We started our new company The Clock Factory about 2 months ago. For now it's a loose association of like-minded creative people. If all goes well we'll formalize things in the months to come.
The first project we did together as "Clock Factorians" was for Mozilla, makers of the Firefox browser. Mozilla were having their annual meeting which was to take place simultaneously in Brussels, Toronto and Santa Clara over a four-day period. Our job was to create an inspirational video that reflected the flavor, energy and values of Mozilla and the "Mozillians" which was to be shown on Sunday during the wrap-up presentations.
This was going to be challenging. We were going to have camera crews in each city - one each in Brussels and Toronto, two in Santa Clara - uploading their footage to our server over the course of the event. With 4 crews shooting 10 hours a day I knew there was a good chance we could be looking at over 100 hours of footage by end of day Saturday. Creating a way to manage this tidal wave of media was going to be absolutely necessary if we had any hope of succeeding.
Additionally we knew we would need graphics - lower thirds and titles - to identify the various Mozilla senior staff and so on. These would need to be designed, approved and animated before we began the process of editing.
So as the editor, the first order of business was generating naming conventions for the project. Naming conventions are a series of 3-letter codes that are strung together separated by underscores that make managing media a lot easier than other haphazard systems. It makes organizing and searching easy, because if you understand the conventions you can spit out a code - say, "moz_bru_fri_int_ceo" (which would mean MOZilla BRUssels FRIday INTerview CEO) and everything in that category will appear. It's much better than the haphazard approach that most people take with descriptive names, since if you forget the description you end up having to scroll through hundreds of shots to find what you're looking for.
Once that was out of the way I developed several designs for lower thirds and titles based on the graphics Mozilla had developed for the event. We shared them with the client who liked one in particular and after a couple of tweaks I rendered out lower thirds for all the senior people we knew would be attending and saved the After Effects project so I could add more lower thirds or revise existing ones for whatever reason.
Meanwhile my friend and fellow Clock Factorian Paul Jaffe was shooting time lapses of the San Francisco skyline at sunrise. Our plan was to get time-lapse sunrises from each city as a way to start the video. After a couple of tries Paul got what he wanted and we were set.
On the eve of production start we were feeling pretty good about where we were. Aubrey, another Clock Factorian had set up the server; Amelia, also a Clock Factorian who was the director for this project had organized our shot list for the 3 day period, scouted the location thoroughly, gotten together a great crew and we were confident that we were well prepared.
There was just one small problem: we had no internet.
We'd been in the space for a month and we'd been promised repeatedly by the giant monopolistic cable corporation that we would have internet service "soon" but the date kept slipping and here we were faced with a project in which we absolutely, positively HAD to have internet service.
What to do?
Part 2 comes next week.
