Pogo Films News 2005 Page

PAUL LEAVES US 31.December.2005
After an amazing and fast eighteen months, Paul Schleicher has departed Pogo Films. He and his wife have flown to NY NY to live and work the metropolis life. But don’t count your chickens, yet!

Paul joined us eighteen months ago when we were really just two people, Oli and Phil. He helped us form the very fabric of the company and also the personality. He developed a vast knowledge of all things FCP and APPLE and has had a very stimulating and passionate affect upon our team.

His move to live and work in New York is something he has long held keen to his heart and it was time to make his move. We all miss him, clients and staff alike. What’s more, we wish him all of the very best.

But wait, he shall be returning to the UK in the summer and you never know, you may see him amongst us again but in a different guise.

What a sign of maturing that we now have ‘company meals’. Luckily, that’s where the corporate rubbish ends and the fun began.

There is little I can say about the pictures, so I shall let you peruse them and decide for yourselves how much fun it was.

We have been battling hard. We wont drag on about how tough it is to expand, but juggling with builders, carpet layers and landlords this week, has been a nightmare.

Kitchenette! It's all going to be lovely. We've had a few problems with the carpet colour the landlord has supplied. It will get resolved but we need to do a bit of the old Nordic flooring.

If that's not enough for us all, we are decorating the hall stairs and landing and also having fitted a new front door as shown. I have to say, it's quite a door. It must be four inches thick and by all accounts, it's made of steel and is bomb proof. Sadly this is not true for the rest of the property, so in the event of terrorist action, please gather by the front door.

The net result of all of these changes is fatigue. Despite me telling everyone that i was looking for a small thing in the pile of the carpet, I had actually fallen over and was taking forty winks.

Pictured here is a montage of how we are doing with the build. Nothing is quite as ever as fast as you think it will be, but we're getting there.

By special invite, we emerge once again at the Apple store in Regent street to do a "Made on a MAC" talk about our ITV Men and Motors, re brand. These are often interesting events as you get an insight into something you may not have come across, bee-keeping, antelope rubbing etc.

Admittedly, sometimes the audience seem more interested in free wifi but i feel deep down they were all rivoted by our talk. It consisted of a run through of the whole commissioning process and delved into Combustion FX work. Stuart illustrated how a few of the MM idents were created using Combustion and some of the issues that brought up. He's our new Visual FX whiz and it was great to see him take so comfortably to demo work!

We would like to make our next demo a bit more involved and show off some kit and software. If there is anything you would like to see us run through, please let us know.

Stuart Wilson has signed onto the Pogo team and we are delighted to have him aboard. He will be our resident Visual Effects Artist and help across a broad spectrum of our output.

His CV and reel is broad and varied and he hails from South Africa. It's a sign of his love for Pogo that he has decided to stay in the UK now we are entering the most grey and drizzly season of the year. Bon chance!

EXPANSION BEGINS

Wednesday 5th October 2005, 8:20am. Our most splendid, burly builders arrive and for the next ten hours, smash the living daylights out of the first floor. All memories of the nasty, fake Edwardian cornice is stripped out. The pretentious Greek doorway, smashed and most of the walls we wanted removed, with some violence.

Our poor but patient neighbours at Toppers and Metal Morphosis had to suffer the onslaught with us and share in the joys of the fire alarm getting stuck on. Now, it just bleeps every now and then.

This is the remnants of the old office. We haven't captured hundreds of mysterious orbs on camera, just some of the invasive dust.

Remarkably, the builders had cleared the floor and were tidied for the build next week. The next day we had to assess. One problem is the existence of a supporting wall that we did not expect. Rest assured, it's still there, but we have had to adjust our plans a bit.

We are at present, measuring and taping the floor. Scratching our heads at best use of space and how much room to allocate to Stuart's Graphics area (see news next week). It's happened, really happened and from now on it's build, decorate and equip. Watch this space.

It is always a great indicator of the passage of time. It pops up once a year, normally at the busiest time, and presents the usual suspects, usual kit and usual friends and others. We were all rather hoping for something mad this year, but have come away from IBC 2005 feeling a bit unimpressed.

