Backyard Studio Blog

We’re Coming Back

// August 9th, 2010 // No Comments » // Uncategorized

So, as you can tell, Backyard Studio has not been that active in past months. This is because I just graduated high school and am busy with a summer job trying to get enough money to live off this fall.

This fall, I have very little plans, and plan to get back into film making. I have been working on a couple scripts.

So watch for us to be more active.

Crazy Busy

// January 4th, 2010 // No Comments » // Uncategorized

Just wanted to let you know what we’ve been up to, we have been crazy busy. Last Thursday we filmed a one minute thing for the upcoming BAY Rally in Brainerd, MN. Wednesday we are starting another video that’s a little bit longer and more complex. We are also doing two more Gieco spoofs.

I am also working on three screenplays right now. Two of them are Horror and one of them is Action. I should be getting back to writing.

-Matthew Loberg

New Video Section Of The Site

// December 26th, 2009 // 1 Comment » // Uncategorized

We added a new part to the site, all most of our videos. You can watch them here.

We are also starting to record our next film next week. The script isn’t done, but we are an amateur studio, we usually don’t have a script or we don’t follow it. Though we are going to try on this one.

We may post little teasers or start a video podcast, who knows. One thing is for sure, we are going to have fun with it.

48 Hour Film Challenge

// December 23rd, 2009 // No Comments » // Uncategorized

We are excited for the new year. At Backyard Studio we have two scripts in production and ideas being developed. We also are working on a amateur film festival with a twist.

We are calling it the 48 Hour Film Challenge. Here is a basic overview of what we are planning them to be:

There are teams consisting of 2 to 10 people. On Friday night at 5:30PM the teams gather. They have all their equipment, they register. Then at 6PM everyone is given an assignment for a short film, under 10 minutes. Each team then has 48 hours to plan, film, and edit their short. The deadline for the video is Sunday night at 6PM. If they are not in, they are disqualified. There is then a banquet like thing, where there is some food and the videos are watched. A panel of judges judge the videos and prizes are awarded to the best video.

We’re pretty excited about it, but we still have some things to figure out. Right now it’s going to be local, which is the Brainerd, MN area.

What we want this to be is a chance for people to get out and film. We hope they learn and network with other film makers.

If you are in the Brainerd, MN area and are interested in this, we have set up a Twitter account, @48film where news and updates will be shot out. Once we get all the details ironed out, we will be adding a page to our web site and post something here. We are really excited about this.

-Backyard Studio

PS. Merry Christmas

It’s up! It’s up!

// December 11th, 2009 // No Comments » // Uncategorized

We weren’t sure if this video was going to get into the Nikon Festival. The first edit was rejected, then we made some changes and resubmitted it. Then we got another email saying it was rejected. Then we decided to forget about the Nikon Festival and make edits to it and make it a short. Then as we were changing the ending credits, we got an email saying our video was accepted. What? But the second edit of the video got accepted, even after it was rejected… Boy, were we excited. So you can watch that here – http://www.nikonfestival.com/blog/2009/12/11/a-dream-i-once-had/

Tomorrow we are going to film a behind the scenes thing about it and post it as our first thing to “Behind the Scenes”.

Speaking about Web site changes, we are talking with @mloberg to make a couple more changes to this web site. One being Behind the Scenes and one being our video page. So watch for that towards the end of December.

Nikon Festival

// December 8th, 2009 // No Comments » // Uncategorized

We have had the chance to make two videos for the Nikon Festival. For more information you can go to the official web site at www.nikonfestival.com. Nikon is holding this festival to celebrate the D5000 ability to take 720p HD video. That’s the same camera that we use, and we recommend it.

The theme is a day through your lens, so we took the “normal” day of Matthew Loberg, the “president” of Backyard Studio. You can watch that here. All camera work, music, and editing was also done by Matt.

There is a second one that we are waiting to get approved. It’s a pretty epic 140 second movie. Matt Loberg came up with the general story, then Dane Walter helped develop a little more.

I won’t tell you what happens, your just going to have to wait, but this was probably the most interesting and fun video Backyard has done to date.

In the first scene, Matt beat up Dane. We filmed it right outside of a Church located in a small town. A street that usually isn’t very busy runs right next to it. As we were filming, a car turned on to that road. Then as Matt started to beat up Dane, the car stopped! So we stopped the scene right there and then ran inside the church. It was pretty funny.

The next scene, is a low light scene, and we didn’t have really anything that gave us the amount of light we needed. So in order to get what we wanted, we put a rag over a light bulb. We were getting the camera, when we heard this pop and whoosh. We ran into the room, and the light bulb had exploded and started the rag on fire. Luckily there was a fire extinguisher right there and we got it put out almost right away. Did you know that a burnt light bulb smells really bad? Along with that, it set off the fire alarm… That sucked. So after we got all cleaned up, we had to change our plan, and had to compromise a little bit.

We started filming this Friday night at 3:30. Saturday morning at 1:20AM we finally got done. The majority of the movie was filmed outside. We are located in Central MN, and it was snowing. It was cold. We had to constantly take 10 minute breaks so the camera and crew could warm up. One thing I learned about cameras, is that they do not like to operate in the cold.

