Marching and beer

February 20th, 2012 by keith

We kicked off the year in high spirits with a spectacular shoot in the snowy Austrian mountains with the darling of winter sports, the beautiful Lindsey Vonn. It certainly wasnt difficult to crew that job once the lads had googled her! Shortly afterwards our Hamburg boys crewed on a promo shoot for the Disney Fantasy Cruise liner in Bremerhaven, northern Germany. A challenging and fun project shooting in multiple locations on board with a full lighting package, crane and teleprompter. The works!!

Back down south again in Switzerland we mingled with the rich and beautiful shooting White Turf horse racing on snow on the frozen lake at St. Moritz, all very swish.

If the year carries on like this we will be more than pleased!

On top of these glamour jobs we have been trucking up and down the country doing our regular corporate shoots, fixing, documentaries and nutty sports events.
Just go to recent productions and check them out.

Meanwhile we are witness to what Germans love most: beer and marching. The streets are full of them, dressed in old Prussian military outfits taking part in parades up and down the country celebrating carnival. The beer flows lavishly and there is a lot of serious fun out there.

Signing off and Prost! (that’s cheers in German:)

Storms, Scandals, Shoots

January 7th, 2012 by keith

We’ve just taken down our Christmas tree and decided to put pen to paper and write our January blog.

The last few days have been really stormy here and the german president’s scandalous antics have shocked the nation! However, at CCG we have been doing the opposite, resting on our laurels after a very successful 2011 and slowly rocking into action again for a great 2012.

We received these lovely words of praise recently:

“Hi Keith,
Haven’t seen the footage yet but just wanted to say we’ve had some really great feedback from the client about how good and professional Stefan and his crew were on the day.  So thank you very much for the ease of dealing with your company and please let Stefan know our gratitude for having ‘a more than happy client’.
Chris Yates
Sixth Sense UK”

“Very happy Keith. The camera guys were great and Joanna a delight. Look forward to working with you again in the future.
Harry Burnett Rae
Irresistble Films London”

“A brilliant job thank you. Everything we needed and more.
Look forward to working with you again!”
Kind ones
Richard
On Screen Productions
UK”

We rounded up 2011 in true fighting spirit with an elaborate portrait of the mixed marshall arts icon Alistair Overeem in Holland. After our shoot he went on to win the much coveted heavyweight title in the USA, and is now the new UFC champion. Congratulations.

On boxing day we continued in a similar vein and filmed the very raucous “Ba Game” on the wild Orkney Isles off the coast of Scotland. Hundreds of hot tempered, tanked up Scots fighting over a ball for hours on end in an almighty huge scrum. Strange what people get up to isn’t it.

In January we kicked off with yet another shoot in the Netherlands. This time a much gentler corporate shoot for the german software giant SAP, followed by more corporate shoots in Berlin, Cologne and Frankfurt.There’s much more in the pipeline and we’re looking forward to another exciting and successful year.

Roll on 2012 and keep em comin.

All the best everyone!!

2011 round up

December 8th, 2011 by keith

A time for optimism and reflection.

2011 has been a bumper year for us at Camera Crew Germany with a wealth of interesting and unusual shoots for a wide variety of clients from the USA, UK, Italy, Switzerland, Australia, New Zealand and India, to name but a few.

I would like to thank all our clients for the trust they have put in us on these shoots. We have been working with some of you for many years now and these long term relationships have not only stabilized our turnover but more importantly have inspired us to constantly give our best. We seem to have got it right. However, we wouldn’t be where we are now without our fantastic crews who are dedicated, loyal and very talented. They are the backbone of our business and it is they who I thank most.

On the television side we have crewed on shoots like “Jesus Conspiracies”, “The history of Tintin”, “The story of Electricity”, “Mubarak and Egypt”, “ The Ash Cloud”, ”The Ultimate Fight Club”, “Belgium’s Royal Family” , “The Eurovision Song Contest”, “The Euro crisis”, “The European central Bank”, “Womens Football World Championships”, “X Machines”, “ Gamescom for MTV”, “Michael Jackson” and the list goes on and on.

Our corporate clients commissioned studio shoots throughout Germany, green screen shoots on location, trade fair shoots till the cows come home and last but not least the Frankfurt Motor Show, which kept us on our toes doing satellite uplinks, sophisticated dolly and crane shoots in the middle of the night, regular 2 man HD crews, a few one man band shoot and run crews and believe it or not a BETA SP shoot in 4:3…I wont tell you who the client was!
Apart from the Motor Show we have done several Automobile shoots with state of the art complicated camera set ups. They have been very challenging, demanding and at the end of the day very rewarding.

The pharmaceutical industry has been throwing money to the wind commissioning doctors round table conferences in the UK, Scandinavia and Germany, live operation shoots (difficult to crew these because of the blood and guts factor), testimonials and case studies.