Apple were pushing their Production suite at full force. It's great, but we have lots of them and there wasn't too much to report. How lovely it would be if they had introduced a cracking new accelerator card tied into a new effects and compositing package, something akin to, well, Smoke! - Just dreaming. On the same subject, Olivier was contemplating pushing away this rather nice rack of XServe equipment. He didn't though, it's his back.

AJA however, surprised us with their new Kona LH card. It's an LS on speed and handles HD. I think we shall be taking advantage of it here as part of our new expansion.

The beach was a good place to contemplate the stands though. A vast area of sand with assorted beach accessories, placed in the midst of IBC and frequented by exhausted delegates, keen for some sun, a beer and a relax. Good move, IBC. Now please concentrate on the food, you're getting there.

Enough already. Amsterdam is great but now i need to catch up on some sleep. Phil

Well, we did it. The opportunity arose to seize the floor below our present second floor suites and buoyed by market FCP activity, we signed this week, September 1st, 2005.

Ahead of us will be a lot of work, a lot of building and decorating, plenty of new equipment and new staff too. The front door will now be exclusively ours, and what's more, it will be a new door! In fact, new carpet, new hall stairs and landing decoration too. Final Cut Pro is here folks and we're not going away. Pogo Films is expanding to meet and develop the market and that's why we continue pushing to make our facility the very best it can be.

Our new floor will house three new suites: A large SD online suite, another suite for HD onlining and Grading and an exclusively graphics suite running Combustion, Motion, Shake and After Effects. We are also preparing for a future of SAN media networking and placing infrastructure there to accommodate. But our most intriguing and exciting suite is definitely our HD grading suite.
At present we are hoping to implement Final Touch with slick, Tangent controllers, HD CRT monitoring and a large, high definition plasma or LCD screen.

It's going to be exciting, fast, furious and bold and we want to thank all of those that have helped and are about to help in the expansion of our new and developing company. That's clients and suppliers, staff, family and friends alike.

For several wonderful months, Shefali has been interned with us as part of her foreign studies from the US. She carried out extensive and magnificent alterations to our website and was without question, a breeze of fresh air in our already, breezy and exciting office.
Once again, we bid farewell to a friend and colleague and wish her all the best for her future. Thank you, Shef!

JOE HAUGHEY COMES ON BOARD

On Wednesday 27th July and with great pleasure, we signed up Joe Haughey as Editor. He will be working with Dave in the edit suites and provide great experience and enthusiasm on forthcoming projects.

Joe's background is varied, crossing short films, ads and corporates. Of direct and immediate benefit will be his experience in Long form documentary editing as Pogo is building on it's history of long form completion for major broadcasters.

We welcome him aboard and look forward to a successful and long relationship.

Pogo Films exhibited at the HD Show 2005 on the 20th of June at the Langham Hotel. We constructed a fully working HD Online Suite based around Final Cut Pro.

Marketing and Facilities Manager, Paul Schleicher also gave an excellent talk on our experiences of HD work and the state of High Definition Post Production for working Post Houses. The Show was good and has inspired us to look for future events to participate in.

Throughout June, Pogo Films worked on the grading and Online for Union Commercials’ Myths, Monsters and Hobbits.

Produced and Directed by Geoff Deehan of Union Commercials, it is a film presented by Lawrence Blair about some of the most potent and awe-inspiring creatures in the world – both real and imaginary – and the remarkable and beautiful islands they inhabit. It takes us into a supernatural world of mystery and adventure where we will encounter many fabulous beasts on our quest to meet perhaps the most fabulous of all – the 3-feet tall ‘Hobbits’ discovered in 2004 on the island of Flores.

The film explores the reality of some of our most cherished myths. Some creatures with supernatural associations for the Indonesian islanders themselves inspired the first western explorers to bring home tales of dragons, giant birds, fire-dwelling phoenixes, unicorns, and small, hairy ‘men of the forest.’

The editing was done offline in-house by editor Leigh Brzeski, conformed, graded and onlined by Pogo’s Creative Director Philip Richardson.Breakfast Of Champions’ animation team James Murphy and Theresa Hilsden created stunning graphics of some of the weird and wonderful creatures in the film.

