations that added pizzazz while matching Degree and the videos aesthetics.

We have a lot of exciting video projects coming up so stay tuned for more updates and information. As always, go to our website at aslproductions.com to see examples of our work and visit our facebook and twitter feeds to see what we are talking about. To get in touch with us, shoot us an email at contact@aslproductions.com.