New F11 Rentals Las Vegas Studio Cyclorama - Open for Business
The studio cyc game in Vegas isn’t the easiest to navigate, especially for out of town productions that don’t know the offerings. Sure, there are some decent places but most are too small for many productions, don’t deliver on amenities or are out of the way and not convenient for talent or crew. That’s all changed with the opening of F11 Rentals Studio Cyc. This newly built stage offers a 3 sided cyclorama, 26’x35’x36′ with 18′ tall clearance. The stage offers free wifi, a secured yard with 12×14 rollup door and ample parking. The conditioned stage is open for business at this time and will continue to upgrade it’s offering with new makeup/wardrobe space, green room, lofted production overlook and state of the art lighting grid, all of which are coming soon.
The space is large enough to accommodate vehicles, multiple talent productions, photo shoots, music videos and various types of large rehearsals for the entertainment industry. The F11 network speed runs on fiber and offers plenty of upload and download speed for live streams productions. The studio is situated next to the airport and is conveniently located not far from the strip. To make things even more convenient F11 Rentals is one of the largest production rental houses in Las Vegas which makes it easy to add gear to any shoot in the studio before or during the shoot itself. They also offer crew to fill out any production needs.
This studio, now open, will soon be the premiere cyclorama stage in Las Vegas and it’s exciting to finally have a space of this quality in the city. Contact F11 to arrange a visit if you’re interested or to go their site to book it in 2020 or beyond. This studio has the FiveSix stamp approval.
Shooting in a Green Room - No, Not that type of Green Room!
Corporate video production can have it's challenges. One of these challenges is locations as we don't often get to choose where we shoot. If we're lucky, we get a scout day or pictures of the location we're supposed to shoot in or we've been there before and already know what we're walking into. In these cases, we are prepared with the correct lighting and grip set up to make everything look great. But sometimes we go into a location blind as to what we'll be working with. At these times it's best to bring a versatile lighting set up because sometimes a green room is exactly that.
Recently in Las Vegas, we walked into a room where the windows had such a strange tint on them that all the light coming into the room was an eerie green in color. These were large floor to ceiling windows and there was no time or enough crew to gel them accordingly. Luckily we had brought four Litepanel Gemini 1 x 1 LED panels. With these lights we were able to dial in the amount of green to match the light coming in from the windows and then after that, it was simply white balancing the Canon C300 Mark II cameras accordingly. The room, despite looking eerily haunted, looked perfect on camera and the subjects, instead of looking sickly, appeared vibrant. It's a simple technique but would have been much more difficult to pull off without the right tools. It's one of the things FiveSix is known for, everything turned out great in a less than ideal situation. Effective video production is about being prepared, even if you're tossed into a glowing green room.
Andrea - Showing At The Best Dam Short Film Festival
Studio FiveSix was selected to show our first short film, Andrea, at the Best Dam Short Film Festival in Boulder City. Andrea shows on Feb. 15th in the 8:15pm block of films. We're very excited to be included and are happy that our premiere showing is going to be in neighboring Boulder City. There was a good deal of work and planning that went into creating Andrea, mainly because it was our first narrative piece and we were finding our way through the process. Since then we have shot a second short film called Maybe Tomorrow that is still in post production but will be out shortly. We'll be at the festival this weekend so if you are there, stop by and say hi.
Render This - New Mac Pro Arrives at FiveSix
Sometimes you just need a little extra power to spice things up in the office. Here at FiveSix Productions, we've been running a few different workstations for some time now, a couple mac trashcans from awhile back and a couple newer imac pro machines. But with the new Mac Pro out, we decided our Edit 1 Bay could use an extra boost. So far so good. We run the Adobe Creative Cloud suite working primarily with Premiere Pro and After Effects but also DaVinci Resolve for some color correction. This machine takes on video editing, real time 2D and 3D graphics creation and powers through the renders at a much better click than its predecessor, but I should hope so for the price tag. We didn't load it up with all the extras and purchased most of the additions from outside of Apple, though we did opt for the afterburner card to help with quick encoding. We're only a few weeks in but our editors can surely tell the difference.
There isn't much else to say. We've cut a commercial, half a dozen corporate videos and a short film so far and haven't had any issues. We'll update soon once we've really put it to the test and have some hard data of our own to report. Until then, happy cutting!
Cast Away - Casting A Short Film
At FiveSix we do video productions of all types including corporate storytelling, commercial, reality, social media, political, event, documentary and short narrative films. The last one in that list is fairly new to us and I'd like to chat about how the casting was done in a entirely different manner than our normal process.
Now, when we started casting for the short films, it was different in two main ways. The first was that the entire production was financed by FiveSix. We didn't have the budget to bring in talent agencies and pay the costs that go along with using their services. A different route was needed. With a little research we discovered that there are plenty of great resources on-line that give you access to thousands of talented actors and actresses. Sites such as Backstage and Casting Networks are great communities that help both producers and talent match together on a project. We ended up posting our projects on backstage.com and having a great pool of talent to choose from. We were able to advertise our day rate for each role and get only those people willing to work for that rate. It helped tremendously in budgeting for the films.
The second main difference in casting for the short films was that we searched over the entire country and not just locally. This brought us a couple of challenges. We ended up doing many auditions through recorded video and not in person. One of the best parts about casting live is that you can ask questions and try giving different direction with lines. You can get a general feeling of how the actor moves with you as you craft a role. This isn't so easy with a recorded audition. We found that we were able to quickly get a feeling about a particular role when auditioning in person but with recorded auditions it took many more views and lengthy discussions within our team. I would always advocate for in-person auditions but when you're on a tight budget and quick timeline, that's not always possible.
Moving forward, due to our ability to find what we were looking for through the on-line talent sites, I think we'll utilize both local agencies and on-line communities for any future auditions. On a last note, casting is fun but also difficult for all parties involved as it brings about more rejections than acceptance. I admire anyone who is willing to put themselves out there like that and audition for a role. Good luck!
FiveSix Productions Celebrates Success
If you may recall, a couple stalwart members of FiveSix Productions got all fired up and entered a video contest. Well, lo and behold, we won! That's right! John (senior editor) and I (base of the pole), won the first ever Nevada Film Office's annual Film Contest. We are very honored and humbled to have been selected as winners, and we sure were impressed with the other entries (there are some great film makers here in Nevada). We want to thank everyone who voted day after day in the first round to get us to the judges, and we appreciate the support and encouragement during the stressful month waiting for the results.
We want to send one of our biggest 'thank yous!' to our friends and pay-check producers, FiveSix Productions. Rob and Dave were very excited and encouraging of our entering the contest, and graciously offered any gear we needed, and allowed us to use some beautiful timelapse footage of Las Vegas Boulevard.
So, again, thank you all! And thank you FiveSix Productions for continuing to support their employees, friends, and independent film makers who chase their/our dreams. Unbiased: if you want to work with the best video production company in Las Vegas, look no further than FiveSix Productions.