Rock Opera, Mad Dogs, and Philofilm
Philofilm is a New York-based video editing boutique that has been cutting music videos for a postmodern experiment called the East Village Opera Company (EVOC). EVOC is an 11-piece band whose first CD launched in the fall of 2005 with rocked out arias from some of the world’s great operas. You don’t often find rock bands covering “Habanera” from Carmen or “Nessun Dorma” from Turandot, and certainly not performed in their full length or in the original languages. But EVOC’s been doing it and receiving great notice, thanks in part to a very visual music video and promotional campaign completed at Philofilm.
Philofilm founder and senior editor Josh Carter has cut many music videos since the boutique opened in 2004, working with Doug Biro, the producer and director at Mad Dog Films. Biro was once creative director for RCA Video, and while Mad Dog does all kinds of film work, projects for record labels are the company’s bread and butter. Biro and Carter hit it off, and so one week the pair might be cutting an EVOC promo for the JumboTron in Times Square, and the next week the latest music video for Norah Jones.
Like many artists who have come to live and work in New York, Carter has found that the city’s varied art scene tends to take careers in unexpected directions. This was certainly true for Carter, a Texan and Mac head since the age of 11 who came east to study classics at Princeton University in the late ’80s. Work in the theater at Princeton led Carter to L.A. after graduation, where he worked for producer Richard Roth (Blue Velvet, Manhunter, Julia). It wasn’t long before he headed for New York City to work with artist Peter Ungerleider, a set designer who also happened to create audiovisual installations. One of their video projects was for poet John Giorno, and this gave Carter the opportunity to work on an Avid for the first time. Ungerleider was also an early user of After Effects (when it was still being developed by The Company of Science and Art), and so Carter was exposed to early desktop video and the opportunity to do his own art video project edited with Adobe Premiere and AE.
As it had done for so many other artists at the time, After Effects opened the door for Carter to work at a legit editorial house, Editing Concepts in NYC. For the next two years Carter honed his skills, eventually becoming an assistant editor. “That was where I really learned to cut,” Carter says. “Working with highly demanding people looking over my shoulder.”
Carter eventually opened his own facility in 2003. Version one of Philofilm was a loft in DUMBO (Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass), an up-and-coming artists’ neighborhood in Brooklyn. It was also at this time that Carter, exclusively an Avid editor, gave Apple Final Cut Pro 3.0 a try. Success came quickly and Carter moved to the center of it all in Tribeca, where the arts are mainlined and rents just keep climbing. The trendy new address certainly helped business, but the important shift for Philofilm was the move to affordable software and hardware, Carter says. “I set up an FCP 4.5 system on a dual 2.0 G5 with a DeckLink Extreme card and a 1TB SATA array. I only rent decks because it would cost me $100K to actually buy even used models of all the formats that have come my way in the past 12 months. HD work has been either HDV or DVCPRO HD. SD includes DVCPRO 50, DVCAM, Digital Betacam, BetaSP, and regular DV. I’ve done a couple projects in true 24p (advanced mode), however, most of my mastering has been to Digital Beta.”
For the East Village Opera Company, Doug Biro of Mad Dog Films generated about 40 hours of HDV. As Carter explains, “This included several interview setups, a threecamera live show, a two-camera live show, an HDV art-directed concept music video, five hours of single-chip DV (at 32kHz), and about five reels of Super-8 – both color and B&W. This all started to arrive in June, right when FCP 5 came out. This allowed me to edit in native HDV and use the multiclip option for the live and music vid stuff. Naturally, Blackmagic was ready to go with their software for FCP 5 and it worked flawlessly.”
Blackmagic Design’s commitment to keeping its drivers current with the latest trends and formats was a big plus for Carter on the EVOC project, as record label music video producers tend to shoot with the latest professional, prosumer, and consumer gear. Carter is now an HDV enthusiast because of the postproduction support for this hot format by Blackmagic and various camera manufacturers. “The downconversion from HDV from my Extreme card looks amazing,” Carter says. “The multiclip option also worked great – go Apple. For the DV and Super-8, which was transferred to DV, I started by just putting small clips I wanted into the HDV timeline and rendering. But eventually I used Compressor to batch all the material and transcode it into HDV with very good results.”
As reliable as the technology has become, some of the high drama of the opera world managed to leak into the EVOC project production process. “The music video for EVOC had some surprises,” Carter says. “The band had been given a free video by Panasonic as test material for their best HD cameras, but the result was good for Panasonic, not for EVOC. The band came up with a low-budget concept for Doug (Biro) to shoot and were very involved in the video. Even then they didn't like the first cut. The two leaders of the group came in and we worked together three additional days. Fortunately, we ended up with a video that the record label, the band, and Doug Biro liked. In the middle of all this, we had to create an SD version of a 30-second spot to go on the Panasonic screen in Times Square. I did this in a 10-bit SD timeline so there would be no need to recreate anything.”
The EVOC project – with its various delivery formats and on-the-spot changes – is a good example of modern editorial requirements in the real world. Companies like Apple and Blackmagic Design are responding to the marketplace with ever more flexible input and output options for their products. Philofilm competes in the most demanding postproduction market in the world, and Carter has no time for anything but dependable results from affordable products. “My Blackmagic card works – period,” he says. “It’s extremely well designed, clearly by someone who is intimate with all the demands that are placed on the post process. The very high quality real time downconversion capability from HDV is unequaled as far as I’ve seen.”
Philofilm is a model for 21st century postproduction. Operated by a filmmaker for bigname clients, quality of work is always the first and foremost priority. In NYC, Carter must keep up with clients relentlessly searching for the latest visual and aural experiences. Staying on the edge, however, cannot come at the cost of dependability or any distraction from the creative process. “On the hardware side, Blackmagic Design is the best thing going,” Carter says. “Their support is awesome and they are always coming out with new software and hardware in a timely fashion, right when it’s needed. They do what they do well, and are not overextending themselves or letting their product line fall apart like some competitors. Oh, and their prices are the best by far. There’s no question in my mind. Honestly, I think the problem is some pros look at the price and think it’s too low, that it can’t possibly be the best solution at that price. They would be wrong.”
Electric guitars wail and the fat lady is nowhere in sight. The new divas are rail thin and wear navel rings. Philofilm, HDV, Blackmagic, and the East Village Opera Company are all part of the act, each with its own restless energy and a need to push boundaries.
