At Biscardi Creative Media, we’re hard at work on post-production for world-renowned dog trainer Victoria Stilwell and her new show, Arson Dogs. While we’re busy cutting new episodes, we first had to quickly turn around a trailer for the series – about a week to craft a sizzling trailer from over 3500 raw clips shot by up to five different cameras.
The trailer edit was led by BCM founder Walter Biscardi Jr., so I asked him to tell us about how collaboration, communication and Adobe Creative Cloud helped make this fast turn a success: “Without the collaboration of Victoria’s team, the shared storage storage system allowing us to work together, and all the new efficiency features in Adobe Premiere Pro CC, it’s doubtful the trailer would have been completed to the quality we were able to deliver.”
First, what are Arson Dogs?
Arson dogs are also called accelerant detection dogs. They’re an essential part of the fire investigation team. They work alongside law enforcement officials to alert their handlers of the presence of accelerants, usually marking a scent by sitting in front of it.
The Arson Dogs series follows Victoria to Maine where State Farm’s Arson Dog Training Program is conducted, one of only two arson dog training programs in the country. The series will tell the story of handlers and dogs getting to know each other and learning to work together for the rest of the dog’s life.
That’s a lot of ground to cover for a three minute trailer. How did you get organized with all the material?
Victoria’s team uses the Adobe suite, as do we at BCM, so we worked with them to show how best to log and organize the materials so we could use their notes to quickly turn the project around. They did a beautiful job logging and organizing the bins in multiple ways so we could cross reference.
Beyond that, we were provided with plenty of notes and the information needed not only for the sizzle but also for cutting the main episodes. Everything was loaded into our Small Tree Shared Storage system which proved a major key in the quick turnaround.
How did everyone at BCM work together on this?
From a master Adobe Premiere Pro project, Kylee and John worked off sub-projects, organizing select elements into timelines while I was cutting the main sizzle. We were all working off variants of the exact same project, all using the same media from the server, and I would simply import their timelines into the master project.
The Marker Window feature came in huge on this project as well because John and Kylee put Markers throughout each timeline and via the Markers Window, I could quickly scan to see what was in there and grab elements.
By all working together, including Alex (on Victoria’s team), we were able to scan through five cameras of material in just two days. Throughout the edit, I would ask Kylee or John to grab some music or some element in the sub-projects so I could keep working on the cut.
When it came to the finishing, John mixed the final audio in his sub-project while I color graded in DaVinci Resolve. We brought everything together in the master Premiere Pro project.
How was communication before post began important to the success of the project?
It’s so awesome when the client comes to us before we start post and we can walk through the project together. We came up with a plan and then executed it to perfection, allowing us to really deliver the project they wanted rather than “well this is all we could do with the time we had.”
It’s such a great feeling when you can collaborate with the client right up front before they get into the edit suite bringing so much more value to their project. The Arson Dogs project is just a perfect example of client collaboration at its best
How is the message of the Arson Dogs show important to you?
This was a thrill for me personally because I’m a long time dog owner and I’ve admired Victoria’s style of dog training. It’s a very positive and non-domineering way of working with the animals, and that’s how it should be. It was also lot of fun cutting this with my own Molly the Wonder Dog hanging out in the edit suite with me.
Arson Dogs will be distributed through Victoria Stilwell’s Positively website and YouTube page. New episodes will be available in the coming weeks. Watch the trailer:
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BISCARDI CREATIVE MEDIA is a full service digital media production company near Atlanta, Georgia with services that include Video Production, Sound Production, Sound Mixing, Graphic Design, Animation, Post Production, Video Editing, Color Grading, Finishing, Digital Asset Transfer, Digitizing and Archiving. Quite simply we’re the people who make video and media production easy for you. No technobabble. Just clear, concise and creative content delivered where and how you need it, on time and on budget. Office and production space is also available for short and long term projects.