Firefox Flicks Backstage

Hilbert College is a small liberal arts college located south of Buffalo, New York. It’s Communication Studies program was started in 2004 with the intention of providing students entering the communications field with extensive hands-on experience without having to give up the advantages of a traditional rigorous liberal arts education.

Students in the program in these two short years have produced documentaries on rebuilding efforts and hurricane relief in the Bahamas (in coordination with Students in Free Enterprise), on cancer survivors, the wine industry of Western New York, the Erie Canal, Letchworth State Park, the Zoar Valley, and have a wide range of projects in pre-production, including a claymation short, a zombie movie, a documentary on small bands in New York’s music scene, and commercials for local volunteer fire fighting, the Motion Picture Association of America (in coordination with Students in Free Enterprise), a local car dealership, and of course, Firefox, all of which are intended for actual air.

This productivity comes from the small size of the department (currently 25 undergraduates), 24/7 access to equipment including 24p digital cameras, complete nonlinear editors, a steadicam, and a complete suite of professional lighting and sound equipment. Next year the department will be adding another faculty member, high definition video cameras and added high definition editing suites, and will be moving into a new, student designed production center custom built from student drawn plans to meet the needs of the department.

The students who worked on the Firefox project wrote, produced, directed, edited, and now have prepared for release of the project with a very limited budget and a lot of sweat equity. The students choose from the beginning to base their commercial on the concept of Jungian archetypes as a sales tool to communicate messages underneath the main voice over, then explored the client supplied documents looking for ideas that would express the real meaning of the Firefox browser.

The archetype chosen was that of a galloping horse (in this case pulling a cart) implying power, majesty, and obedience. It also suggested the final tag line of ‘why put the cart before the horse.’ The students then developed a color palette by analyzing the Firefox logo and pulling a primary blue from the graphic, which then became the tint chosen to back the horse. It was decided to shoot the horse against snow, but this almost had to be abandoned when there was a lack of snow fall around the shoot days; a sudden short snow combined with a practice session for the horses allowed the shoot to come off after all. At the same time a simple audio track was developed from open source elements using Apple’s Soundtrack Pro. The final production was editing during a marathon session, and was produced in the higher quality DV50 (DVCPro50) digital format, because the amount of color heavy special effects, though simple, presented a possible problem with noise in the broad expanses of primary colors if the DV25 shooting format was used. After the initial edit, a post-mortem was held, and the audio was remixed to better hear certain parts of the session. Three versions were eventually produced, and one version was chosen to be reedited in DV25 and to have a DVCPro100 1080i60 version cut.

During the students self-analysis they identified areas they needed to improve upon in their production, including better handling of the audio, improving their storyboarding, and better contingency plans. The students, all volunteers (none received college credit for this assignment, something that is not unusual since students routinely use the equipment for their own projects) wished they could have done a series of commercials rather than just one, that they had a chance to meet with the client over client needs, and that they had access to exemplars of previous Firefox commercials.

Read more on the Hilbert College production diary page.

We’re hard at work finalizing the design of the ad viewing site that we’ll be putting in place sometime in the next week or so. We’re going to be providing a great system that will let you view, comment on, rate, subscribe, download, and share the videos. More details coming soon.

My name is Richard Sanchez, from Los Angeles, CA and I’ve finally reached picture-lock with my commercial for the Firefox commercial contest.

We’re currently mixing audio and working with our composer to get a killer score for the piece. It was a very quick shoot that we had, since we shot the piece guerilla style without actual expressed permission for our location.

We shot in 24p using a Panasonic AG DVX 100a, a homemade steadycam, and some construction flood lights. We also applied Red Giant’s Magic Bullet to achieve a film look for the piece and the footage is looking fantastic.

We even used gradient mapping to achieve thermograph shots (top photo), and there’s a shot of myself on the left (bottom photo) in a behind the scenes snap shot going over one of our scenes.

Cutting the piece was tricky, as I come from a background in music videos and short films, trying to achieve all that I wanted in 30 seconds was quite a challenge. We experimented with 24 style PIP shots, and other effects. My plan is to have the project submitted later this week.

-=Richard Sanchez=-

We’re coming up on our first major visibility opportunity for Firefox Flicks entrants: the Vail Film Festival screening. VFF starts on March 30th, but they need the ads from us in less than ten days. So, in order to be considered for inclusion in the VFF screening, your entry will need to be submitted to us, both online and in full resolution physical media by the end of next Tuesday, March 21st.

All entries received prior to that date will be screened by the Flicks team and a handful of the best entries will be sent off to the Vail Film Festival. If you’re not quite finished with your final production, but you think you’ve got something that deserves to be shown at Vail, let us know with an email to ad-support@mozilla.com. If we agree that your preliminary work is that strong, we can work with you to get a draft version included in the Vail screening and you can still have until April 14 to put the final touches on your ad before submitting it to Flicks through the normal process.

After stumbling upon this contest in early February, I immediately began working on my submission, almost instinctually. I have always been a supporter of the Firefox browser, referring nearly 98% or more, of people I come in contact with, to it. I’m enthused, and excited to see the submissions derived from all the participants!

My name is Christopher Richard Kunferman of CRK Design, who has been more than appreciative of the Firefox browser ever since the day I discovered it. As any web developer will tell you, there is true beauty in a browser that interacts, and properly displays websites adhering to web standards. The promotion of this browser, is nearly a revolution, one that the average person would never be able to fully grasp.

For years, developers like myself have had to write additional code, and in many circumstances, break perfectly valid code, in order to have our designs display in a browser that nearly 90% of web users had been using. Even worse yet, was the fact that those additional codes and broken segments, would not display properly, or even display at all, in the other 10% of browsers, and because of this, a monopoly was beginning to occur. This monopoly of sorts has been unseen by the public eye, but suspiciously realized, and voiced by many who for years went unheard. The inconsistency of code due to this, has been holding us back from advancing into the full potential of how we utilize the internet.

What has driven me more than the prizes, and any other additional benefits that may ensue, is my utter belief in this product, and the desire to bring its beauty into the spotlight. It is this passion that is the undying motivation behind my work in progress, and furthers my determination to squeeze 150% of my creative talents, skills, and knowledge into 30 seconds of film. Every aspect of my production so far has been built from the ground up, with only myself, and a single computer to work with.

Without going into too much detail of my script and what the spot will fully contain, I started out with 2d images and realized that they lacked the depth and impact I was seeking so I found myself now exploring the new realm to me, 3d. After much trial and error, I was able to produce and animate a Photo-Realistic rendering of a 3 dimensional Earth and then integrated other aspects like voiceover script. The hardest part of my project thus far, has been the time consuming rendering of the 3d objects. Needless to say, rendering nearly 900 frames, of 3 dimensional images containing anywhere from 988-4067 polygons in the objects, tends to make any computer a little slower than normal. With the rendering complete, I can once again channel my creativity back into the piece. Read more here.

With nearly all scenes completed in my piece, soundtrack and voiceover complete, editing nearly finished, I will most likely continue tweaking, and fine tuning every aspect. My submission is nearing completion, and I look forward to sharing it.

Thank You Everyone @ Firefox Flicks, and Mozilla, for the opportunity to share my work, and for providing such a great product!
Christopher Richard Kunferman, CRK Design