Avant Productions

Category: Creative

Video Production with a Purpose

We love our clients! From national broadcasts to corporate production and non-profit promos, we have a passion to bring our clients projects and ideas to life. Yet, it’s always great when a project comes to our Orange County video studio that helps us reflect on our own lives. That’s what we get with the monthly green screen shoots we do with Cloud Townsend Resources.

With their award-winning books about life, love and boundaries, we are now able to transform the latest Cloud Townsend content into a video series that streams on their website and social media pages. Yet, Dr. Cloud and Dr. Townsend are pros with co-writing over 20 books, totaling 5 million in sales. They know that their ability to reach an audience is crucial, so we had to transform our green screen studio into an opportunity for these clinical psychologists to be able to teach what they know so well, while also being able to personally connect with the viewer.

Our task to combine such intimate topics like grief, forgiveness, depression with the technology of our green screen production and clarity of high-definition video to stream on the web is crucial. We know this to be a key component to build a virtual relationship with an audience that needs to feel a connection for trust with such heavy topics. We love these types of shoots! It’s like our own therapy session in the studio, editing room and streaming on the web.

April 25, 2011
Transforming Live Events

We love it when we can get out of our video studio in Orange County and load up our high-definition cameras and equipment for on-location video production. Yet, live events can be tricky. We have to stay focused on the task of transforming an empty room into something memorable. Whenever a client comes to us to bring a live event to life, we know that it needs to be a total experience. From setting the right mood with stage and lighting, to correct audio equipment and speaker positioning and making sure the visuals projected on the screens from our cameras can be seen by every attendee.

Well, practice makes perfect and this week’s event for CWS Capital Partners is a production they have been counting on us to deliver excellence for, for the past 10 years. While this live event of their annual investor’s meeting may only last for a few short hours, we make sure to capture every moment in high-definition to add another dynamic to the evening. Not only does this allow for us to project the image of each speaker onto two 20-foot screens for the entire room to easily see, the “recorded event” can be shared and relived for years to come no matter how technology advances.

At AVANT, we are always thinking ahead for our clients – how can your project be “future proofed”? How can your video expand and connect even further than you ever dreamed? Give us a call. We’d love to be a part of the team that brings your ideas to life!

April 6, 2011
Images Come to Life

At AVANT, we love going beyond our green screen studio to shoot video productions on-location. Our recent high-definition video production for Ambassador Advertising, a five-minute promotional video set to music, was just such an opportunity.

The concept for this latest video centers on a young couple expecting their first child. While looking through a family photo album, they reminisce about the past and anticipate the future. We were able to take this project to the next level by developing the concept of photographs coming to life, giving the audience a glimpse into this young couple’s life.

The shoot itself went amazingly well. The real challenge was in the post production phase of video editing. Our effects team employed advanced motion tracking techniques combined with good-old-fashion hand rotoscoping to add post production images to the live video shots. All the hard work was worth it to see the still photos perfectly integrated with live video.

Yet, the most interesting part of the shoot was that our lead actress was actually pregnant and only a few short weeks away from her due date. With such a narrow time window we worked hard to finish shooting all of her vital scenes. With some quick and efficient prep work in setting up equipment and redressing the set, we were able to maximize our shooting time, and less than a month later we returned again to shoot her and her husband with their brand new baby boy.

The results were inspirational and the memories will last a lifetime!

March 7, 2011
The Art of a Green Screen Shoot

We recently had True Entertainment in our green screen studio in Orange County to shoot a new video production. Typically their teams are working on their new shows like “Real Housewives of Atlanta,” but today they came to Avant for a new video to add to their long list of reality and documentary programming.

Yet, with each green screen video shoot, we have to anticipate every step of the complications that could come up. We always have to discuss the green spill. Is it too dark, too bright, uneven, the right shade of green, or should we bring in the blue screen canvas? At Avant we take pride in our experience to give our clients the best lighting for each scene…especially in those trouble areas like the hair.

