Los Angeles based Whirled Creative recently turned to AlphaDogs once again to complete color and audio on the 30 second pre-roll for Fireside Chats With The President. “We already had a great experience with AlphaDogs colorist Sean Stack and positive results in the delivery of Google’s Zeigeist 2012 Year-In-Review so it was really a no-brainer that AlphaDogs was our facility of choice to complete the finish for Fireside Chats ” said executive producer Jenna Cedicci. The first presidential hangout was held in January of 2012 where five people were selected to ask the president a question during a live Google hangout. Brett Fallentine commercial director at Whirled Creative likened the event to FDR’s Fireside chats thus coining the term Fireside Hangouts. Cedicci and AlphaDogs colorist Sean Stack teamed up once again to decide the best approach for completing the finish on the picture. “Sean is a pleasure to work with. His knowledge and experience help us in achieving the best possible results ” said Cedicci. Fireside chats required Stack to work with footage from a variety of locations throughout the United States. The clips included an urban street setting a University campus workers building a housing subdivision the view from inside a hotel room and finally a typical office. “This project was a great example on how important it is to communicate with the client ” said Stack. “My first instinct was to have the shots flow together with consistent color tone from scene to scene. But that was the opposite of director Fallentine’s idea who chose those shots with the intention to have the viewer jump around from place to place all over America.” To create the desired look and offer appeal to a variety of audiences Stack added different tones and contrasts to give each setting its own personality and feel. Stack comments “I may have gone down the wrong road without the consultation and discussion that took place with the director.” AlphaDogs junior mixer Curtis Fritsch was in charge of fixing some tricky audio clips that included various sound bytes from the original FDR Fireside Chats that spanned a little over a decade. Less than stellar quality of the radio recordings changes in FDR’s voice as he aged and evolving technology of the time period made fixing the audio particularly challenging. Cedecci was quick to recognize the audio mix could be a potentially time-consuming process. “ We alerted Curtis of the issue ahead of time and when we came in to start on the mix he had already smoothed it out considerably ” he said. “He was very passionate about working on the project and we appreciated his attention to detail. The final result was clean concise audio and a beautiful picture. We’ve had two solid experiences with AlphaDogs and look forward to using their services beyond audio and color for future projects.”
