DIE HARDLY WORKING

We premiered our latest corporate video “Brand New Spaces” in front of 470 patrons at the annual Parent’s Quest for the Cure Gala in Calgary.  This yearly video showcases the work of Kids Cancer Care Foundation (KCCFA), an organization that helps children with cancer have the opportunity to be kids again.

KCCFA raises approximately $500,000 annually through these types of events and video has always played a very important role in their fundraising initiatives.  There wasn’t a single dry eye in the house after “Brand New Spaces” played at the sold-out event, so you can imagine the results.

Writer and Executive Producer Paul Lowey said, “Creating a video like this really takes its toll on the producers and a lot of tears flow during the filming.  An emotionally driven topic like childhood cancer can make it really tough to sift through hours and hours of footage to create something that makes an impact and also doesn’t exploit.”

All of the filming occurred near Calgary, Alberta during their annual KCCFA Summer Camps in 2009 and features original music by Calgary singer/songwriter Michael Bernard Fitzgerald. Paul previously wrote, directed and produced their 2008 Video “Still Beautiful” while living in Calgary and has loved working with KCCFA again from his new home-base in Vancouver.

Gloo Studio's Mike Ritchie and Director Todd Strauss-Schulson discuss the process of making "Die Hardly Working".

This just came in today from the cool guy who did all the sound for Pixar Intro Parody.  We personally loved what Carl put into the Pixar video.  He hit the nail on the head with everything Mike had requested and brought the video to a whole new level of extreme awesomeness. 

Anyways - check out his interview below. He mentions Mike and Gloo Studios around minute 8, but that doesn't mean you should stop listening after that.  If you love sound design, then you should hear what Carl from Sondrol Music has to say.

Carl said:

I was interviewed recently on the "123 Film!" podcast- mostly about my music and sound work with collegehumor.com.  It was very humbling as their usual guests are Oscar/Emmy winners, the president of the WGA, dreamworks employees, etc.  Crazy.  It's 45 min long, but if you're REALLY curious here's a link:
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/123-film/2010/01/29/guest-carl-sondrol--film-composer

It's not much, but we just finished graphics for a project parodying a video by Google to showcase their new chat program called Google Wave. We had to recreate all of the screens in the video. We did it by rebuilding everything in Adobe Illustrator as a vector image so that we could zoom into it without losing quality. We used the same technique for our videos We didn't Start the Flame War, Internet Distractions and MSN. It's a bit time consuming to rebuild everything, but in the end it pays off.

Enjoy!

***Warning! This video contains mature themes and one (written) bad word.

MSN is launching a new site very soon, and College Humor made 3 videos for Microsoft to introduce the features for them. The videos are genuine and not a parody of MSN. The videos feature Joel McHale from NBC's "Community", Julie Bowen from "Happy Gilmore" and Brian Baumgartner from "The Office". We were asked to make the screens for the video and the title slate at the end which we did happily.

The videos can be seen here on MSN's website:
http://www.tourmsn.com

You will need Microsoft Silverlight to view the page. If you don't already have it, when you click the link, it will be made available to install.