We have been using a vast array of cameras and formats ranging from low budget HDV through DSLR, XDCam, Sony F3, P2, Panasonic 101, Red Epic and to top it all, the king of the road the wonderful Alexa!

On top of this, like everyone else we have been grappling with constantly changing demands on the camera and format fronts, ftp uploads, social media marketing, and web site revamps. Its never ending but that’s showbiz I suppose.

Finally it is with great sadness that I have to say farewell to my trusted colleague Uli, with whom most of you have spoken to over the last 10 years. She is moving on to newer horizons. We have been a great duo and have had a very harmonious and trusty relationship with plenty of laughs. I wish her all the very, very best.

Is the future already over?

November 1st, 2011 by martin

It seems like the last few years have been all about 3D. Big players like Samsung, Sony and the major film studios have seen 3D as a way of boosting income in market where content is regularly stolen online.

Is the fad over though? A new survey says film-goers are now 7 times less likely to see a film in 3D instead of in 2D, than they were at this time last year. 3D film is only at the beginning of its revival, yet already it is losing favour. This is bad news for all that investment.

As far as the broadcast future lies it seems that consumers are more interested in Smart TV than 3D TV. They want their televisions to be connected to the internet. They want to watch content on their home cinemas and flat screens. Vimeo the popular video site already has a “couch” button you can press so that the video is optimised to watch at home on your TV.

Topology Research Institute reckons 52.9m Smart TVs – televisions with internet access and the ability to download and run basic apps – will ship worldwide next year. This is a growing technology and 3D is fading.

The problem is that age old problem of supply and demand. it seems that media providers and manufacturers are caught in a familiar feedback loop of stagnation: the entertainment industry isn’t going to invest in producing 3D content when there aren’t enough viewers to warrant the extra expense. And manufacturers aren’t going to push the 3D TV sets until there’s enough content to bring out the consumers with open wallets. And in this economy, who’s rushing out to buy the latest fad in electronics? Unless, of course, it has a picture of an apple on it!

Which brings us neatly to that man…

Steve Jobs helped change computers from a geeky hobbyist’s obsession to a necessity of modern life. But for all the eulogies for business acumen and flair for designing products, I was moved the most by this …

“Steve’s last words, hours earlier, were monosyllables, repeated three times.
Before passing away, he’d looked at his sister Patty, then for a long time at his children, then at his partner, Laurene, and then over their shoulders past them.
Steve’s final words were: “OH WOW. OH WOW. OH WOW.”

Winter is fast approaching and Here at CCG we are wrapped up warm and have been working hard…

CCG have Just completed two great shoots for pharmaceutical medical company Parexel. The shoots were multicamera PDW 800 XDCam HD, in Hamburg and we were filming doctors’ round table discussions in hotels.

Here in Frankfurt we produced a lovely shoot with live mixing for the London based company Merchant Cantos. The shoot was an Investor day webcast.

Also we have been working with long-time clients Manor Films from London . We shot with the Sony F3 and Canon 5d. The cameras were fabulous at producing stunning car footage – Mostly car interiors with both cameras and lights rigged inside the car. We shot at night around Frankfurt. This felt more like a feature film set up than video with all the attendant crew, producer, cameraman and director flown in from the UK and we provided equipment, camera assistant, media wrangler, precision driver, assistant director. The DOP Paul Barton shoots all the BBC Top Gear car programme stuff.

We also had to look our best for a great little shoot for UK based Mezzo films. The reason for this was making a film about princess Astrid at the royal palace in Brussels. She was addressing a charity she is a patron of. For this shoot we e sent our cologne based crew to shoot this on the XD cam with a teleprompter.

New clients are using us all the time because we come highly recommended and we are both professional and fun to work with. Connecticut based Roger Wilco productions found us on Google and hired us to crew for them on a TV show they are producing for the Speed channel in the USA. It is a one hour documentary about Mercedes, which is 125 years old this year. Our camera crew shot on Sony’s PDW 800 and even got to film the World’s first motor propelled car, the Mercedes Patent Motorwagen built in 1886.

Filmmakers App of the month

AJA DATACALC
Platform
Apple iPhone / iPod Touch

The AJA DataCalc computes storage requirements for professional video and audio media. Designed for video professionals, this application works with all the most popular industry video formats and compression methods, including Apple ProRes, DVCProHD, HDV, XDCAM, DV, CineForm, REDCODE, Avid DNxHD, Apple Intermediate, 16 bit RGB and RGBA, uncompressed, and more. Video standards supported include NTSC, PAL, 1080i, 1080p, 720p, 2K and 4K.

AJA DataCalc allows you to change settings and calculate storage requirements in a single screen with simple controls and a clear concise display. Media durations can be entered in units of days, hours, seconds, or even as precise as frames using time code mode.

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