Butcher Bird Studios

Three half-hour live streams of a festival event (co-hosted on the Facebook pages of Airbnb and National Geographic); posting a short-form companion documentary within two days of the event's completion; and a continuous output of interesting photos and media pieces beginning the day before the event and posting throughout the festival.

• TIME. There were short turnaround times for their content and they needed to cover an event with thousands of attendees over the course of three days.
• FORMATS. They would be supplying multiple aspect ratios (including vertical video) for sites ranging from Instagram to YouTube.
• BUDGET. They were working with a limited budget for the amount of deliverables required in the time frame expected.

"The real magic happened during our post workflow at the end of each day.

"Ten or more of us would gather in Jarrod's hotel room (he drew the short straw). We had three Apple MacBook Pro laptop computers connected via 10GbE to Thunderbolt converters to OWC Jellyfish Mobile. The effect was very much like being in college and cramming for exams. But we all embraced it, client, agency and filmmakers alike, because the pace kept us on the edge of our seats. Or duvet. Or tabletop, if you were the last to arrive.

"At any one moment, Jarrod, Jason or I would be capturing footage and imagery from the C300s, GoPros, SLRs, or one of a dozen cell phones. Another one of us would review footage and images with our client. While yet another would be in the midst of editing and reviewing sequences with the whole team. A pizza would arrive, and we'd swap tasks. Now I worked on Jarrod's sequence while Jason dug up more shots for me to use. And Jarrod outputted material that one of our clients could use for a social media post.

"Sure, you wouldn't want to run a feature film like that, but it absolutely worked as a four-day sprint. All it needed was the willingness of everyone involved to go back to school. And the stacks of late-night pizza boxes really helped set the scene."

Steven Calcote - Founder, Butcher Bird Studios

The live-streamed pilot garnered millions of views, but that wasn't the most important victory for the team. They established a entirely new method of real-time collaboration that they apply with all their content production at Butcher Bird Studios HQ in Los Angeles. Since then, they have taken the same Adobe Creative Cloud for Teams/OWC Jellyfish approach on everything from Top Gun-style multi-camera shoots on aircraft carriers to some truly insane narrative projects.