The Blog - Ideas, Observations & Opinions

I'm very excited! I'm a keen walker and spent a lot of my youth in the mountains and hills of North Wales. A couple of weeks ago we were approached by a national charity and asked if we would film a charity event:

"sure" we said, "what is it?"

"The three peaks challenge, going up Ben Nevis, Scafel Pike and Snowdon"

"Cool! when is it?"

"Two weeks!"

Well luckily I love the outdoors and even more I love a good challenge! Over the years we've filmed some interesting outdoors events including hanging off superbikes in the mountains near Rome Italy so we know what we're doing and we've got the right kit for the job. You'll see there are outdoor camcorder rain covers, boom mic windshield, and portable LED lighting, plus a comprehensive cleaning kit! It's all about attention to detail!

The first challenge is going to be packing all the kit (two video cameras and two stills cameras) into a hiking bag.

I've stripped the filming kit down to the bare essentials for an outdoors shot (assuming it's going to rain!)

I'm getting excited... and I'll keep you posted!

This is a really nice example of how shooting on a green screen allows your online web movie to be branded with your web colours. In this example the background is a gradient of colour using the two main colours of NickKempTraining.com. Several layers of graphics, text and lighting are merged with the footage to produce this elegant and stylized promotional web movie. So when you look at your website you can begin to think about which movies would really help to boost your business and how it would look.

We've just finished editing up 10 new videos to promote the excellent Global Crystals shop in Leeds. These were lovely videos to make because they are extremely informative and Bev and Mario certainly do know their stuff! A pleasure to film. This is a good example of how videos can be used to explain to customers more about your stock. By using a video you can communicate so much more in an entertaining and engaging way, which really helps increase sales and makes you stand out from the crowd...

To see all the amazing things that Bev and Mario sell check out www.globalcrystals.com. Here are some of their other videos:

Silver Jewelry for Women

Navaho Indian Jewelry

Spartmedia's been making online movies for Nick Kemp for a few years now and we've got a great understanding... so when we were drafting ideas for a new trailer to promote his Provocative Change Works technology he simply said "Do something different!"

Green Screen Shinanigans

We were filming for a 4 DVD set and at the end of filming I got Nick to act out a Minority Report styled action... we shot this on a green screen and then went to work. Using stills photography and a lot of hand made graphics we created the virtual set that you see in the video. FCS3, Final Cut Pro, Soundtrack Pro, Motion, Color and a lot of Adobe know how were used to create this 90 second trailer. It's cool, we had a lot of fun making it... and Nick Loves it!

Importantly it's getting a lot of hits on youTube! which is great because the whole point is it's an advert so the more people that see it the better!

Another happy customer :)

Well last night I took team Spartmedia to the Vue Cinema at Westwood Cross and we watched "Kick-Ass"... the film from Director Matthew Vaughn. I have to say my expectations were not high... but it turned out to be a great film! very funny and managed to be serious too without taking itself too seriously.

Some great action scenes and a nice pace throughout. Very dark at times too. And a killer quote which is far to rude to post on here...Overall it could have easily got a one way ticket on the fail bus, by trying to be too funny but they got the balance right and avoided too many cliche's, althought there are plenty of cheesy moments and subtle in-jokes about the hero genre.

Comedy: 3/5

Action: 4/5

Script Originality: 4/5

Overall: 4/5 well worth the cinema ticket.

Link to IMDB