Art Film as Content Engine

Lostball’s 90-minute golf-art film, now in production, serves as the content engine for a host of subsidiary projects. “We’re going out and capturing all this premium HD video and still imagery for the movie and storing it on huge arrays,” says Clark. “Then we can bring that media down for fine art prints, custom videos, consumer DVDs and branded content for corporate partners.” Lostball efficiently acquires all the content at once, then slices-and-dices it into a variety of products, whether TV show or stock imagery for commercials.

Back at the studio, digital artist du Midi relies on his dual-processor Power Mac G5 with Xserve RAID, Mac OS X Tiger, Final Cut Pro, Shake, Motion, DVD Studio Pro and QuickTime to shape the digital video and still images he captures with his Panasonic Varicam and 22 megapixel Hasselblad H1 camera.

He treasures every inch of real estate on his 30-inch Apple Cinema Display. “My biggest problem is screen space,” sighs Dandi. “I like to have so many apps open at the same time. If I had ten 30-inch Cinema Displays, I’d be happy — I always need more pixels.” Three PowerBooks accompany du Midi on the road, enabling him to download and review thumbnails after each shoot.

Final Cut Pro is “the bedrock for all our moving images,” he says. “I use it for all our editing and as the digital tool to integrate everything we do. There’s so much know-how built into Final Cut Pro, I don’t have to worry about the glue holding everything together — I can just be creative.”

“The story here is that technologies like Final Cut Pro and QuickTime are allowing us to pull this project together on a level that, before, only a big studio could do.”

Effecting Nature

“I’m not interested in special effects per se,” continues Dandi. “What I’m trying to do with this film is to achieve a very natural look. I use Motion and Shake and a gazillion plugins to add transparent layers of reality — subtle things like rain, mist, fog or whatever I wasn’t able to get while shooting because a cloud came or the light changed — sometimes the natural world doesn’t cooperate. So with Motion and Shake I can seamlessly go in and augment or integrate with plugins to get the look I want.”

He’s an accomplished Photoshop artist who hardly bothers to differentiate between photos and video. “In digital imaging, I see still and moving images the same way,” says Dandi. “I use different tools — Photoshop and Final Cut Pro — but the same techniques.” When it’s time to go to DVD, du Midi uses DVD Studio Pro to present his work. Until the advent of HD DVD players, he creates discs that can be played on Macs or PCs.

As much as he relies on his editing tools, Dandi hastens to add a note of praise for QuickTime. “It’s an amazing piece of software. If Final Cut Pro is the novel, then QuickTime is the word — it’s the kernel without which none of this stuff would work. The genius Apple had — to develop and keep that core technology advancing. It’s kind of an unsung hero. QuickTime is like the secret, hidden weapon for people like me — we use it to bring our dreams out of the hat. It’s very, very cool.

“The story here is that technologies like Final Cut Pro and QuickTime are allowing us to pull this project together on a level that, before, only a big studio could do.”

Eschewing Story

Lostball calls its flagship film “The Nature of the Game: A Visionary Tribute to Golf.” The partners plan to enter it in festivals starting in October 2007, followed by a limited theatrical release and global distribution on HD DVD. They’re labeling it an art film for good reason; “The Nature of the Game” eschews conventional narrative.

“Europe has a strong tradition of the art film but here in the U.S. we are slaves to the notion of story,” explains Dandi. “But film is a beautiful young form that doesn’t have to be reduced to the ‘novel visual’ — as in, ‘Hey, this is a great book; let’s make it into a movie!’ Because art — and film — can be so much more than just story.”

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