Read the full press release here. http://pressmediawire.com/24755/The-Best-Video-Production-Companies-Ranked-by-topseos.com-for-April-2011.html

The Top 10 Video Production Companies for April 2011 are:

1. Studio Center

2. SkyStorm Productions

3. BeanoVision Productions

4. Innovate Media

5. Independent Media Productions, Inc.

6. Eyecon Video Productions

7. Indigo Productions

8. Levy Production

9. Seven Pictures

10. Video One Pro

Working with Ben and Co. enabled us to spice up the topics at hand, without being irreverent or insincere in our presentation.  When shooting a video designed to promote a health maintenance website, a critical social issue became a major national news story: gay bullying and suicides among LGBT youth.  With the help of Ben, we were able to piggyback a second video shoot onto our scheduled one.  The subsequent video: “Fenway Health Presents: It Will Get Better” ended up being much more significant for us than the original short.  Ben and his colleagues were amazingly accommodating and flexible.  They also infused an easy flowing flair into both of the projects we made together.  McElroy Films meets the client where they are at—for us, we had a fairly high amount of creative input into one project.  The crew took what we wanted to do and made it a reality.  Conversely, when faced with making up something from scratch in a single day, Ben and co. took the reigns and directed us towards a fantastic final product.  Ben also made the secondary things—titles, music, and especially editing look easy.

McElroy Films are truly creative and truly facilitative.  I strongly endorse them and intend to work with them again soon.

Jon Vincent, Program Director for Prevention, Education and Screening, Fenway Health

Click here to watch Fenway Health Presents: It Will Get Better

Ben and his crew made the whole process so much easier, more manageable, and much more enjoyable for all of our students and faculty that were involved. We are so happy that we found someone with the experience and skill to help us tell our story.

Alan O’Neill

Assistant Director of Admissions and Web Editor

Fenn School

Click here to watch The Fenn School Overview video

Enjoy.

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