We were filming in a church’s parking lot. It had just the right amount of light we wanted. After taking a break, we went out and no lights were one. So we had to relocate to the back of the church where there was one or two flood lights on. It did not provide enough light, so Matthew Loberg being the DIY guy he is, found a par can, a partial piece of white cardboard, and a ton of extension cords, and rigged up some lighting. It worked out perfect. And a ton of thanks to the crew. It was the biggest crew we have ever had. (It’s usually just Matt)

The movie turned out awesome, so awesome in fact, that we are going to take the very basic plot of it and turn it into a feature film.

So watch for it here. We hope to have a “lite” version of it done by January 20th so we can submit it to the EgoFest in Brainerd, MN.

We Are Finally HD!

// November 26th, 2009 // No Comments » // Uncategorized

Last week we bought a Nikon D5000. Besides being a DSLR camera, it has 720p HD video. We are still waiting for a lens, but that should be arriving tomorrow. The first thing we are going to record is a film for the Nikon Festival. The theme is “A Day Through Your Lens” and it’s limited to 140 seconds. There are some good videos entered already, but we have a pretty good idea. The grand prize is $100,000 and second is $25,000. We could do a lot with that, like a Mac Pro and a Professional Camera.

Once we upload our entry, we will post a link so you can see it.

If your not doing anything this weekend, why not enter in it too?

Nikon Festival

New Camera and New Site

// November 17th, 2009 // No Comments » // Uncategorized

Yesterday, we bought a Nikon D5000 DSLR. The best part about the camera is that it has 720p HD video. We are really excited about that because now we have something that can record video and it’s HD. So watch out for new videos soon.

We are also adding more stuff to this site. One being a custom video page, rather then redirecting you to our YouTube page. Another is a behind the scenes page. And the last, but probably the biggest, is a community place for amateur film makers and studios. We are excited about it and will hopefully be up soon. More details coming soon.

Winter Is Coming and That Means More Videos

// October 23rd, 2009 // No Comments » // Uncategorized

First thing first, there is a contest to make a commercial on the dangers of Texting and Driving. It’s for high school students, so I qualify! I’m and trying to gather a group of people and some ideas. If you are a high school student located in the Brainerd Lakes Area, we would love your help if you would take it seriously. If you are interested, please send an email to matt[at]backyardstudio [dot] net.

I have also been forming an idea for a show. I think I have all the ideas down and enough show ideas for a good deal of shows. I just need a place where I can make it the set and gather a cast and crew.

Backyard Studio also wants to make a movie that we can place in film festivals and is a little bit more advance then what we have done before.

Winter seems like a time where we can get enough people together to do some filming. We hope to be adding more films to YouTube channel.

-Matt Loberg

My First Video

// October 9th, 2009 // No Comments » // Uncategorized

I was looking through a video folder that I had on a file server and I found a folder with some of Backyard Studio videos plus some of my personal videos. One of those was one of the first videos I made, a “music video” that got my started in video production.

Here is the story behind it. In my sophomore year I took a Microsoft Office class. The first quarter was Word and the final for that class was making a slide show using Apple iMovie. I just watched that movie and it was pretty bad. All the pictures were really bright and the scanned ones looked really bad. The second quarter was Excel and I excelled at it. I got everything done in half the time it was supposed to take. I got to work with the IT department and learned a lot about networking. The final for that class was a music video. I had a great idea, problem was I couldn’t replicate what I had in my mind. I had some people drop out of it and then I had to change songs twice. By the end of it, I had no one that would help me with it, so I had to do it all by myself. This was also a hard time in my life, I had two of my very good friends leave me, so I felt depressed. There was this one song that I really liked so I decided to use that as my song for my music video. When I finally chose this song, I had two weeks to get it all done. This song was kind of depressing and I had a great idea in my head. Problem was again that I had a hard time making it look like my head. I filmed like 4 scenes. Most of them were scenes of me looking down and depressed. There was one scene where I walked through a dark hallway and one where burned a piece of paper.

By the I got the four scenes filmed, I had three days to get it all done. So I cheated and used Movie Maker (it probably harmed me more then helped me), I was supposed to use iMovie, but that wouldn’t have given me enough time. I put my 4 scenes in there and then split them up. Now there was one part of the song that I needed to have more then one person in my scene, so I took something I had filmed just for fun and used that. I put most of it together, I took out the audio and rendered out the movie. The last day of school, which was three hours, I got done with all my classes and went to work on it. I put the rendered video into iMovie and the audio in and an hour after school was done, I got my final done. I never knew what grade I got on it.

Watching it made me shake my head. It was so bad.  It was me in two different places, and dark hallway, me burning something, and a clip of some people (that had nothing to do with the video) mixed around. My hair was a complete mess and I looked really depressed. The one good thing about it was that the scenes changed when the lyrics did, so the video flowed with the audio. But other then that it was bad, it was badly lit, very grainy, and I looked just stupid. I remember at the time though I thought it was the best thing. Maybe I’ll put it up on the web site some day just to show you where I started with video production.

-Matthew Loberg