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Ben McElroy filmed this mini-documentary in his early days of filmmaking before forming McElroy Films LLC.
G.S. Nair and the People’s Baptist Bible College used this video to gain support from churches and other individuals to keep the ministry strong in India.
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McElroy Films is very pleased to announce our new 2009 3D corporate logo. We contacted Will Cavanagh, a graphics design artist working at National Boston to undertake the task.
Will was kind enough to discuss his experience and workflow:
After discussing the animation with Ben McElroy, I spent some time conceptualizing how the logo should build. I decided on a grand build into an elegent resolve, that relied on showing off the geometry of the logo in an abstract way to engage the viewer. I drew some rough boards, and then began modelling the logo in 3d. I used Adobe Illustrator to clean up the logo file, remove unneeded elements, and prep it to import into 3d. I then modeled the filmstrip bit from the vector art in Maxon Cinema 4D, and extruded the text.
I animated the camera move roughly, and then worked on designing materials and lighting to enhance the scene. I tweaked the camera animation, and added additional cameras (for shots used in the build) and animated them as well. I used Maxon Cinema 4D NET Render to render the scene across an 11-machine render farm of 8-core Mac Pros. This additional render power allowed me to use GI with HDRI lighting in the scene to add softness in the shadows and realism to the reflections, specularity and caustics. I rendered the scenes into 24 seperate passes, as image sequences.
I pulled the passes I wished to use for composite into Adobe After Effects, and using the multi-pass output from 3d tweaked the appearance of the materials to my liking. I used Object Buffer alpha channels to isolate the alpha of the logo elements from the scene, and to replace the background with color mattes. For part of the animation I used the Trapcode Horizon plugin for AE to allow the background gradation to match the camera movement pulled from 3d. Since C4D is able to export camera and scene information to After Effects, matching the camera movement from 3d in composite is painless, without having to work in a heavier-duty compositor like The Foundry’s Nuke.
I added lens flares using Knoll Light Factory, and also added vignetteing and some additional toning to the composition in AE. To end the animation, I built a transition from the 3d animation to a 2d logo resolve using a tweaked vector art version of the McElroy Films logo.
- Will Cavanagh
To see the logo in full animation click here
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“I am beyond thrilled with the wedding video that McElroy films created for us. Ben is a truly talented, detail oriented individual. I am so grateful for quality, creativity, immense care and time that Ben put into creating this very special keepsake. He captured wonderful moments of my wedding day and turned them into a beautiful cinematic story. Out of all of the special gifts that I have from our wedding day, the video is my favorite. I will cherish it for the rest of my life and pass it on to our future generations. I am sincerely grateful, Ben.”
Click here to see the video.
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This is an excerpt from “The Gloves” a documentary on the Golden Gloves produced by McElroy Films in 2006. The annual Golden Gloves is a tradition for amateur boxing in the United States. This documentary specifically featured the Golden Gloves of Lowell, Massachusetts which is held at the Lowell Memorial Auditorium.Posted by admin · Leave a Comment
If you’re one of those people that wait for technology to drop in price before you buy, you’ll like this.
We’ve been on the market for another blu-ray player for a little while but didn’t want to shell out another $350 to get it.
Then this caught our eye, the Magnavox NB530MGX Blu-Ray Player. We ran across it at Walmart the other night and did a double take. This Blu-ray player is retailing for $130.00. We thought it just couldn’t be true. That’s insanely affordable!
To my amazement we cross checked it online to see if it was even cheaper. Turns out, it is. Other bloggers and gadget sites are reporting that some Walmarts are listing it for just $98 bucks!
Even though this model doesn’t sport some higher-end features that other Blu-ray player have, this is a great starter model to get you in the 21st century of HD technology.
Quick specs:
Here’s the direct link to the listing on Walmart:
http://www.walmart.com/catalog/product.do?product_id=10825995
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“I cannot even begin to express how pleased we were with not only the wedding DVD that Ben produced for us, but for Ben himself. He was extremely friendly and easy to work with. Ben showed up on time and we barely knew he was even there!
He was able to present us a fabulous product in time for us to share with our family and friends during the holidays. We especially were very excited to find someone cutting edge and willing to work from more of a modern point of view.
We really appreciate McElroy films for capturing our wedding in such a timeless manner.”
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McElroy Films is pleased to announce a new user friendly design for our corporate and weddings pages. We’re trying to make our design more appealing and less complication and overwhelming. That’s why we’ve design ours to be modern and sleek with easy to read text and illustrations.
Come check us out the new corporate and wedding pages.
McElroy Films provides a comprehensive line up of high definition video production services for corporate, non-profit and educational clients in Massachusetts and New England. Additional services include, weddings, events, music video production and independent filmmaking.
