Across the Bridge

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Walleye Pictures & Sound on Reel-Exchange
Mojo Video Tech on Reel-Exchange
Ryan McKenna on Reel-Exchange

Left to right: Jason Gallagher, Stephen Schlueter, Ryan McKenna, and Mark Alan Johnson. Photo by Jason Woodruff

To reach Ryan McKenna''s editing studio,which claims part of the top floor of a multifamily house on a residential street in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, you ascend the stoop, passing the banner of a motorcycle club, open the unlocked door, and then proceed to the third floor and into to McKenna''s studio apartment. The motorcycle club may or may not own the building, but its presence seems to ensure that the house''s front door can stay unlocked in a New York neighborhood that was considered a dangerous slum two decades ago.

A freelance editor who works mainly on television commercials and music videos, McKenna is a member of a creative class that would have, a generation ago, found a place to live in Manhattan. The past decade''s real- estate market in New York has placed the current generation firmly on the Brooklyn side of the East River. The democratization of technology and the gentrification of the borough—the “acceptability” factor—have allowed creative professionals of every stripe to hang out their shingles in Brooklyn. Among them, many video producers maintain workspaces in Brooklyn. The following are a few representatives.

At Walleye Pictures & Sound, Jason Gallagher (pictured) and Stephen Schlueter use an Apple Final Cut Pro/Digidesign Pro Tools G5 system to edit footage they shoot with their new Panasonic AG-HVX200 or various rented cameras.

Stephen Schlueter and Jason Gallagher run Walleye Pictures & Sound out of the apartment that Schlueter shares with his wife on the second floor of a brownstone, on a leafy block in Prospect Heights. Like McKenna, both studied filmmaking at school—Schlueter learned camera work at Syracuse University, and Gallagher picked up nonlinear editing at Boston University. They met through Gallagher''s brother-in-law, who acted in one of Schlueter''s films.

After working alternately as a grip, an assistant cinematographer, and a bar manager, Schlueter had some early success upon moving to New York after college. He had hooked up with a group of Syracuse alumni from the theater department who were looking to turn their stageproduction into a film. Schlueter served as producer for the film project, which turned into the feature River Red, a festival selection at Sundance in 1998.

Gallagher did postgraduate work at MTV News and produced documentary programs, such as episodes of My Block and All Eyes On…, for the network.

Meanwhile, Schlueter was working steadily as a DP for music videos, reality shows, and a documentary project about ultimate fighting. He and three friends produced The Smashing Machine about the troubled, once-dominant fighter Mark Kerr over the course of two years. They shot more than 400 hours of DVCAM footage, traveled to Japan five times, and edited for 18 months — often in round-the-clock stints to maximize their time in the suite. HBO premiered the documentary, generating high ratings, and aired it on Spike TV in 2003.

In 2003, Gallagher and Schlueter formed Walleye Pictures & Sound to leverage their experience and connections in the worlds of documentaries, TV production, and music video. Beginnings were less than auspicious: For their first project, they followed around a notoriously ill-behaved supermodel and were stiffed by two separate production companies when the project went belly-up.

Although their endeavor basically started deep in the red, work has been steady. Schlueter and Gallagher are shooting projects they're genuinely excited about, such as a multi-Varicam shoot of Brooklyn band TV on the Radio's homecoming concert last summer in Prospect Park. They've done several music videos for major-label bands such as My Chemical Romance and Kittie, a few dramatic shorts, and bullriding documentary Rank, which recently aired on IFC.

The two come from traditional broadcast and feature film production backgrounds, and every client has different format needs (especially broadcast networks). Unless they end up shooting with their new Panasonic AG-HVX200, the pair rents gear packages based on the job, so there's not a lot of gear creeping into Schlueter's living space. It's confined to one room that houses an Apple G5 system with Final Cut Pro 5.1.4 and Digidesign Pro Tools. Shelves are stacked with hard drives and MiniDV and DVCAM tapes.

Walleye usually does not own the gear it's using, so Schlueter and Gallagher get the most out of gear that's in their hands at the moment. That's allowed the two, for instance, to shoot a video for Gallagher's band, Leroy Justice, with a 35mm camera during a weekend rental. Likewise, the duo might use a necessary business trip as a way to shoot a side project with the HVX200 and develop another project.

This summer, Walleye was in Las Vegas shooting for the MTV Video Music Awards. “We knew we'd have a bunch of friends out there that we could call on to help us,” Schlueter says. “And we had another friend who'd just finished an album. We liked a track, so we came up with a concept with him to do a western-vibe music video that we're cutting right now.” Also involved in video shoots for the award show was a group of Vegas go-go dancers, whom Gallagher befriended. Walleye ended up featuring them in the friend's music video and giving them reels based on their performances. They also started developing a documentary project with the dancers based around their daily lives.

When I visited, the pair were in the process of editing the music video they shot in Vegas. “We're sitting in together,” Schlueter says. “We've known each other for a long time, and we know what we want.”