Patrick Rowland of Angell Sound mixed the programme on Pro Tools adding effects and utilising the sound design created by Ikbal Wahyudin. The Programme aired on the 20 th June on Sky One. This was our biggest broadcast project to date and showcases the strength of FCP as an Onlining and Grading tool as well as the quality of work we are capable of. Pogo Films are eager to continue working with Union on upcoming documentary projects.

Pogo Films have just completed the creation of Men and Motors’ new idents inline with the channel’s launch on Freeview.

Men and Motors Commissioning Editor, Joe Talbot handed Pogo Films the task of recreating the moving identity of the channel with a tight budget and a deadline of four weeks.

“I came to Pogo Films as they are a flexible, young and daring company, able to conceive and deliver a modern and energetic result,” said Joe Talbot.

Photographer, Marcus Tate was briefed to deliver what he does best: stylish, crisp and modern black and white images taken in a variety of locations and environments. Rob Lord of Stylophonic composed a series of intelligent and contemporary music beds and Andy Day of T-A-N-K designed the 3D logo animation.

Marcus’ images have been carefully and subtly manipulated to mystify and intrigue the eye and develop with each subsequent viewing. All are supported with an evocative word and complimented by the musical beds. The double M of the Logo is animated clear and bold. Other break bumper material is also kept simple and vibrant.

“We wanted to be brave and cut the cloth to our needs, so we conceived using Black and White still photography on top of modern musical beds.

Not something one would automatically associate with the launch of a new-look widescreen channel, but for Men and Motors target audience of 16-34 year olds, it provides a great opportunity for non-patronising more sophisticated messages,” said Philip Richardson, Creative Director, Pogo Films.

The idents were produced under guidance from Euan Hudghton and Natasha Bayford, senior marketing executives at ITV.

For the first time Pogo Films had a presence at the National Association of Broadcasters Conference in Las Vegas. Marketing Manager Paul, spent a single busy day traipsing around the Las Vegas Convention Center eying up the new and the exciting in the world of Post Production. Here are my Top 3…

The most exciting vote goes to Final Touch. An NLE Grading Solution the runs on a Mac and would act to compliment our existing suites giving Pogo the ability to grade projects with the real time speed and creative choices only previously found in dedicated suites costing around 10 times as much.

Second, one that Pogo wont be purchasing soon, but shouldn’t go unnoticed was Smoke on Linux. This package sparked my interest last year as it was so powerful but cost under £100,000. The drawbacks were that it didn’t have any HD I/O and could not communicate with FCP thereby hindering workflow. With the new version both of these requests have been answered and if I had a spare 100K I’d snatch one up quick as I could.

Finally, Soundtrack Pro, the new addition to the Pro Apps group from Apple. I don’t know how well this will integrate with our workflows yet, but it is amazing. It is a fully functional post production sound tool to mix fix and Foley projects. The gem is that we can send clips with dodgy sound (Pops, Click, Noise) from the FCP timeline and with one click really sweeten the sound files non-destructively. I am really looking forward to integrating this software.

So that was the top 3. And Vegas is now a distant blur. I did find time to get in a spot of gambling, even left the tables up $25 which was quickly spent on strippers and booze…

Pogo launched for business a year ago and on Thursday 31st March we had a celebration and invited a mixed bunch of clients and suppliers to help us get through some drinks and food that was lying about. We shall let the pictures speak for themselves:

At first impressions, our guest were shocked to see the CIA were operating our door security policy. But actually, our most superb American intern, Yaniv (in the middle looking coy!) brought along two chums from college.

Above? Dave (our top new technical man) and his other half, Emma. That is to say, they are the couple on the left. A word has to be said for our accountant, Mark Saunders on the far right. The word is, bananas.An enigmatic smile from Nick Reed to his left.

There is little that can be said for the above pictures but we would like to thank all of those that came along an made it such a fun night. There shall be more we just have to squeeze a bit of business in first.

David signs on to Pogo team
We are delighted to welcome aboard David Berezai. He signed on Monday 17th January and will be joining Pogo Films as our Technical Operator. His responsibilities are the smooth running and development of the edit suites, looking much younger than the rest of us, even Paul, and collecting stray clients.

He fits the bill for a Pogo person, friendly, intelligent and energetic towards post. We hope you get a chance to meet him soon and join with us in welcoming him aboard.