We have tested our lighting equipment, and dialed in our high-definition cameras, to make sure that every project that comes our of our video studio facility in Orange County is the best it can be. This ensures that each and every one of our clients walks away with a clean image to head to their post production phase. Yet, most of clients don’t finish their green screen project with just the shooting. They continue their project by stepping from the studio and into our editing facilities so that the start and finish of their project can all be completed under one roof. We apply our same talents from the studio into the video editing bay to make sure that every video comes out with the best key possible to pull the green for an incredible image for broadcast or the web.

Because after all, green screens are the wave of the future. Can’t live with them. Can’t live without them.

January 31, 2011
Video Production On-Location

One of the perks of having our video production facility is getting to go beyond the studio and record video on-location all around Orange County. Such was the case with our most recent high-definition video production in beautiful Newport Beach overlooking Beacon Bay and Balboa Island. AVANT teamed up with Ambassador Advertising to shoot a five minute promotional video set to music.

A noteworthy piece of equipment that we used during the shoot was the jib. With smooth vertical and horizontal motion, we were able to pick up flawless shots perfect for creating the scene. We definitely achieved our “glory shots.”

All around, it was a successful day of shooting and a great way to kick off this music video for one of our first video productions of 2011. Take a look at the preview below…

January 14, 2011
Video Production Facility Turned Photography Studio

At Avant, we’ve always been known throughout Orange County for our green screen, video production facility. But, did you know that we also love doing still photo shoots? Well, we pulled out all the stops last week for an east coast start-up, Automatic Apparel – full lighting setup, incredible clothing line, models and green screen backdrop so that each picture could be transformed onto any background for publicity use.

The outcome? SUCCESS!

BEFORE PHOTOS:

December 13, 2010
Green Screen. Mobile. Streaming. No problem!
Recently, one of our clients came to us with a video production challenge. They wanted to produce a series of training videos with some unique criteria…
- The videos would be shot in one take on green screen so that slides and information could be shown in the background.
- The videos had to be future proofed for Blu-ray and other formats down the line.
- Each training video would be encoded for multiple platforms including mobile devices so over 600 sales reps could easily utilize the files on the go.
- And as always, the production had to be done on time and on budget.
Our response? “No problem!”

Our high-definition production shoot went smoothly on our green-screen stage. Our talent (also our client) was overjoyed at using our teleprompter to read his script directly into the camera. He was reticent at first but told us “this is going so much easier that I ever imagined” after only 10 minutes of shooting. We were able to get our footage with a minimum of re-takes and finished shooting early.

For post production of over 2 hours of hi-def raw footage we chose to use the Avid for this particular project. The Avid’s AMA architecture allowed us to directly import the camera footage and begin editing immediately. Also, the Avid’s Spectramatte keyer produced superior results with real-time previews.

As befitting a project destined for online and mobile delivery, we supplied all preview and final files to our client via FTP. Aside from his initial shoot he never had to leave his busy consulting practice to see how things were progressing.

As a result, we have produced a series of 4 videos that will be utilized across the country in mobile form and will be ready for high-definition distribution on Blu-ray when the time is right.
November 22, 2010
Web MD comes to AVANT

Web MD recently came to our green screen production studio in Costa Mesa to finish one of their latest videos for their website. With teams flying in from San Francisco and New York, Web MD found AVANT’s Orange County video production facility to be the perfect fit to ensure their project was completely successfully.

AVANT’s video production facilities became the hub of action as we worked side-by-side with WebMD’s crew to ensure the picture and sound for the recent web video was of pristine quality.

November 5, 2010
Join Us On Facebook

Quick! Log onto Facebook and join us at http://www.Facebook.com/AvantProductions – get updates on what’s happening in the office and be the first to know about exclusive offers for video production services.

November 3, 2010
Logomark – Tritan Water Bottle

One of a series of short product videos for Logomark of Orange County highlighting their Tritan Water Bottle.

Production, Editing, Color Grading, and Motion Graphics.

October 20, 2010