There's a big difference between a 30-second TV spot (with a two-week deadline that encompasses the New Year's holiday) and a feature-length superhero movie with a nine-figure budget. That's not to say that the folks at Sony Imageworks who sweated the details on the new Ghost Rider movie were anything but slammed with work for the duration – but just to point out that New York's Quiet Man faced a problem on a completely different scale when it took the job of creating its own embodiment of the supernatural avenger to perform in a commercial for … Jackson Hewitt Tax Services. We asked Quiet Man Founder and Creative Director Johnie Semerad to tell us how his crew of crack CG specialists and comic book geeks powered through the job. (We've got the spot, too.)
Elsewhere in this issue, Dan Daley has an overview of some of the issues facing the post industry as it starts to figure out the best way to prep content for delivery to mobile devices. Focusing on movie trailers, which have been picking up steam as ideal handheld viewing, Dan found that some facilities are outsourcing their digital distribution services, while others are trying to keep it in house. He got the story so far from CMP Impact and Ascent Media.
Speaking of mobile media, take a look at what Fox is doing to promote its new Rob Corddry-starring show, The Winner – apparently fearless that new-media outlets will cannibalize regular broadcasts, which don't start until March 4, Fox is giving potential fans the chance to watch as many as six complete episodes in advance, either on the Web, via iTunes, or on promotional DVD giveaways at Circuit City.
And Panasonic ramped up its efforts to get videographers to start thinking about recording their footage direct to solid-state media, rather than tape, with the pre-NAB announcement of a new, $14,000 2/3-inch camcorder, the AG-HPX500. Maybe more importantly for shooters who find that the 8 GB P2 cards severely cramp their style, Panasonic also announced the impending arrival of 16 GB P2 cards – and, by the end of the year, a 32 GB version. We have all the details.