Rob Sim, president and CEO of the Sim Group of Companies, today announced that Alexandra Raffé, vice president of production for Thunderbird Films, is the recipient of the 2015 Douglas James Dales Industry Builder Award. The award was presented to Raffé at the annual PS Dinner on the Hill, held during the Canadian Media Production Association Prime Time Conference in Ottawa.
Modern VideoFilm has appointed Julie Currin as vice president of sales/feature film. Currin will lead a new effort to grow Modern’s share of the post-production market for motion pictures and enhance its relationships with major studios, independent producers and filmmakers. Her background includes more than 15 years in senior sales and marketing roles, including posts with Deluxe, Laser Pacific and Technicolor.
Videographer Todd Ruel, who shoots video stock footage and licenses it through Getty Images, recently took his new Panasonic AJ-PX270 P2 HD handheld camcorder to the Detroit and Chicago Auto Shows to document car manufacturers’ latest offerings.
Creative editorial company Beast has named post-production industry veteran Valerie Petrusson as president. A co-founding member, Petrusson returns to Beast after steering sales and marketing for commercial and feature projects at parent company Deluxe. In her new role, Petrusson will be responsible for overseeing Beast's seven offices across New York, Santa Monica, San Francisco, Chicago, Atlanta, Detroit and Austin.
Faroudja Enterprises today announced that the company has been granted three more patents. The patents improve F1’s video streaming and file compression efficiency without reducing perceived quality. The F1 solution utilizes any conventional encoder (MPEG-2, MPEG-4, HEVC, etc.) on the market, without any codec modifications.
Award-winning cinematographer Theo Van de Sande, ASC recently completed his second pilot, CBS’s Evil Men He shot it with Panasonic’s new VariCam 35 4K camera/recorder, which Van de Sande calls “the first 4K offering I feel comfortable with, an absolutely modern camera with tremendous scope, an embracing image, and whose dual native ISOs of 800/5000 will completely change the business.”
Dr. T. Colin Campbell, best-selling author of The China Study, and his son Director Nelson Campbell, are teaming up to preview the feature-length documentary PlantPure Nation. The forthcoming film examines the political and economic factors that suppress information on the benefits of plant-based nutrition, while making the connections of this idea to larger issues such as medical practice, farming, and food deserts. The promotional tour mirrors the film’s story of three people working to spread the word about one of the most important health breakthroughs of all time
The 2015 NAB Technology Summit on Cinema, produced in partnership with SMPTE, will be dedicated to exploring the technical and creative innovations that will define the cinema experience of tomorrow. The two-day summit, titled Building the Future of Storytelling, will take place April 11-12 at the Las Vegas Convention Center.
David Semel, who directs commercials through Accomplice Media, has a history of directing pilots that become hit television series. In his latest television outing, based on the award-winning Phillip K. Dick novel, The Man in the High Castle, Semel engages in a frightening, but enthralling, game of “What if?” Produced for Amazon by Ridley Scott the story is an alternate history set in the aftermath of World War II; in this telling, the Nazis and their Japanese allies were the victors. Semel directed the pilot, which is currently available through Amazon Prime’s instant video service.
Union Station’s Beaux-Arts facade was recently transformed into a canvas for The Monument Comes Alive, a 3D projection mapping video that was the centerpiece for the iconic Kansas City building’s centennial celebration.