“We'll get something going and he'll let me go for an hour or two,” Gallagher adds. “It's back and forth. It's not like, ‘I need six hours; go away.'' It's real loose.”

Walleye has worked with a handful of outside directors for most of its projects, but Gallagher and Schlueter are starting to direct. The purchase of the camera has been somewhat of a turning point; Schlueter says that with the HVX200, he's finally confident of the quality of something he didn't have to rent. And with his background in film, he says that the workflow of changing out cards after several minutes and offloading them into a P2 store feels natural, as if he were working with film reels. “I'm really amazed at what this camera can do — it's really beautiful,” Schlueter says. “I know it gets knocked for its low-light capabilities, but Jason was shooting in a nightclub, and the stuff that you can see in the dark is really amazing.” Currently, the Walleye duo is developing a scripted show about the inner workings of the hip-hop world

Mojo Video Tech uses three dual-G4 editing machines running Adobe After Effects and Final Cut Studio.

Mark Alan Johnson, owner of Mojo Video Tech (MVT), doesn't live in his studio in DUMBO (which stands for Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass), a neighborhood across the river from Downtown Manhattan where wealthy young families have bought former artists' lofts over the past decade. But he does keep a futon there for occasional late-night sessions. According to Johnson, his windowless studio — teeming with computers, video display gear, cameras, and piles of relevant components — is situated deep inside the last true artists' warehouse in DUMBO, making it a prime target for a rent-doubling. Indeed, he and his gear might be on their way to another neighborhood if the current eviction threats materialize.

Although the home of MVT is not secure at the moment, Johnson has the deepest New York roots of any of the subjects of this article. His pro video career in New York stretches back to the early '90s. As a guitar player, he started putting together slide-projection programs as a visual component for his performances. “This was when video projectors were CRT projectors the size of refrigerators,” Johnson says. As the technology inevitably shrank, Johnson began VJing at clubs and loft parties.

“You couldn't pay me enough to work in a dance club these days,” he says. “Chasing my money down at 5 a.m. from some promoter is just no fun.”

Johnson has taught himself computer technology to accomplish musical tasks, starting with an Atari ST 1040 MIDI computer in the '80s that he used to sequence and notate music. He has been a Mac fanatic since the days of the Apple II, and he has three dual-G4 editing machines running Adobe After Effects 7 and Final Cut Studio 2. These feed a projector and several small flatscreens. These and a tray for his laptop are mounted on an array of steel tubes, calling to mind a spacecraft set from a future-dystopia flick. A glance at his studio reflects hours of experimentation with gear, with various cables and connectors in plastic tubs and a triage table of components to be soldered.

Johnson says that about half of his jobs through MVT require his presentation expertise. He owns five 2500-lumen Epson PowerLite 820p projectors, an Edirol V-4 for live video mixing, and all the necessary connectivity gear, such as VGA converters. With the gear he owns, he's able to spec out rental packages for corporate events and concert tours, sometimes including gear he needs to rent from other sources, such as bigger projectors or matrix switchers with more I/O than the 4×4 models he owns. He often serves as technical director for these events as well, as he did recently for the run of an off-Broadway dance/rock-and-roll show. Johnson set up the video system, served as onsite technical director, and trained the show's video director on the Edirol mixer. The director could then switch the SD composite video outputs of HVX200 cameras that captured live video of the dancers for IMAG to a 16'×9' screen.

A dream job for Johnson, however, would have him mixing the video at front of house for a live concert. “I love the touring lifestyle; it's a lot of fun,” he says. In recent summers, he has VJed electronic music festivals and hit the road with acts such as Donna Summer and The Dead. “For someone who does psychedelic visuals, that's pretty much the best job you could ever want,” he says of his 2004 tour with the surviving members of the Grateful Dead.

Johnson uses royalty-free abstract visuals as well as those he creates himself in After Effects 7. The new version speeds his workflow for creating visuals driven by music. With After Effects' Expressions, he says, “You can have your audio intensity at a certain frequency be driving a filter. For music stuff, it's great. Instead of having to go in and drop a keyframe, and then render the preview and make sure it's in sync, all you do is take the audio waveform and assign it to drive your filter.”

Not only does Johnson design visuals, but he also develops unique ways to display his creations. For his 2005 tour with Donna Summer, Johnson adapted a projection technique he developed for his tour with the Dead. He has built an array of four Epson PowerLite 8300i (6000-lumen) projectors pointed up and toward the backdrop behind the band. Arranged like a fan, the projectors throw trapezoidal shapes from 6ft. away to cover the backdrop. “It's more part of the lighting show,” Johnson says. “I work closely with lighting designers to make sure we're working in the same color palettes.”

