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Excerpt reprinted with permission of Markee magazine Take a look at the future of independent filmmaking. Aim your Internet browser at www.yellowcat.com. You'll find a rundown of the capabilities of the Washington, DC film and video firm of Yellow Cat Productions. You'll also find blurbs and ordering information for a number of the firm's independent documentaries. You can order the critically acclaimed Semana Santa (Holy Week) in Seville. Available in both English and Spanish, the 52-minute documentary chronicles the annual celebration of Holy Week in Seville, Spain - a tradition that dates back more than five centuries. Semana Santa earned Honorable Mention awards at the 1995 Columbus International Film & Video Festival and the Cindy Competition in 1996. Critics offered unreserved praise: "...beautifully filmed, magnificently researched and superbly narrated... It should definitely be an integral component in courses on Spanish culture and civilization," wrote E. Michael Gerli, professor of Spanish at Georgetown University. The magazine, Video Librarian, called it "an enlightening and visually satisfying exploration ...of interest on several levels: as art and cultural history, folklore, religion, and travel." "The broadcast rights originally brought in $20,000," says Michael Ford, president of Yellow Cat. "We've been selling about five copies a week, at $29.95 a copy, for a number of years through our web site. People e-mail us with their name, address, and credit card number, and we send it to them. We've sent copies of the tape all over the country and all over the world to all seven continents. We don't find them. They find us." In a way, Ford has been riding new production technology for 30 years waiting for the emergence of something like the Internet market. Educated at the Rochester Institute of Technology and Boston University, he has a BFA in Photography and an MS in Broadcasting and Film. He found his first job shooting news in l6mm for a local television station in the Northeast. Later he made educational films in the university market. In 1970, he formed Yellow Cat Productions to house his freelance documentary filmmaking business. His first was a folk documentary on agrarian life in Mississippi called Home Place. Produced in 1972, it collected a number of awards and was selected for screening at the American Film Festival in 1976. By 1979, Ford had incorporated Yellow Cat in a townhouse on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, and set out to produce corporate videos with a JVC KY-2000 video camera, one of only two available in DC at the time. The three-tube JVC camera cost $10,000 and captured video with quality akin to the $60,000 video cameras that set the standards of the day. "Suddenly there was this new JVC camera," Ford says. "We were in just the right place at the right time. In those days, everyone was beginning to feel the demand for more media. I knew we could get broadcast work with a camera like that, so we bought it. People said to us: Do you mean I can do a show, cheap?" Today, Yellow Cat's capabilities include pre-production, production, and post production. For field production, Yellow Cat has two complete Betacam packages and one DVC package. The post production side of the house offers an AVID Media Composer 1000 on line editing suite with Broadcast Component Board and AVR-77. Music compositions are handled with a Midi system: Roland E-35 synthesizer, Proteus FX, and Performer sequencer program. For graphics, the firm uses After Effects, Boris and Adobe Photoshop. "The reason we exist is to make independent documentary films, most of which we develop, produce, shoot, and sell on our own. That requires having our own equipment," says Ford. "Equipment costs will continue to grow as the industry moves forward to 16:9 letterbox formats and HDTV. Just like anyone with a large investment in NTSC 4:3 equipment, we have to watch for what is happening and try to make the right moves at the right time. Today these decisions involve technologies such as HDTV, digital SX, and Digi Betacam." "But whatever happens with technology, we'll still tell stories. We're still dealing with flickering lights. Now electronic lights flicker on the television screen instead of fire-light on the wall of the cave. Either way, we're still sitting down and telling stories to people. And you have to tell the right story to get people to come by and listen."
by, Michael Fickes |
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