The results are in, and I’m proud to announce that The Buddy Group has won eight 2010 Telly awards! For those of you who are unfamiliar with the Telly Awards, they honor the very best local, regional, and cable television commercials and programs, as well as the finest video and film productions, and work created for the Web.

Here’s how it works – The elusive Sliver Telly is the highest possible award, and isn’t given out very often. The second place award is the Bronze Telly.

Seven of our awards were awarded in the traditional process, where producers who have won Silver Tellys in the past are sent copies of the work and judge each individual video based on the category in which it was entered. The eighth award was for the VelociRaptor Product Trailer that we made for Western Digital and comes from an exciting new category – the People’s Telly, which was voted on by the general public via the Telly Awards YouTube channel.

Here’s the full breakdown of our eight 2010 Tellys:

WD My Passport Studio Trailer – Computers/Information Technology Category – SILVER

WD My Passport Studio Trailer – Use of Animation – SILVER

WD Velociraptor Product Trailer – Computers/Information Technology Category – BRONZE

WD Velociraptor Product Trailer – People’s Telly, Use of Animation - BRONZE

WD SmartWare Overview – Sales Category – BRONZE

WD SmartWare Overview – Visual Effects Category – BRONZE

Hot Wheels Custom Motors Interactive Video Experience on YouTube – Entertainment Category – BRONZE

DTS UltraPC Video – Miscellaneous Category – BRONZE

File this one under: Stuff I Can Finally Tell You

We did it! We finally launched the Hot Wheels Custom Motors Cup interactive game on YouTube and the Mattel Hot Wheels site. In its first few weeks alone the game has garnered over 350,000 views - and that’s just on YouTube!

We’ve been dying to tell you all about this project, but we had to keep it all top secret until after the official launch. It’s out there in the world now, though, and if you haven’t already seen this interactive game, you should check it out.

The concept is pretty simple - you pick the vehicle you want to race with and then you pick the accessory that you think will give you the best shot at winning the next race. There are three races overall and you get to pick a different accessory for each race. Watch out though, because the other cars get to pick new accessories, too, and everyone wants to win!

We shot every frame of this video in stop-motion animation. The prep, which included concept generation, storyboarding, planning, set construction and the stage build took six weeks. The shoot took a month. For those of you who like production trivia and fun facts, here are a bunch of numbers that went into this project…

26 days of production
9181 frames captured
1 minute 16 seconds average to shoot each individual frame
88 individual camera angles shot
3 expensive movie light bulbs burned out
2 expensive lighting control boards burned out (but fixed under warranty!)
85 pounds of sugar used
150 pounds of sand used
2 tripods hot glued to the floor
98,511 individual files totaling a 641GB project

Sometime in the next week or so we expect to have a behind the scenes video completed that will highlight all of the work that went into bringing these cars to life. For now, you can play the game on YouTube and tell all your friends about it!

–Mike

We’re working on a super cool project in DotLot right now.

It’s for a major brand.

It involves stop motion animation. Lots of it.

And it’s super cool.

But I can’t tell you about it until it launches in a couple of weeks.

What I *can* tell you is that to date, we have used north of 85 pounds of granulated sugar and over 150 pounds of sand as set dressing.

I can also tell you that granulated sugar retails for approximately $0.50/lb. The biggest bag of sugar that Ralphs carries is 10lbs, but Albertsons stocks 25lb mega-sacks.

In case you were wondering.

– Mike

DotLot Creative Director Mike Kirsch was tapped by the Death Valley Conservancy to edit a PSA promoting the Death Valley Fund. The 30-second spot will air on PBS (KCET-LA) September 27th during the premiere of the new Ken Burns documentary “National Parks”. (Check your local PBS station’s website for air times.)

Reps at the Death Valley Conservancy sent Mike more than 13 hours of historical, modern and aerial footage, stills and postcards. They asked for a spot that would make Death Valley look heroic and beautiful. Mike sifted through all the footage to cut a spot centered mainly around the Borax 20-mule team and amazing 35mm aerials.

The spot is being conformed to HD in DotLot this week and then will move on to a post-house in LA for color correction and output.

You can learn more about the Death Valley Fund at DeathValleyFund.org.

– DotLot

This is a short BTS clip that I shot this morning as we were prepping for our Western Digital shoot. I’m on a quick break right now and then it’s back to shooting!

–Mike

This month we celebrated July 1^st as Happy DTS 7.1 Day! “Give me 7.1 surround sound or give me complete silence”.

http://www.celebratesevenone.com/

Celebrate 7.1 on 7/1! from DTS Digital Entertainment on Vimeo.

DotLot played the producer role and called on some of our finest crew to shoot this production. We had the chance to work with some amazing talent: Fred Willard, Lou Wagner, Richard Horvitz, Robbie Troy, John Pollow along with some talented DTS buddies. This was a quick one day shoot which took plenty of preparation. We all had a great time on-set and off-set!

Even the Agoura Hills Mayor Denis Weber got into the act by proclaiming July 1^st to be “DTS 7.1 Day” in honor of their cutting edge 7.1 surround sound audio technology.

Also … signup and be a part of this celebration as DTS is given away Blu-Ray Discs, Playstation 3 and a 7.1 audio system! Go on and have some entertainment!

We took a trip out to Vegas to visit DTS at CES where we were able to see our three commercial spots featured prominently.

Each spot was given its very own display area!

UltraPC

Broadcast

At the Broadcast display they also turned some of our animation into print materials…

Car Audio was also on display…

DTS also put together a 15-minute presentation that showed off several of their technologies, including the brand new 11.1 audio format. For their demo of UltraPC they chose to use our UltraPC spot. Each viewer had their own pair of headphones that they were able to use for the UltraPC demo. It’s an amazing technology - two speaker or headphones truly sounds like full surround sound. Here’s a group of audio professionals and journalists watching the demo.

CES is always an amazing show that features great new technologies. DotLot was proud to be part of it.

Here’s one more cool shot. The video for this Kodak display was shot entirely on the DotLot green screen stage in Irvine.

For even more on CES, see this Buddy Blog post on the conference.

– Mike

We had a lot of fun making this next commercial. At one point, the earliest concept even included a ninja, but that part of the concept got axed due to time constraints. What we ended up with was an awesome little spot that features a wily granny in spandex. Nothing wrong with that!

Be sure to watch it in HD on YouTube!

– Mike

This commercial was made to promote the integrated car audio systems that DTS has available through several different auto manufacturers. We shot multiple locations in and around Orange County.

Special thanks to all the cast and crew who worked their butts off on one very long production day.

Be sure to watch it in HD on YouTube!

– Mike

Hey, Friends. 

During Q4 last year we produced 3 commercials for DTS in order to help them promote several of their new consumer audio technologies. I’ll be posting them over the next few days. Here’s the first one, which covers their broadcast audio technologies.

You can also watch this video over at our YouTube Channel.

– Mike