By Jon Silberg, November 18, 2008
Zak Knutson and Joey Figueroa of Chop Shop Entertainment. (Photo by Jon Silberg)
Friends Zak Knutson and Joey Figueroa didn’t really think about starting a video business when they met in Orange County. The two now work as jacks-of-all-trades in their Hollywood-based production and post company, Chop Shop Entertainment, creating EPKs and documentaries for filmmakers including Kevin Smith and John Milus, but, when they met, Knutson was the bouncer at a strip club where Figueroa was working as the DJ. “His job was to guard the ‘couch dance area’ by the DJ booth,” says Figueroa of his beefy business partner, “and we’d end up talking about movies all night.”
Some 10 years later, Knutson and Figueroa had worked their way up from the bottom of Kevin Smith’s production company, View Askew, to a point where they had jobs waiting for them coordinating production and postproduction, respectively, on Smith’s next film, Jersey Girl. Instead, the two — both huge fans of all the cool extras on well-produced DVDs — asked if they could produce and shoot the behind-the-scenes material. Smith and his longtime producer, Scott Mosier, both supportive of their loyal group of crewmembers who keep returning show after show, immediately approved.
“We then got a crash course in lighting from [Smith’s cinematographer] Dave Klein,” Knutson recalls, noting that Chop Shop might not exist if not for aid and encouragement from Smith and Mosier.
Klein showed the two how to rig “book lights” — homemade units that attain a very soft lighting effect with a standard hard source by diffusing the light and bouncing the result into more diffusion. Knutson and Figueroa learned quickly and were able, with a few units and very little time, to make talent look good for their interviews. “We don’t use book lights now,” Knutson notes. “There are great ready-made soft boxes we can bring if we want to add a little fill or some rim light to someone.”
The Chop Shop team has a philosophy about shooting this kind of video that isn’t exactly followed by everyone who does this kind of work. “We always keep things small,” Figueroa says. “I’ve seen EPK crews come on set with six-person crew — two producers, a sound guy, a boom guy, and they’re all in the way of the production. We’re a two-man band. We make our presence known so people know why we’re there, but we don’t get in people’s way.”
“We make sure we’re friends with the gaffer, and a lot of times he’ll throw up a light for us,” explains Knutson. “Very often, the sound mixer is happy to let us jack into the audio board. But we know that everyone there is very busy, and we never want to get in the way of the production. Usually, actors or crewmembers who see our stuff say, ‘You were here that day?’ ‘You were shooting then?’”
Lately, the team’s been using a Panasonic DVX100 camera in 24p mode
. They’ve cut down their lighting package from two to one box: An ARRI tungsten kit with two 300s, two 650s and two soft boxes, though they like a somewhat “un-lit” and raw look that can give the behind-the-scenes material a slightly less polished, studio-generated feel. “When things appear overlit,” Knutson declares, “that look irritates me as a viewer. We try to let the existing light do a lot of the work, and then we might hit people with a rim light or make the light on an actress a little softer — that kind of stuff.”
The two also edit most of their material themselves at their Hollywood offices, where they have a couple of G5s running Final Cut Pro 6.0.4 and a 4TB RAID for storage. When DV visited the Chop Shop HQ, the pair was at work on a series of behind-the-scenes “Webisodes” to complement NBC’s Web-based science-fiction series Gemini Division (available here). These mini-documentaries have run in their small, compressed versions for the Web, but their delivery spec is HD to allow for the pieces to run on broadcast or cable TV or to be included in a Blu-ray release.
Knutson and Figueroa work with the material in FCP’s 720p HD codec. While they say they would use Pro Tools for some more elaborate projects, they are both happy with Soundtrack for most of their bread-and-butter EPK work. Likewise, Apple’s Color has given them very pleasing results, though there’s still some color-grading assignments they would trust only to a dedicated colorist at a high-end facility. “I want the blacks black!” Knutson says. “A good colorist is a technical artist, and there are times we really don’t want to try to do that work ourselves.”
Having completed behind-the-scenes work and documentary Webisodes for Smith’s latest ribald comedy, Zack and Miri Make a Porno (available at quickstopentertainment.com) the Chop Shop duo hope to continue building their EPK business as they progress on their own projects, including the Milius documentary and possibly a Web-based series of their own — though it’s still too early for them to share what the premise might be. It’s early days for Webisodes, and a lot of small companies like Chop Shop are thinking along similar lines. One thing they will say about a Web series they might produce is that the 3-5 minute duration of each Gemini Division installment is just right — and not merely for technical reasons to do with streaming and downloading. “The average person watching programming on the Internet will only stay with something so long,” Figueroa observes, admitting that this short-attention-span stereotype includes himself. “If I’m watching something on the Internet and it goes on for much more than three minutes, I say, ‘You’ve got to entertain me much faster than that!’”
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