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