While Smith was in town as executive producer on the recently filmed feature “What’s Wrong With Virginia,” she sought out Grooters Productions as a local solution for fulfilling her commitment to Fox. The company was well-equipped to assist with both recording and facilitating a real-time audio link with the director and producers in Hollywood.

“It’s really been a pleasure to see our people working alongside industry-leading talent,” commented John Grooters, president and CEO of Grooters Productions. The company’s re-recording mixer Paul Wesselink engineered the sessions. “Yeardley was a joy to work with, and I think she was genuinely impressed to find such capabilities here in West Michigan,” he commented.

In addition to recording for “The Simpsons,” Grooters Productions also recorded actor Ed Harris, playing a lead roll in “What’s Wrong With Virginia,” for a series of national television and radio ads for Home Depot.

Product names, logos, brands, and other trademarks featured or referred to in this article are the property of their respective trademark holders.

With a quick two week turn-around GP concepted, designed, developed, tested, and unveiled this site to our client’s giddy delight. The site harnesses the power of WordPress and its vast plug-in repository. Through modifying existing plug-ins to “talk” to each other, WEF received a website with features like an automated pay-for-membership signup, event registration and calendar, forum, and blog.

Here’s what Meena Ariagno, founder of WEF, had to say about her experience with GP: “Let me begin first by saying what a JOY this project was for me to work on with you. The whole team was unbelievable in every way imaginable. We simply could not have produced the outstanding results we did without your gentle listening and the team’s insightful marketing input. GP’s expertise gave the project shape, direction and clarity. I am so grateful for the commitment of your entire team for helping us evolve to our new communication platform!”

Check out the WEF Website and become a member today.

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I just finished color correcting That the World May Know Set 9, produced by The Image Group and Grooters Productions for Focus on the Family, featuring Ray Vanderlaan.

This set was filmed by our crew over the course of 24 days on the Sinai peninsula and features about 3 hours worth of footage. After months of script writing, editing, music composition, motion graphics creation and illustrations drawn, every element comes down to my office to be reassembled in full HD quality in the on-line edit.  Once all these elements were gathered, we re-digitized thousands of shots from over 400 video tapes.  Now it is time to color correct and do hours of fine tuning, in multiple passes.

The first pass for me was doing color correction. These episodes were shot in High Definition with 3 Panasonic Varicams with a 720p resolution at 24 frames per second. The challenge comes in matching the color and contrast of 3 cameras that were operating out in the bright sun in the middle of the desert. Another interesting element is that the desert earth tones are at times a pinkish / red hue which is very close to the flesh tones of our teacher and his students.  The color of the desert also changes depending on what terrain they are in.  All of this makes matching sand color and flesh color a good challenge in keeping things consistent.

Secondly, I applied special color treatments to our reenactment segments of Moses, Pharaoh and of Jesus. These treatments require a blending of multiple special effects filters, applied to create specific “looks” that sets it apart from the main teaching.

The third step is a review pass.  I called in John (Producer/Director), Dave and Trevor (Graphics Designers,) and Sara (Project Manager) for a viewing. We watch all 3 hours worth of the lessons and make notes on any of the elements that need tweaking and anything that might be missing from when John last saw the lessons in his edit bay a couple weeks ago.

While I had been finishing and fine tuning the video, Paul (Re-Recording Mixer) had been giving the same attention to the audio – integrating the outstanding scores created by our in-house composer, Eric. After all of this I needed to make a fourth pass to integrate the notes from the peer review, integrate Paul’s audio and finally set everything to render.

Finally, it was time to show the client. We showed the program in our theater on the big screen.  It was great to feel the collective emotion of the audience who has worked so hard on such a large project for over two years. It is a very powerful experience to behold, and indeed the best part of my job.

