#TBT, Triad Style
Often on Throwback Thursdays, people like to reminisce on terrible school pictures, sweaters with shoulder pads and loud prints (can we say hot pink zebra stripes with day-glo pom poms?). Here at Triad, we often reminisce on technology.
Our producer has pictures of her with her first mobile phone, all eight pounds of it, when she was producing videos back in the mid 90’s. Twenty years later, a phone about the size of a deck of cards has as much, if not more, computing power than the most powerful laptops that she would use to write scripts! E-mail was just coming to the attention of the general public. Now we all have phones that host multiple e-mail accounts, plus Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Snapchat accounts (or any other social media that’s in vogue at the time).
When we first started Triad Production Group in 2011, we produced a kid’s television program called “Kids Can Cook.” We learned a LOT from that run; we worked through workflow issues, realized that we had recorded audio for our video too hot because there wasn’t an audio monitor built in to our cameras at the time and found a workaround, tested out different encoding options to make sure that it would be broadcast at the best quality (Our editor spent a day and a half with an IT guy exporting and re-exporting an episode)!
Learning from past mistakes; we now have invested in equipment that enables us to do our jobs RIGHT! We now have two Canon C-100 cameras, with built in audio monitors! Codecs have become somewhat more streamlined over the years and encoding programs have better presets! If we want to export that video so it shows on Facebook; there’s a preset for that! We even have a computer that has fiber optic connection to a shared network drive. It exports like a beast!
We have learned a lot about digital film storytelling, color correction, mastering audio, and even a bit of 3D modeling. We’ve learned that when you’re coordinating with team members who are on the road across the country, Dropbox is a lifesaver! We’ve tried out different shooting and editing styles, and much like hair or fashion, some of the trends have fallen out of favor and we’ve picked up on the latest and greatest. We’ve also learned that with a little grit, determination (and a lot of sushi!), quite anything is possible. Sent b-roll of 3D printers to the White House? Done it. Interview people from NASA? Yup, done that, too. Travel down to Oak Ridge National Laboratory to film new technology? You got it; loaded up the rental, fired up the Ed Sheeran tunes, and drove to Tennessee!
So what will we be looking back and remembering in another ten years? Other than cringing at the pastel color palette of clothing and the ubiquitousness of man buns, we hope we will be remembering from our infancy learning how to edit VR video, or laughing over how an intern’s handling of a drone was so shaky and now they are a ninja drone camera operator. How will you remember your future Throwback Days? If you’re like us, you’ll be working hard towards the future and will have many things to look back on and be proud of… except maybe that paisley kilt craze.
