THE NETHERLANDS — Studio Flip (www.flip.nl), here, recently produced and posted two government videos for the Jeugdboa, a Dutch task force that interacts with local youth in an effort to build trust, serve as mentors, and prevent crime.
According to Philip van Wijngaarden, the company’s principal, who wears many hats, including art director, DP, animator and compositor, the client, who is involved in the training of the Jeugdboas, wanted two short videos — one explaining the concept of their approach to decision makers, and another that promotes the training as a recruitment tool.
“To avoid yet another video with talking heads and lower thirds as a desperate attempt to make things a little more interesting, I added a little drama,” says van Wijngaarden. “For the informative version, I wanted audio with a bit of a rough edge. Not too modern…but some guitar and a bit of harmonica. It would resonate with the decision-makers (40-plus) as audio they would recognize and perhaps appreciate.”
Van Wijngaarden is an early adopter of Smartsound’s Sonicfire Pro 6 (www.smartsound.com), which provides users with tools to easily create custom soundtracks. The new release includes Core Ultimate, a collection of meticulously produced tracks representing a range of styles. In addition to orchestral music that can be used for scoring, Sonicfire Pro 6 also offers simple, happy, upbeat music, a rhythm-guitar jam, and a live vocal indie-rock song as part of the 10-track album.
“[Sonicfire Pro 6] has an extensive library, which makes it easy to find a suitable clip, [where I can] tinker with the audio and instruments afterwards,” says van Wijngaarden. “I use it a lot. Even at the level of copying and pasting bits of instruments in the timeline to get more appealing audio. You can do this automatically too.”
The Jeugdboas videos were shot over three days using a Sony FS5 camera. “[It’s] a great run and gun camera,” says van Wijngaarden. “It turned out that on the day we shot the ‘meeting’ part, there was a festival with lots of loud music, especially in the low end. There was no way I could get around not recording that. But I managed to filter it out and used less dialogue.”
Editing was performed using Adobe Premiere with After Effects for motion graphics. Van Wijngaarden runs a custom PC loaded with the Adobe Creative Cloud, The Foundry’s Nuke X, Modo and ZBrush for 3D.
“The promotional version, I wanted to be very direct,” he says. “This one had to strike a chord with a 20-plus audience. Smartsound had a fitting clip for that as well. In the video, I mixed some clips that I shot with the FS5 and GoPro footage. The image would be mangled in post by me, so the difference in image quality did not matter much. All of this was done in After Effects. The action shots are mixed with three testimonials. And I ended up with a very happy client.”
Kevin Klingler is the president of SmartSound Software and says the new Version 6 release offers a host of benefits to media creators, including faster customization of music tracks through a new integrated interface, faster music response thanks to the new sound engine, and more precise control over the music because of new timing control and cut-video-to-music features.
“All these represent tangible benefits to the media creator in maximizing the impact and power of music on their media projects,” says Klingler.
Sonicfire Pro 6, with its included royalty-free music album, Core Ultimate, is priced at $199. Current users of Sonicfire Pro Version 4/5 can upgrade to Version 6 for $69.95. Sonicfire Pro plug-in users (Premiere Pro, Final Cut Pro X, Sony Vegas Pro, Adobe After Effects) can download their updated plug-ins for free.