This month AbelCine marks 25 years of supporting filmmakers with the tools of their craft. To celebrate, AbelCine opens the doors of its Burbank facility on Saturday, October 18 from 10am to 5pm for an anniversary event featuring: industry discussions and seminars, as well as raffles, refreshments and a great opportunity to connect with colleagues.
Post-production and visual effects company Encore has hired Andy Gizzarelli as vice president, head of production for its Los Angeles office. Gizzarelli will oversee Encore Hollywood’s team of post-production supervisors, in addition to producing shows in-house – starting with the third season of Netflix’s House of Cards in 4K.
Pakistan post house Darkroom Asia has won a major contract with ARY Films as a strategic partner in providing post-production and VFX-related services. Darkroom Asia CEO Salman Hasan credits the company’s new SGO Mistika 4K system with sealing the deal. The first project was the feature film Main Hoon Shahid Afridi, which some say marks the rebirth of the Pakistan film industry.
Kicking off the 2014 season of Canada’s Triple Crown of Thoroughbred Racing, Toronto’s Woodbine Racetrack hosted The Queen’s Plate Stakes last month. The event is the longest continuously run stakes race in North America, and this year marked its 155th anniversary. To ensure not a moment of horseracing action was missed, the production of the event included use of For-A’s FT-One 4K variable frame rate camera, used in conjunction with For-A’s ZE-One 4K extraction system.
Sound Devices has established Sound Devices Europe and opened a new European Service Center in Berlin-Adlershof, Germany’s leading science and technology park. The new facility has been established to extend product service and repair to the company’s growing international customer base.
The Room, the boutique finishing facility located within Technicolor-PostWorks, New York, recently completed two months of post-production finishing on The Giver, the new film from director Phillip Noyce and The Weinstein Company. In a project involving numerous creative and technical challenges, the facility handled editorial conforming and color grading. The latter included applying the finishing touch to an onscreen world that undergoes a gradual transition from black & white to color.
Based on Peter Rees’ book The Other ANZACs, ANZAC Girls tells the true story of five military nurses from Australia and New Zealand who served with Allied forces during World War I. Witnessing the horrors of war, the women experienced severe hardships while tending to the wounded and formed bonds of friendship that would last a lifetime. As series producer Lisa Scott (who produced the series with Felicity Packard) explains, the series “offers unique insight by showing how the war affected people, other than soldiers on the line.” The first episode premiered on Australian TV earlier this month and got exceptional ratings around Australia and much critical acclaim.
In a technology tour that covered several U.S. cities last week, Dolby executives provided an overview on the evolution of its Atmos sound platform in both professional and home markets. Among the highlights was the news that Dolby has developed two new technologies for home theatres and this year will unveil the first loudspeaker to carry the Dolby logo.
British cinematographer and Polecam owner operator John Gillan was booked to cover the Azores leg of the Red Bull Cliff Diving competition. He flew in to the Azores on his way to the small island where it would take place, 1000 miles from the nearest city and two days away from shooting the event. It was not the ideal place to hear from the airline that brought him there: "Sorry, Mr. Gillan, we’ve lost one of your Polecam flight cases."
Luma Pictures has standardized render management and data processing across studios with Thinkbox Software’s Deadline. Having purchased more than 400 seats of Deadline, Luma was able to easily integrate the software into both in-house and off-the-shelf tools within its Linux-based pipeline.
