Mirza - The Untold Story
Here’s a trailer to Mirza – The Untold Story, a punjabi film we worked on last year over a two month period.
Release Date: April 6, 2012
Starring Gippy Grewal & Mandy Takhar with Rahul Dev and Bunnu Dhillion. Music by Honey Singh.
The director, Baljit Singh Deo, wanted to create a Punjubi film with a distinctly North American large scale production value feeling. He wanted to set new standards for Indian films overseas. Principal photography was in Vancouver, BC.
We had a challenging time creating that big budget movie lighting with a minimal crew and no budget for pre-rigging. We worked closely with our good friend and cinematographer Toby Gorman to use large sources, carefully shaped single sources, and strategically placed background lights. We used condor lighting where possible for our night exteriors to save time and manpower because we had minimal time for setup and turnarounds to rig smaller lights. Throughout the show we carried a pair of 6k PAR’s in addition to our base lighting package, slush truck, and a tow generator.
Filmed on Red Epic. Produced by Inda Raikoti & Aman Khatkar. The movie has been getting a lot of attention overseas because of its cast special appearances, and non-conventional Bollywood production ways.
We’ve been doing short films and corporates throughout the first month of the year. Here’s a still from one titled “We’ll meet again” which we did with our friend Ryan. We’ve also done some interesting work with VFS Business Management which we will be posting on soon — it means big things for the film school academic world in Vancouver.
As far as the future, we’ve got a few feature film contracts lined up which will be an excellent opportunity to take advantage of our new 10k diesel generator (recently modified to add camloc connections) and our ever-growing HMI package. We picked up the generator on our way back from shooting in Kelowna towards the end of last year.
Stay tuned for more happenings, its been a busy new year!
Our new Modern Studio Equipment “hostess tray” style side mount in action on a Dodge Viper Powered SRT-10 Ram. We’re in beautiful Kelowna, BC at the moment on our third feature with the ever popular Vancouver based independent cinematographer Norm Li. It stars up and coming english actor Luke Goss previously known as part of the brit pop duo Bros. It is directed by Justin Donnelly from TV The Troop.
Modern Studio Deluxe Hostess Tray on "Pressed" set with Norm Li
… yes we are way behind on our posts — !
Contact us if you’d like to rent our car mounts or find out more about flying Norm’s lighting balloon.
…so to further update you.
The Odds was our previous feature film and it was produced by Oliver Linsley who recently completed Beyond the Black Rainbow – also filmed by Norm Li…
The guy is unstoppable — with multiple independent film cinematography credits under his belt, more RED Camera owned then he has fingers on his right hand, and a private Airstar 4k balloon light to fly high in the moonlit air on helium pressure — look for a steady stream of Norm’s work to debut soon.
The Normstar (4k Tungsten Balloon Light)
This time lapse from the first portion of a 6 day film shoot at VFS with director Michael Chayse — Head of Production for VFS Entertainment — shows what can be done with TALCO’s 5-ton lighting and grip package truck out of the box.
Vancouver Film School’s equipment was booked by multiple graduation projects from the cinematography program. Michael was leading an inter-department collaboration between the school of business and post production code named Project Space Squid, which involved students, faculty, and alumni. The project was based on the sci-fi cosmic horror writing of HP Lovecraft, an american writer from the turn of the century.
Michael needed professional lighting to bring Lovecraft’s surreal Cthulhu Mythos to life.
VFS Entertainment turned to our grip truck to convert an unused space which had no lighting grid into a functioning green screen studio with lights and equipment. We performed lighting services while business management students oversaw the shooting of 5 short films. They were titled: C’Thulhu, Dagon, Dunwich, Erich Zahn, and Rats.
The students are maintaining a comprehensive blog of their progress in post production.
The project was overseen by VFS head of the Entertainment Business Management department, Jessica Leigh Clark-Bojin, who also produced a 7-minute behinds the scenes documentary of the production titled, The Interactive Lovecraft.
Further there are some photos taken by a student here.
The VFS press department seems to be on a roll with this project…more will follow.
This music video for Arkadia Picture was shot on 35mm Film on a houseboat in beautiful Sycamouse, BC. Produced by Alex Galanis and Directed by award winning Stephano Barberis with cinematographer Ron Williams C.S.C. The video echos the sentiment, “When life is rough go sit on the lake and put some alcohol on it”. You heard it from Gord Bamford and his band. Happy summer.
The final video for Faber Drive, “You And I Tonight” with cinematographer Danny Nowak C.S.C, Key Grip Mike Branham of Best Film Services, and lighting by TALCO. The video was directed by Colin Minihan of Digital Interference and produced by Shawn Angeleski. Rain Effects by BrantFX.