American Sailors, a Grooters Productions original production, has been picked up by WGN America and will air nationally on July 4^th at 9:00 PM eastern. In addition to this prime time slot there will be an encore airing on July 26^th at 1:00 PM eastern. The show focuses on four skippers who competed in the 100^th running of the Chicago to Mackinac sail race, the longest and oldest freshwater sail race in the world. See more at www.AmericanSailors.tv

]]> http://www.grootersproductions.com/people/?feed=rss2&p=113 http://www.grootersproductions.com/people/?p=97 http://www.grootersproductions.com/people/?p=97#comments Mon, 04 May 2009 14:37:59 +0000 Dave Lassanske http://www.grootersproductions.com/people/?p=97 We’re proud to announce the launch of the new Holland Farmer’s Market website! The Farmer’s Market is one of many great attractions in Holland.  Everyone loves the market for providing business for local farmers, tools for healthy living to our community, and an opportunity for quality family time outdoors.

We developed, designed, and programmed the site all in-house here at GP. The website informs the public of market events, what’s for sale this month and the months to come, and introduces the vendors, chefs, street performers and market staff.

We love jquery and have used it in many areas of the site. jScrollPane was used for the custom scrollbar. Fancybox displays all the beautiful market photography taken by our own Jeff Grooters, and a home-brew of scripts make links and photos come alive.

What we are most proud of is what the end-user can’t see - the CMS. Through this, the website is easily administered. Here’s the workflow: After logging in, the administrator can navigate to the specific page he or she wants to edit. By hovering over the text, a button appears that can be clicked to edit the content. Once clicked, the information to be edited loads right on top of the page. After editing and saving, the page will refresh and wallah! The changes are instantly seen! The concept is a lot like jeditable but tightly integrated with all the other tables and records that make up the website.

Check out the site and if you’re in the area, be sure to stop by the Holland Farmer’s Market.  Tell ‘em we sent you.

Last week, John and I attended the NAB (National Association of Broadcasters) convention in Vegas. As much as we try to follow industry technology trends throughout the year, NAB is a great place to see new things up close and get your hands on the latest video and digital film gear. I was there for only two days packing in as many flyers, pens, trinkets, stickers and, oh yeah, knowledge I could into my swag bag. Here is some information on a few of my favorite technology “toys” and observations from the show.

The most major trend I observed at the show was stereoscopic editing and finishing in 3D. So what is stereoscopic editing? It is editing video for 3D presentation on the big and small screen. Creating a film in 3D was previously a very complicated process and now you can edit this footage easily with Avid and almost every other editing system out there. With the increased horsepower of today’s computers, this amazing technology is finally affordable for more than just the big studios. It seemed like every booth was showing 3D options with software and hardware systems. With movies like James Cameron’s 3D feature film “Avatar” opening soon, the popularity of 3D is expanding past the realm of concerts and cartoons and into feature narrative films.

Another trend I observed was the sudden death of video tape and the warm embrace of file based workflows. This is the essential practice of organizing and protecting your data files shot on all the modern video and digital film cameras out today from companies like Panasonic, Sony, and of course Red.

One of the most versatile systems that we saw was called Content Agent from Root 6 Technology.With one button you can create files for web distribution, DVD, and for editing at multiple resolutions. In the recent past, this required multiple pieces of software or hardware systems. Root 6 also allows for organizing and logging these various files all in one smart and concise interface. Very cool.

One final product that caught my attention was a facility management software package called Farmer’s Wife. Their booth has a giant picture of a 1930’s era country woman scooping lard out of a bucket. It definitely set the tone for this company’s fun and functional software. It features intuitive ways to manage scheduling for editors, producers and composers. And it links employee time-tracking and billing into a very comprehensive piece of software for managing the day to day operation of a facility like ours.

NAB 2009 was definitely an important conference for us.  It was a fantastic opportunity to see new technology that will help us to continue making excellent media in the future.

Perfect for Maunday Thursday, Good Friday, and Easter Morning, Angelhouse releases the three part “Redemption” and the single “Passover Lamb.” Shot on location in the Galilee, Nazareth, and Jerusalem these films are the very best of the short film format.

“Great original work, high production value, with a haunting tone reminiscent of Gibson’s “Passion” film. Also commend the relative brevity of the FULL version, despite covering a lot of territory, as well as offering it in three parts…”
Jeff Huston
Steelehouse Productions

Watch these films and celebrate Easter by remembering - we have so much to be thankful for.

Also, look at Angelhouse Media’s other Easter selections “The Jesus Egg” and “Cure.”