the really useful media company

Some of our favorite events we have shot this year for our biggest client, The New School, were Sandra Day O’Connor at the Games 4 Change Festival, Jeffrey Toobin on the Supreme Court, and a panel of food writers remembering Julia Child. Here’s a funny excerpt from the last one, Molly O’Neill’s dead-on impression of Julia Child responding to criticism from PETA.

We have a number of clients at The New School, including the India China Institute, the Graduate Program in International Affairs, The New School for General Studies, the Vera List Center for Art and Politics, and the Wolfson Center for National Affairs. The New School makes most of their filmed events available online through Fora.tv, an interactive video sharing site that presents thought and discourse from some of the world’s foremost think tanks, conferences and institutions. Follow the last link for many hours of fascinating debates, lectures and interviews.

In July and August, we wrote and edited a promo trailer for I Dig Tanzania, a novel summer camp organized by Global Kids, the Field Museum of Chicago, and the Encyclopedia of Life. In collaboration with Global Kids and the other funders, we collaboratively scripted the trailer based on footage and photos shot by the teachers, students and researchers in the field in Tanzania. The footage and photos were of varying quality and size, from Flip cameras to consumer HD cameras, with on-board microphones, and all handheld. We had to massage and sweeten some of the audio and video considerably to make them easy on the eyes and ears, and the clients were happy with the results.

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In May, the really useful media company’s Dan Winckler joined Global Kids’ Virtual Video Project, an after-school program, to replace a departing instructor. In the VVP, the GK Leaders (all high school and college age students) choose an issue of global significance to research and create a film to promote awareness of it. This year the students wrote their film about the effects of racism on youth access to education. And did we mention it was entirely shot as machinima in Second Life? In addition to guiding the students through final scripting, shooting, and editing with co-teacher Tabitha Tsai, Dan assembled the students’ iMovie edits in Final Cut Pro, adding niceties like audio cleanup/sweetening, lipsync tightening, background sounds, color correction, and some custom graphics of the students’ happy faces for the end credits. You can watch their film Race to Equality below and read more about the process on the Global Kids blog.

On March 15th, 2008 the Really Useful Media Company did a live, two-camera, high-definition shoot of the operas Bastianello and Lucrezia, presented by the New York Festival of Song at Caramoor, a performing arts center in Katonah, New York. After intensive post-production (editing, color correction, DVD authoring), the operas are now up for all to enjoy the performers’ world-class musicianship. Here below is a custom player we made for NYFOS to put on their site, showcasing the two operas. The videos have yet to be released by NYFOS. Many thanks to Benton-C, whose experience, expertise and all-around-nice-guy-ness shines through in the videography (wide shots) and color correction. Thanks also to Adam Abeshouse, the audio engineer and recordist who mixed the superb recording you can hear in these videos. The full credits are after the jump.

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