BOC Week 9 Photo Challenge - Producer's Choice

I was the producer for a team production. We re-sound designed the movie Night of the Living Dead (1968). What we were in production for was Foley, ADR, SFX, Scoring, Mixing/Mastering, and Video Editing. We edited down the movie into 42 minutes that would fit in an hour block of television time. I was in charge of Foley production and had all the master tracks for all the individual area stems. I did all the audio editing as well. Once I received everyone's individual work, I was responsible in putting it all together as we did our weekly screening previews of or progress up until the due date. This whole experience was alot of fun but very tedious and frustrating work. Working with others is not easy but we all pulled it through and delivered a great final product. The pre-production documentation was not a delightful experience but it is something that needs to get done for all your spotting sheets to keep all recording sessions run smoothly with an outlined schedule. For these "mockup" job assignments, I had to fire the General Manager at midpoint production and hire a new classmate to fill in. I did the necessary to make the production process what it needed to be and with more strict deadlines. This project was alot of fun!

BOC Week 8 Photo Challenge - You as the Professional

Attending The Art Institute and moving along through my courses, I have learned from fellow colleagues that having your own equipment helps you when doing projects for school and freelance work. Without equipment no work can be done. Let alone, not having the right equipment work can't be done well. An advantage that the students have at my school is that we can check out equipment we want anytime for 24 hours. This includes HD professional cameras, microphones, cables, lighting equipment, etc. Unfortunately for me, I live about 24 miles away from my school. It is not very advantageous for me to check out equipment to be returned the next day when I don't have class and have to make long drives roundtrip. Due to this fact, I started investing some money to provide myself with better and professional equipment for my projects and my work. I have built up my list with studio monitors, microphones, headphones, audio interface/preamp, hard drives, audio recorder, audio and video editing softwares, audio plugins, and other miscellaneous stuff. I don't know how I was able to buy all this, but as you can see from the picture that I tweeted, "I'm just a pro."

BOC Week 7 Photo Challenge - Screenplay Cover

For my commercial scriptwriting class we were assigned to write commercials every week. One of the assignments was to write a Public Service Announcement (PSA) for an existing company. I chose to do my PSA on Save the Music foundation. I chose this one because it is important to me that children are able to have the opportunity to have music programs in their school. It's been a huge controversy for many years now because the first programs that are cut financially are music classes while keeping all sports. I am against cutting funds for music because without music the world would not be the same without it. Music is the only universal language. It is also proven that children learn and concentrate better when they are involved in music classes than when they are not. My PSA was about a composer who is writing his next orchestra piece in his apartment. There are no words and all you hear are bits and pieces that are happening in his brain. He writes on staff paper. He gets ready into a tuxedo. He gets in a cab rushing out to make it to the concert. He is late. He gets to the theatre and runs to the music stand to give the first downbeat to the orchestra when then he realizes as he looks up that there are empty seats in from of him and looks behind him to the audience to an empty theatre. Silence.

BOC Week 6 Photo Challenge - Special Effects

This is a screenshot picture of a project that I was working on for my Advanced Editing class. The theme was "Tell a Story" so it was completely free game of what I could do to film and edit a short story. Since this was my 3rd video editing class, I wanted to challenge myself and bring something new and different to the table. In my head I envisioned that someone had stolen the "Welcome to Las Vegas" sign on Las Vegas Blvd, and there would be a detective and witnesses to unravel the story of what really happened. I also wanted it to be comedic. I went to the strip and asked random people to answer the question "Who was it? and What did you see?" This was a really fun and funny experience to deal with drunk people, which made the video the better. As for the detective, I for sure wanted him to be in silhouette and I used a practical effect where I took a lighting kit and aimed it to the wall with a black background to have the silhouette effect which worked! I was proud of myself in accomplishing my vision into my work.

BOC Week 6 - Monty Lapica

Monty Lapica is a Las Vegas native who has aspired to be a producer, director and writer in the film industry. He is the founder of Thought Division Media Company “creates television ads, and offers Internet and multimedia services for major companies worldwide” (Business Press, Akers). His company is in Las Vegas because it made sense to him to offer services from his hometown, plus that Las Vegas is not as competitive as Los Angeles. Although he enjoys the advertising aspect, he enjoys being a filmmaker more because it is more fun. At the age of 24 he wrote, directed, co-produced and was the actor for his documentary film “Self-Medicated” in 2004 (IMDb). “Lapica has given back to his hometown through the creation of the Las Vegas International Film Festival, the largest independent film festival in Nevada (Business Press, Akers). Monty Lapica has become so far and successful because he has been determined enough to follow his true passion, film. How he got there is through networking in Los Angeles and Las Vegas companies, and building a reputation of himself. He started out as a small company just doing commercial jobs but his clients also were interested in web and mobile production in which he then expanded into doing that as well because it was high in demand. Lapica’s career has blossomed into greatness and still has more to go to become the next Steven Spielberg.

