 |
About Serac Adventure Film School
Serac Adventure Film School specializes in extreme adventure filmmaking, taking cameras into the world's most intense environments. Their combined experience includes over 50 expeditions to all seven continents, winning more than 50 international film festival and industry awards, summiting Mt. Everest five times, and shooting for some of today's top-rated television shows including Deadliest Catch, Storm Chasers, and World's Toughest Fixes. Clients include National Geographic, NBC, CBS, ABC, ESPN, OLN, the BBC, Rush HD, the Discovery Channel, and many more. Instructors are happy to teach first-hand the true art of adventure filmmaking along with all the tricks of the trade to complete a film from start to finish. Serac Adventure Film School student films have won awards and appeared on national television. Many former students have since started successful careers in the industry.
Michael Brown and David D’Angelo
Over the last two decades, Michael Brown has climbed to the top of two of the world's most demanding professions. As a world-class mountaineer, he has summited Mount Everest four times, and as an Emmy-award winning filmmaker, he has carried a 25-pound High Definition camera with him to the top. Brown has made a habit of going to the world's harshest, most dangerous environments—the South Pole, the North Face of the Eiger, and 1500 feet underground in Choreadoro cave—and coming back with incredible footage and compelling stories. Men's Journal called him "a master of gut-dropping action," and Outside Magazine described the cerebral filmmaker as a "swashbuckling librarian." As Founder of the Adventure Film School, Brown practices another of his favorite pursuits: teaching.
Partner David D'Angelo has been a Producer / Cinematographer with Serac Adventure Films since 2004. He successfully summited Mount Everest and has produced and filmed award-winning adventure documentaries around the world. D’Angelo applies his natural ability to perform under pressure in the most adverse circumstances such as Discovery Channel's Deadliest Catch, Storm Chasers, Iditarod, and National Geographic's World's Toughest Fixes.
www.seracfilms.com
|
|
How has LaCie made your life working/editing footage easier?
There are a few things I look for in a storage product: it should have RAID 5 internal, and not require a setup on the computer to get a RAID array going. I need to trust it, and know that it's not going to fail. And if a drive does go down, I can just plug a new one in and we're good to go. eSATA 3Gb/s is key for our work, since it lets us transfer files so quickly.
Since we can’t afford a five-figure fiber channel network for editing (yet!), we have to have ingenuity in troubleshooting. This used to distract our editors from editing and, most importantly, affected our deadlines and costs. With the 4big Quadra, there is no wasted time. My editor can take that drive to any of our computers and start working with it. It’s got RAID 5, and 4TB, which is plenty. In the worst-case scenario, a drive can go down and we lose a couple hours while it rebuilds. In the past, if a drive went down, we would have had to go out to storage and find our backups, which was a huge hassle.
What are some of the challenges you experience as an adventure videographer that differentiate you from other videographers?
Our productions take us to places like the top of Mount Everest, into white-water rivers and into other extremely hostile environments for long periods of time. We are often working in places, like the sides of cliffs, where one small mistake would be deadly so we have to be very focused and have the right equipment.
How do you pick the topics for your documentaries/videos?
We seek out projects that, as we say, celebrate the human spirit. Our favorite films include Farther than the Eye Can See about a climb of Mount Everest by a blind climber and 3 Peaks 3 Weeks about ten women climbing peaks and raising money for non-profit organizations in Africa. Adventure is in our name, but what we really like is a great human story.
We also have the Adventure Film School which is all about having fun and sharing new experiences. We have held class on Kilimanjaro, on the Inca Trail, and various events around the country including snow camping at 12,000-ft in the Colorado Rockies during January. The idea is that the students will start and finish an adventure film in a few weeks or less and some have won festival awards or aired on television. Our upcoming schools include a trip to Everest Base Camp, Antarctica, Bhutan, and Kenya.
Describe an experience with your LaCie drive where our product greatly improved your workflow.
Serac Adventure Films is a mid-sized production company that pays close attention to the budget. When we upgrade our computer systems every year, the old edit stations are kept for logging and archiving our massive still library. One problem is that interfaces change so much from year to year, and you have to be careful to keep track of which drives work with all your systems. The 4big Quadra has everything, from USB to eSATA. I can move it from system to system without hassle. It doesn’t matter if our students show up with a Macbook that only has FireWire 400 or a Macbook Pro with an eSATA card—we always know we can hook it up to our 4big Quadra and don't have to go hunting for a drive with the proper connector.
|
Testimonials