On top of his work in the presentation world, Johnson also works as a Final Cut Pro editor and a gun-for-hire for events that need documentation, whether it's a band working in a studio or a National Geographic event honoring a photographer. He has a Canon XL1 and GL2, and a few analog camcorders (not to mention the security cameras monitoring his studio). One current project has him documenting bands in the studio for the web video site mDialog.com, in a series called NiteSessions. With a mix of HD and SD camers, he and another cameraman record via FireWire direct to a hard drive. “We have all the assets right on hard drive at the end of the session,” Johnson says. “And with Final Cut's new open timeline, it's great, we just drop it into one project.”

Ryan McKenna crams a Mac Pro tower with a MiniDV deck, a Blackmagic Design Intensity card, a Sony Bravia screen, and an Apple Cinema HD Display into his studio apartment in Williamsburg.

Although the largest feature of his studio is his bed, Ryan McKenna has edited TV commercials that have found significant national airplay here, such as a recent one he did for Subaru. He's got a completely professional editing suite — the core of which, a Mac Pro tower, is available for purchase at any Apple store. Similar NLE setups can be found in perhaps several hundreds of apartments within the borough.

Most of these, however, don't include eight processor cores, an attached MiniDV deck, and a Blackmagic Design Intensity card for realtime preview via HDMI to a 40in. Sony Bravia screen, as McKenna's does. He also has 2TB of internal storage in a RAID 0 configuration, plus a 30in. Apple Cinema HD Display.“I can do uncompressed HD fine,” says McKenna, who estimates he spent about $18,000 setting himself up earlier this year.

He learned nonlinear editing on Final Cut Pro version 1.0 (and Avid) at Fitchburg State University in Massachusetts. McKenna says the school's focus was on teaching the tools rather than discussing films. With his friends, he would come up with a visual effects gag and write a short movie around it. “It wasn't the most genius writing,” he says, “but it helped us develop techniques.”

These techniques helped him find visual effects work in New York, such as broadcast design/branding firm Plus et Plus, where he spent countless hours rotoscoping. These days, however, he's focused on editorial, and he'll take on jobs independently or spend a few days at a time editing at Post Millennium in the city or at Lifelong Friendship Society in his neighborhood.

Although he'd love to work as an editor at one of the big edit houses in New York, McKenna says he doesn't want to restart from the ground floor as an assistant. “That's a difficult thing to break into,” he says. “They promote a lot from within.” But the types of cinematic projects that make these houses attractive to McKenna are starting to come his way. Recently, he edited a music video for the song “Peacebone” by New York psychedelic-folk-etc. group Animal Collective that looks and feels like a big-budget production.

If several favors weren't called in, of course, the budget probably would have been quite large. A former classmate from Fitchburg, Jeff Shepherd, served as DP on the video. He filmed Super 16. Shepherd and McKenna also shot moody time-lapse footage of trees and the sky with digital SLR cameras during the nine weeks prior to the formal shooting days. The director, Timothy Saccenti, and McKenna wrote the treatment for “Peacebone,” which features a romantic interaction between a green, lanky monster and a Corvette-driving young woman with a horrifying mouth. Most of the video's budget went to a creature shop in New Jersey called Monster in My Closet.

Mark Szumski and Tom Hurlburt from Click 3X worked on “Peacebone” as a favor. In Autodesk Flame and Maya, they did CGI work on a scene where another monster comes out of the woman's mouth. Needing to stretch the actress's mouth and push back her teeth, they first modeled and animated based on test Panasonic P2 footage that came in before they received Digibeta plates of the Super 16 footage. Telecine was at The Mill, where James Bamford color-corrected the video. As soon as McKenna got files from The Mill to edit, he had to cut it together quickly in order to pass it off to Click 3X, so they could do their final compositing on Digibeta plates.

It might seem like a lot of high-powered, unpaid work went into a video for a relatively unknown indie band, but the video has made an impact on YouTube, where it was briefly on the Featured Videos page. In one day, according to McKenna, “Peacebone” received more than 100,000 hits. (At press time, it has attracted about 400,000 viewers.)

So far McKenna's Sony DSR-11 MiniDV deck hasn't gotten much play; most of his projects involve high-quality QuickTimes shared with collaborators over the Internet or via hard drives. For McKenna, who says he learned to type in Final Cut Pro, a file-based workflow just makes sense. “As things get more and more post-heavy, your browser in Final Cut is just like your Finder in your Mac,” he says. “You can point to [QuickTime] files on your hard drive, and there's something that an After Effects artist can use, a Flame artist can use — anybody can use those files.”

When I visited his bedroom/studio, McKenna was getting ready to receive a client, James Wills of the electronic record label Love Is War. He had seen the Animal Collective video on the Web and Googled the editor's name, leading to McKenna's website. With that, McKenna had another gig editing a music video. He says he's at the point where he can pick and choose the projects he wants to edit at home and work freelance gigs at other facilities as necessary. A recent example of that is an NBA commercial McKenna edited for post house Lifelong Friendship Society (LFS). He did all the work from home, editing DVCAM dailies of 35mm footage and participating in review and approval with the director, the agency, and LFS via the Web.

Current short-term plans for McKenna include a bigger apartment. “If I could get the bed out of the office, it would be cool,” he says.

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