BOC Week 5 Photo Challenge - In the Director's Chair

This is a picture that I Photoshopped myself into for this week's photo challenge. I found this picture of the writers and director at a pre-production meeting of Saturday Night Live (SNL). I love this show because comedy is one of my favorite genres and I have a great sense of humor. I have always wanted to be a part of SNL in some kind of way. I have even considered myself wanting to be one of the characters and make people laugh. Making people laugh is one of my favorite things because when that happens, I know that at that moment, any kind of stress that I have and anyone else has, is relieved from it. My skills in Photoshop is not that great, but I at least put myself in there with a laughing candid picture along with the others in the picture. Especially next to one of the writers of the show. Maybe one day I can be sitting on that table or being a part of any other production process for SNL.

BOC Week 5 - Market Analysis - Customers

The Beat Café will fulfill the demand for a venue that supports live music and a place to relax and enjoy good coffee and good company. I will draw my customers mainly from the university area located around Paradise to attract students, faculty, young professionals and most importantly, locals. There is a majority of café-restaurants in the city, but very few catering strictly to coffee and live music. A typical customer ranges between 18-45 years old, both males and females will equally frequent the venue and we will serve customers from all backgrounds and income statuses, including students, local residents in the neighborhood, tourists, and professionals. This wide array of groups is all potentially strong customer segments. The benefit of this mix of customers is that it helps maintain consistent business throughout the year. For example, while tourism is strong all year long in Las Vegas, it peaks during the summer months. Conversely, the student population is not as strong during the summer as it is from September through June of each year. Also, by appealing to several market segments, Beat Café does not become overly dependent on any single consumer group. For example, several local coffeehouses with primarily student customers do poorly during the non-school months. They must also market themselves anew each year to the incoming students. I will avoid these peaks and valleys in business with a mix of customers.

BOC Week 4 Photo Challenge - Movie Poster

This is a movie poster for a short film that I had originally composed the music for. It was for the 48 Hour Film Festival. The chosen genre for our group was "silent film." I originally wasn't participating in this event, but I joined later because they needed a pianist who knew ragtime and can compose on the spot. This is where I got the call and became on board! It was a really great opportunity to experience the real world and how the audio/video world work in the film industry. It got intense and extremely stressful but myself and the engineering team were able to pull it off, barely! It was surprising that alot of the music you hear in this short was previously recorded as improvisation without a locked video edit, or a guide for that matter and still worked when plugging it to different scenes. One of my favorite parts was playing along with when Chap was trying to sip out of the other guy's drink. It's a great comedic short. Click here to watch Lady and the Chap!

BOC Week 3 Photo Challenge - Story Board

Here is a storyboard for a commercial that I'm going to shoot within the next two weeks. It's going to be a 30 second commercial in advertising this restaurant. It's located at the end of Chinatown on Spring Mountain and Decatur. The cuisine is Argentinian and also providing and serving other south American countries. Argentinians are known for their mate and their assorted meats, "parilladas". It's served on a grill plate with different cuts of meats and types. There are different variations on which one to get. How I'm going to do this video production is have two cameramen (a friend and me) and we're going to capture outside appearance, inside appearance, closeups on the chefs cooking, the bakery, the merchandise, and designated plates desired to show alone. There won't be an announcer, it will only be candid video capture and the information will be all voice overed. It should be fun! 

BOC Week 2 Photo Challenge - Professional Photo

This is a picture of me engineering at Digital Insight recording studio. The client was a local rapper artist who was working on his next album. Alongside, he also brought in other artists to be featured as vocals in some verses or as background vocals. In the live room we used a tube condenser Audix microphone that ran into the Avalon tube condenser preamp. This was a pretty cool experience because I was able to work with real clients and to utilize my knowledge on the spot and work on a timed schedule. Not only is making the client happy about what he wants, at the same time it is also the engineer’s job to rush things along to not waste time and make the process long. I was able to keep that in line. Usually when recording rap artists, you record the same verse at least three times, each on a separate track, panned left and right and the one with overdub to exaggerate and bring out certain words pop out as the artists desires. The whole process was about three hours to record three different songs at its entirety. I was able to obtain and perform proper etiquette as an engineer and made the workplace enjoyable for everyone present. It was really fun to be able to engineer in a real life, professional situation!  

BOC Week 1 Photo Challenge - Xtranormal Film Festival: Courage!

For this assignment, we had to participate in an online film festival. We were given the xtranormal.com website to make an account and to make up a video that is a minute long. You can choose different characters and themes. I didn't really know what I would do, but it had to be comical. Upon deciding what I wanted to write about, it dawned on me that people don't stand up for what they believe and let life pass by and take crap from people and situations. That's where I decided to base it off "courage." Being in the entertainment industry, you have to be able to be courageous in putting your work out to the public. Even if your ideas and work get shut down, persistence and having a little faith and courage will one day make it big. There are many examples where people are able to be successful and because they don’t know how to achieve that, it never happens. Even if you didn't think it would. At first it reminded me of the Wizard of Oz, and so I took a bit from that and added some other things on my own. I titled it Courage!