Final Focus Productions

Information may not be reliable

DUI video telling it like it is.
An Australian video showing the effects of DUI – A bit graphic, but brutally honest. Please remember that every decision we make has an impact positively or negatively.

Final Focus Productions Fall 2010 from Steve Kownacki, Final Focus Prod on Vimeo.
We had a smidgen of time recently so we re-worked the showreel to include a couple new shots and a new piece of music. If you look at our prior demos, many of the same shots were used but with a different style of music, changes the whole impression of the shot.
Anywho, you can see just what greenscreening is all about.

Price Of Leadership from Steve Kownacki, Final Focus Prod on Vimeo.
Another great offering from Tremendous Life Books. In between the big projects that take weeks or months to complete, we can sneak in little gems like this that we shoot in 2 hours, 4 hours of editing and it’s on the web. Tracey was taped with a JVC HM-700, the book shots with a Canon 7D DSLR and the photos were scanned. The brochure opening up was a scan animated in After Effects.

12 Paradoxes of the Bible from Steve Kownacki, Final Focus Prod on Vimeo.
We were recently presented with a shaky video clip and a book and requested to create an online video for Tremendous Life Books. So we grabbed the DSLR and shot the book, added a few graphics and my editor and I supplied some VO. A few hours later… voil!
The first step was to process the video to remove the shake; then clean up the audio as best we could; setup the book with some nifty lighting and get product shots; shoot Steve (hey! just get that thought out of your head.)… shoot Steve thumbing through the book; record Steve & Ryan reading the book quotes to break it up a bit; create some graphics and put it all together. All together a little over 4 hours of work with proper planning. Can’t stress enough about planning.

TEDs Ads Worth Spreading Challenge
If you’re not familiar with TED, its simply “Ideas Worth Spreading.” I’m a huge fan of forward thinking, conceptual development, and thinking outside the box. Check out Freakonomics for a great read too. Anyway, we have a few months left to come up with something. “We” meaning me & you. I’m not looking to give away services (sorry) but I am looking for a client that may really want to stretch their mind and reach an incredible audience. I’m looking to inspire someone to action. Do you have a product, company, cause or idea you want to promote? Read all about it below and get a chance to make 7M impressions.
Don’t forget that the typical FFP value-add of re-purposing the project for your own website, broadcast and wherever else you want to put it will give that many more impressions.

TED announces its Ads Worth Spreading Challenge. Full article here.
An open invitation to the global advertising community to reinvent, inspire and engage audiences with a new definition of what advertising can mean in the digital age, using TED.com as its platform.
TED invites the business community to submit their most forward-looking video campaigns to the contest by January 10, 2011. A judging panel will select up to 10 winning video campaigns, which will premiere at TED2011, February 28-March 4, 2011, for the gathered audience of 1500+ thought leaders, and will appear on TED.com for free for one week in March.
During the week of March 21-27, 2011, the winning campaigns will occupy every available postroll ad space on TED.com,garnering roughly nearly 7M in free advertising impressions. In addition to appearing as post-roll after TEDTalks, each ad will also have a permanent page on TED.com, allowing the ad to be rated, shared, commented on and linked to, perhaps earning large numbers of additional views.
Submissions to the Ads Worth Spreading Challenge must be made in the form of a video, which can vary in length from 30 seconds to 5 minutes, and submitted in a common digital, downloadable format as detailed in our submission guidelines.
Videos must be promotional in nature, but can promote a company, cause, product or idea. It can promote a product, company or cause, but is likely to do so indirectly rather than directly — for example, by showcasing the values, motivations and questions of the organization’s people. The ads may be commercial, PSAs or self-promotion.
The campaign should be new — created between January 2010 and January 2011. Ideally, it should be new creative, but it is possible to submit campaigns that appeared elsewhere. Submissions must be received by midnight EST, January 10, 2011.
All entrants into the Ads Worth Spreading Challenge will be notified as to whether their video has been selected by Friday, February 25, 2011.

Aligning Forces for Quality from Steve Kownacki, Final Focus Prod on Vimeo.
We were fortunate to work with our pals at Suasion to create a video for Aligning Forces for Quality. They are a York county, PA-based group community leaders, consumers, physicians, nurses, employers and insurers who have come together to help improve health care quality in the community.
The video is a series of greenscreen interviews shot over 2 days in a conference room. Working from an outline that provided the direction of the video, Producer Megan asked the questions to elicit meaningful responses that could be whittled down from 4 hours to, yep, 11 minutes. Adding a bit of motion to the graphics, some cover shots, news footage and photographs, a pretty dynamic and informative video was developed. This video replaced a panel of individuals at a conference greatly reducing time on the agenda. Everything was shot HD, but final output was SD 4×3 for projection at the venue.
Thanks to my editor Ryan Mast for pulling out some quick tricks to liven things up.

Leaders Without Borders – Logo’d by FFP from Steve Kownacki, Final Focus Prod on Vimeo.

Anyway, Tracy from Tremendous Life Books (formerly know as Executive Books), GREAT source of quality motivational and leadership books BTW, called and had a video provided by the author that she had permission to post to TLB’s YouTube account – an FLV. We’ve got lots of nifty util software around to re-encode to an editable format, add the graphic here & there in a “like-it-was-meant-to-be-there-in-the-first-place” look and then get it properly encoded for wherever you need it to go. All with online approvals along the way.
So check out the book, check out Tremendous Life Books and have fabo day.

United Way – “Never Turn Our Backs” from Steve Kownacki, Final Focus Prod on Vimeo.
We were approached by the United Way of the Capital Region to create a TV commercial based upon a corporate giving video that was produced by the Rite Aid Corporation video department. While the video was very well done, the visuals and dialog didn’t quite work out to pull elements & create a TV ad.
So I worked with my writer and he extracted the concept of “never turning our backs” on the community and the concept of people in the logo t-shirts and finally doing actual projection onto the shirts. Through a few revisions (5) we came up with the final script and pulled visuals from our vast United Way library – we’ve been working with them for years.
The next step was how to pull it off. I’ll get some pix on Flicker soon, but we re-configured the teleprompter mounting bracket in order to mount a video projector directly above the DSLR camera on the same tripod. With this whole contraption on a dolly, video coming from a MACbook & Final Cut, we did many, many rehearsals to work on timing.
So it came down to this much time to make :30 seconds:
2 hr initial script mtg, an hour of re-writes, 3 hours of pre-production planning, 2 1-hour site visits, 3 hours to find and edit the projected clips, 1 hour to concept and mount the projector, 4 hours of location setup, 1 hour of rehearsals, 30 minutes of actual attempted takes, 30 minutes to record additional audio, and a day of editing more or less. Oh, plus the digital upload to Comcast.
Thanks to all of our volunteers that day that put up with me saying “OK, we’re gonna do it again, but this time…” What a bunch of troopers! THANKS!
“Behind the scenes video coming soon!”

A little diagnosis on our aging DVCam deck uncovered a faulty firewire jack. A $15 part the size of the tip of your pinky finger and $12 in shipping later save a few hundred bucks over sending it to the repair center. I have to applaud SONY on a detailed parts website and relatively easy checkout.

We’re working on some developmental stuff for a client which involves LOTS of high resolution product shots – and this is how it’s done. Surrounding the object with light and controlling reflections is the ticket. This box is a 3-foot cube with a small opening on the front face to insert the camera lens. Product images to come soon as we get through more testing.