(Sundance Film Festival, Park City, UT – January 19, 2007) Blackmagic Design Inc. today announced that We Are the Strange, a 94 minute animation produced in the United States and whose workflow utilizes Blackmagic’s DeckLink Pro capture card, will be screened at Sundance Film Festival beginning January 19, 2007. In addition to being the only full length feature animation at Sundance, We Are the Strange is also unique in that it is composed of mixed media consisting of 3-D, stop motion, and 2-D, taking almost three years to complete. The film was produced, written and directed by M Dot Strange. Chaylon Blancett was brought aboard for post-production.
“We are thrilled to be part of such an innovative animation as We Are the Strange,” said Grant Petty, CEO, Blackmagic Design. “Filmmakers like M Dot and Chay are doing things that have never been done before, moving into uncharted territory with their full length film, exclusively utilizing three types of animation. It’s great that Blackmagic can be a part of helping to make this type of creativity possible!”
Strange and Blancett used Cinema 4D and Adobe After Effects 7 to create 1920×1080 Blackmagic 10 bit uncompressed movie files. In post, the final movies were exported as standard definition (SD) movies to be off-line edited on an Apple G4 and a Mac Pro using Final Cut Pro 5. The online assembly was also done using After Effects.
The After Effects project files were then sent to a G5 dual 1.8 with 4GB RAM. Using the SD files as reference in Final Cut Pro, the uncompressed 10 bit files were then color corrected in After Effects. The DeckLink Pro was used to preview their Photo Jpeg files for color correction purposes on both an analog CRT monitor and a DLP projector with SDI inputs.
“The DeckLink Pro was fantastic and extremely easy to use and install. It allowed us to view all of our 10 bit uncompressed movies simultaneously, taking analog out of the card to the CRT monitor as well as SDI out to the digital projector,” said M Dot Strange, director, screenwriter, and editor of We Are the Strange”. “We also enjoyed the flexibility of previewing anything we wanted through the card in any resolution. Unlike other programs, the DeckLink Pro provided a reliable picture to base our color correction.”
“I want to stay innovative and small, and do large projects,” continued Strange. “To achieve this, it is important to maintain a level of creative control in a micro studio environment. With the availability of fast and affordable computer systems, and the changing face of entertainment, we believe that this film is just the beginning of what can be done.”
Blancett, co-editor on the film, added, “The DeckLink Pro is the perfect product for young creative individuals to finish what they have worked so hard for. With the DeckLink Pro, we are able to work with the highest quality formats while manipulating and finishing the project perfectly, without any loss of quality. We were not bound by the restraints of digital or analog signals. The use of the DeckLink Pro card made it easy to complete our vision for the movie because we were equipped with the right tools.”
About Blackmagic Design Inc.
Blackmagic Design Inc. manufactures the world’s highest quality video cards and converters for the post-production and television broadcast industries. The Multibridge, DeckLink and Intensity family of leading quality video products have changed the post-production industry and made HDTV more affordable for everyone. Blackmagic Design was founded by some of the world’s leading editors and engineers from the post-production industry. This industry knowledge and experience is constantly fed back into our products allowing us to introduce the most amazing, creative tools for the industry.
Blackmagic Design Inc. corporate headquarters are in the United States, with offices in the Netherlands, Japan, Singapore, Hong Kong and Australia.
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