Deb Eschweiler – Speaking of Rampant Design:
I was recently asked to design a project for video projection mapping. The finished video was going to be projected onto the front of 6 grain silos, wrapping around a corner, with 3 silos per side.
There was little time between the decision to move forward and the deadline. The video was part of a live event that was happening in less than two weeks. Shooting did not complete for several more days.
I was able to cut down my design time by using Rampant Design Tools Studio Mattes, FlashFX, & the new 4K Studio Flares to add a bit of panache to some very well-shot, but somewhat mundane quad- & octo-copter footage of local landmarks.
I did not have to “massage” my hours to come in at budget. (I won’t quibble over an extra hour or so. Considering how much time it would have taken me to just to design custom mattes… an hour is nothing!!)
The video played last evening. The producer was over the moon, the client was extremely satisfied with the end result, & the attendees at the event raved about the video. People came out of an entertainment pavilion, looked up at the silos, stopped in their tracks & started taking pictures, asking questions about the video & the projection mapping, & generally enjoying the show!
I have joked with Sean Mullen of Rampant Design that he has often functioned as my graphics department. It was never more true than on this project!
Set Up & Testing:
Event Night:
A Little About Deb:
Deb Eschweiler is a freelance editor in the Minneapolis/St. Paul area, with clients also in Chicago, Louisville, Denver, San Francisco & Los Angeles.
She began editing just before the dawn of desktop computing, so she’s seen a lot of change in the industry over the past few decades.
Deb began her professional career cutting news for a fledgling satellite news gathering agency, but she quickly learned that she and news just weren’t meant to be, and within a year or so, she was hired as an assistant editor at a post-production facility in Minneapolis. This was in the heady, early days of Digital Betacam and CCIR 601.
As an assistant, she became adept at driving the Grass Valley Halo character generator & graphics system. It’s where she learned to cut mattes, make alpha channels &
animate handwriting, but not how to be an efficient typist. In three years, she was promoted to full editor status and honed her chroma-keying & mad GVG EMEM & PEG skills. (If you don’t know what those are, you missed out on some amazing programming macros!)
Deb met her first NLE in 1993. She became keeper of the Avid media and has been an organizational whiz ever since she had to rescue 3 Zip disks of project backups from
corruption. Triple-redundant backups were born that day.
She currently works either in-house with clients who have systems or on her own system. Her projects run the gamut from large format video projection mapping projects
to live event, government, educational, medical, financial & other forms of corporate video, with a sprinkling of series work to keep things interesting.
She edits on Avid, FCPX, FCP Classic & Premiere Pro, depending on the project and client needs. She likes being able to be flexible and to choose the best tool for the job. She uses After Effects and Motion for graphics work, though she freely admits that there are many times when one wants & needs a full-time graphics team, complete with designer & operator, to pull of some projects. Those in-between projects are where content & element developers like Rampant Design Tools become indispensable.
She can be found on Twitter as @debesch or via email at debe(-at-)pobox.com.
