A boutique video production & creative content house based in Manchester.
Film / Production /Graphics / Events
Northern Spark Productions were appointed to provide video coverage of Zen Internet's annual partner event at London's BT Tower. As well as filming the keynote speakers, sessions and seminars, a short highlights video was produced to give an overview of the day including vox-pops from Zen partners who attended the event. The event was managed by Just Watch Events.
Sony F5, 4K, S-Log3, XAVC, Zeiss prime lenses.
With the 4k rushes shot S-log on a Sony F5, the first challenge to overcome was that all the footage was upside-down! Director And Hutch’s vision for the video was to have continuous takes shot ‘in the round’ with the camera rotating 360 degrees in the centre of the studio with the talent following the lens around as the camera rotated. To achieve this the camera was mounted on an inverted DJI Ronin gimbal on a tripod. This gave the DOP, Jack Webber smooth wireless remote control of the camera with the ability to control the speed and direction of the rotation. A remote follow focus was used on the carl zeiss prime lenses, it was a tricky day for the focus puller with all the movement of the camera and talent whilst shooting with a shallow depth of field.
To avoid having to use a processor hungry motion flip across all the footage whilst editing, I used the display preferences on the preview/output monitor to rotate the output 180 degrees and then nested the final edit in a new sequence and added the 180 rotation DVE to the master clip.
We shot the video 4k in order to give us the flexibility in post to be able to crop into shots, which worked well and definitely helped give more options for the edit.
Adobe Premiere CC, music video edit timeline.
Having initially sync’d all the footage up on separate layers on the timeline, once the edit was complete I then deleted unused footage and separated scenes onto different layers for grading.
Adobe Premiere colour grading using Lumetri LUTs and tools.
I have been very impressed with the addition of the lumetri colour effects within adobe premiere cc so decided to use them and grade the video completely within premiere. I used a LUT across all the footage and tweaked the intensity of it for various scenes and individually tweaked shots where exposure and colour balance needed tweaking. I then added adjustment layers to the various scenes and used the ‘creative’ effect LUTs to further enhance the grade and bring out the colours.
I used magic bullet ‘Cosmo’ filter in places to enhance skin tones on the close-ups and also an FX Factory plugin named “Flarelight" for the “anamorphic glare” effects used in some scenes.
Here is a comparison video which shows the ungraded s-log footage along with the final graded version:
Dame Edna Everage "Hello Possums!" Copyright © Steve Dunlop Photography.
Northern Spark Productions provide creative content for the Globe Travel Awards 2016.
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Northern Spark Productions were commissioned to document the journey of Travel Counsellors move from their head office home of 15 years in Bolton town centre to the Peel Holdings Venus building in Trafford City.
The process was filmed over the course of six months as Travel Counsellors worked with Overbury, the UK's leading office fit out specialist to design and transform the two and a half floors of empty office space into their new head quarters.
This short highlights version of the film was shown to unveil the new HQ to Travel Counsellors at their annual conference.
Northern Spark Productions recently carried out the post-production on a short film directed by Phil Mash.
The "Age of Grace" dance company is part of Richmond Upon Thames Age UK.
Watch the endearing mini documentary here...
Produced and Directed by Phil Mash and Amy Howard. philmash.com
Post Production by Mark Tuson northernsparkproductions.com
Shot on Canon C300
Gary Barlow sings Take That classics to the wowed Travel Counsellors audience.
Northern Spark Productions were invited back for a successive year to the Manchester Central Convention Centre to capture the Travel Counsellors Worldwide Annual Conference 2015. The Northern Spark Productions crew filmed, produced and edited the highlights video onsite to be played out to close the conference.
The event was hosted by Vernon Kay and Amanda Lamb with special entertainment from Gary Barlow and John Bishop and guest motivational speakers Katie Piper, Michael Finnegan and Chris Moon.
Watch the web version of the edit here...
Please get in touch if you would like your event or conference filming and editing.