Quarterly Newsletter - Summer 2022
NEWS FROM THE ROAD
A quarterly newsletter from Junction Road about the stuff we're doing, the stuff we love and the people who make it all happen!
We are excited to show off the video we created in collaboration with an amazing local restaurant, A Place At The Table.
A Place At The Table is a Raleigh café with a pay-what-you-can business model, so everyone can eat there regardless of their means. People can pay any amount for food, they can volunteer for a meal, or they can redeem a token for a free meal.
Until recently, the token has been an actual wooden coin token. But because Table is so committed to putting all its patrons on equal footing, they have introduced a new pay-it-forward device, the PLACE card. This credit-card-shaped token is not only a way to remove the visual differentiation between paying and non-paying customers, it also is a way to spread the use of the card to lots of different people with different backgrounds.
With that in mind, we wanted to create a piece that showed the card being received in lots of different scenarios (as a tip, as a gift, as a welcome-to-town item, and as a help to a person in need) and also showed the positive effects of paying it forward. We see a café patron choose the PLACE card as a way to pay it forward, the energy of which then goes out into the community, connecting people from all walks of life.
We used some particle effects to show the metaphorical energy that binds us all together, spreading from person to person and showing how these cards can be a great choice in lots of scenarios. By the end of the piece, everyone is eating together in the café as one big group, and our energy has spread throughout the city, creating a web that connects us all.
Working with the Table team has been an amazing opportunity, and we are so grateful to have been able to provide this video for them as part of our charity and outreach efforts for 2022. This group is a truly outstanding one, and the work they do for the city and people from all areas is really inspiring.
If you haven’t been to Table yet, get down there! The food and coffee are outstanding, and it’s a unique and powerful opportunity to help the community we all share.
To learn more about this project, check out our blog post HERE.
In the Triangle area, we are very lucky to be surrounded by a lot of talented groups in the video, film and animation world. Digital P Media in Cary is just such a group, they have been creating fantastic work for TV and the web for decades. So we are very excited to partner with them to work on a series of new broadcast commercials for the Town of Cary, set to air on the Golf Network in October.
We will be traveling around town, filming moments and locations that make Cary such a special place to live and work. It’s always fascinating to look at the familiar elements of your own town through the lens of a camera, and find the people and places that make it unique.
We are staying busy on-set filming other pieces as well, including the challenge of creating a cozy fall atmosphere during the oppressive heat of a southern summer. But we can share more about that next time. If you see us and our cameras around town, be sure to say hello!
We were lucky enough to shoot a commercial for Stainmaster carpets recently, collaborating with our long-time partners at Lowe’s. This was a fantastic project that utilized a lot of talented people working together, but one of the more fun elements was revisiting one of our old friends, the Phantom Flex camera for extreme slow-motion.
A standard camera records at around 24 frames per second, and a standard slow-motion camera (like the one on your smartphone), records at around 240 frames per second. In contrast, the Phantom Flex can record HD footage at a whopping 1,900 frames per second, and can record 720p footage at almost 3,000 frames per second.
This means that a brief moment of time can be stretched out and viewed in detail, which was the perfect choice for the spills that we were featuring in the Stainmaster commercial.
Here you can see a bit of on-set footage of a spill, and hear how excited even the veterans get when watching awesome slow-motion like this.
Special thanks to Jason Comparetto and Cinema Oxide for providing us with the equipment and technical support for this cool camera, to learn more about the Phantom check out the Phantom site HERE.
This time we are looking at one of our favorite pieces of gear that sees a lot of action these days – the Ursa Mini Recorder, a solid-state hard drive attachment for the Ursa Mini Pro.
Storing media has been a challenge since the days of film. I remember unloading film mags in a dark bag on set, and I remember carrying boxes of tapes through airports. No fun. Technology has advanced, but I have always been disappointed that we were still stuck in this mindset of switching cards and transferring footage, in a time when storage is so cheap.
That is why the Ursa Mini Recorder has been my favorite piece of gear recently. Finally, we are able to just insert a 2TB solid-state drive directly into the camera, and film all day on one drive. No more media transfers, no more cards filling up, just shooting. It really is the type of storage solution I have been hoping for.
This is not to say it is a flawless system, however. The UMR uses one of your SDI Out ports, so you are confined to a single monitor SDI port. Also, we learned that attaching a wireless video transmitter to the back of the camera (like a Teradek) can wreak havoc on the camera’s ability to read the drive. But relocating the transmitter to the other side seemed to solve the issue.
I am excited to see where the technology goes next, because this has been a huge improvement in our shooting experience already.