Kairos Creative Co.

15/01/2025

First project of 2025 has been released!

When we set out to make this commercial, we had one goal in mind: Create a clean, simple, beautiful commercial that communicates what makes this game so special to so many people.

How'd we do?

Are you interested a producing a high quality commercial in 2025? We'd love to talk! Shoot us a message and we can schedule a call!

22/07/2024

SOLID first run at a festival. Took home 1st place for the "Best short film" category.

Excited for the festival run to come!

04/05/2024

Have you ever wondered to yourself, "So what does a production company do, exactly?"

Well... simply put: we make film and video projects come to life. But what does that look like in practicality?

We could go really deep answering this question but to keep things concise we'll break it down into 3 simple phases:

1.) Pre production- Pre production is what we jump into immediately after being hired on a project. This phase can vary widely depending on the size of the client's business, whether they have a marketing team or not, if we're working though an agency or directly with the client, etc. But this phase can best be described as the planning phase. This is where we plan EVERY controllable aspect of a production before we get onto a production in an effort to make the production phase as efficient as possible. Pre- production includes planning and hiring cast and crew, renting in any additional or specialized equipment, booking or scheduling locations and studios, shot listing, scripting, dress rehearsals and training for any special equipment we might be using, booking travel, scheduling our production days, to name a few of the aspects.

Pre production is important for two reasons. The first is that in the pre-production stage we have the luxury of time which is a requirement to be truly creative. Once you show up on-set, there's so many moving parts that you don't have time or mental bandwidth to be creative on the fly. We HAVE to have a plan in order to create quality creative material. The second is that pre-production time is much cheaper than production time. If we can devise a plan in pre-production that increases our efficiency and limits the amount of time required once we get all the personnel and equipment on set during production, it saves the client money. That's not to say that we don't have to pull an audible every now and then on set and deviate from the plan but the goal of pre-production is to minimize how often that happens.

2.) Production- this is the: "Lights, camera, action" phase of a project. This is what most people think of when they imagine a production company. We're rolling cameras and gathering footage. It's a lot of setup and teardown, it's a lot of staring at a camera monitor and tweaking EVERY tweak-able aspect of a frame to match our story.

The goal is to execute the plan we devised in pre production and capture everything needed to tell our story. A close secondary goal is to make everything as close to what we need it to be in the finished project as possible so that we can limit the time spent "fixing" things in the post-production phase because similarly to the relationship between pre production and production, post-production can get really expensive really fast relative to production if you have to fix things that would have been as easy as remembering to remove the red bull can from the shot before rolling camera (yes... that's a specific example because that exact thing has happened to us on a production and it took literal days to remove a can from frame in editing that would have taken 14 seconds to remove physically if we'd have noticed it before rolling camera).

3.) Post production- This is the final stage and a lot of people think that it's as simple as just editing a quick video. But there's so much more that goes into it than that.

For us post production starts with ingestion and file management. How you handle your video and project files is very important in the overall process of post production. There'aoften a lot of data, for reference, we just wrapped production on a project and after 2.5 days of shooting, we walked away with 7 terabytes of footage. We shoot in a raw format for video which often requires pre-processing before we even get to the editing phase. Then there's editing, there's audio engineering and mastering, there's color correction and color grading, they're' VFX and SFX. There's sound effects and foley (also sound effects) that need to be worked out. There's a lot of steps involved and each one requires a specialized person or team of people to accomplish.

For smaller projects we handle post production in house but for larger projects we prefer to hire the post production rolls out to true specialists. And then there's packaging. The way video is distributed these days is multi format so it's not as if we edit a single video for a project and deliver it. We're often cutting different videos for horizontal and vertical deliveries. Social media or pre-roll advertising formats. Embedded formats for websites and all the accompanying visual assets for landing pages, etc. And all of that get's packages and delivered to the client.

So that's a peak at our process of producing a film project. Now you know :)

16/04/2024

The toys are definitely a perk of the job in this business 😎

11/04/2024

Got the squad out doing things 😎

Little BTS from a recent commercial production. More to come!

29/03/2024

Something cool is dropping today!!! If you haven't snagged a ticket to see the premiere of the short filmed that we shot for Twinbolt Media last July, here's your chance!!!

$10 at the link listed below and you'll receive an email with a link to the private premiere event where you can see the film :)

BIG ANNOUNCEMENT!

That's right, Folks. David: A King's Calling is finally here!
Premiering this Friday, March 29th, our short film will go live for all investors to watch on Youtube.

We have several announcements we will be making going into Friday, but the most important announcements are as follows.

1. If you've already donated $10 or more through our fundraising campaigns so far, we will be sending you a private link to watch the short film in 4k quality, this Friday.

2. If you are interested in receiving the link to this short film, please donate at Givebutter here! https://givebutter.com/DavidFilm

More to come!

20/03/2024

Ai is going to replace photography and film production.

Specifically, these categories of film and photo are in danger:
1.) Headshot photography
2.) E-commerce product photography (commercial product photographers, don't worry you're fine)
3.) A lot of landscape photography
5.) Drone video
6.) Stock footage (generic stock footage, story driven stock, still in the clear)
7.) Social/short form/"trend" videos

If you've had a conversation with me at any point about this (this is Sam writing this, by the way), you might be surprised to hear me say this. But hear me out because my stance is the same. If you're creating unique, story-driven work, you're fine. THat's my stance and I'll die by it.

BUT

If you're a photographer or filmmaker that creates these types of images and video products listed above, I would start thinking about how to pivot now.

Why is this? We need to understand a little bit about ai and how it works. Ai requires a quality input and then based on that input generates a predictable output; and what do all of these categories have in common? Predictability; especially given the right inputs.

Photoshop has been doing this forever (in practical use, the back end of the program is different but the principal is the same) and nobody has been all that shook by it. Content-aware fill has existed for a long time and what it does is take its input from the surrounding portions of an image and then it outputs something that the program believes will fit in that spot, visually. Now we've advanced to doing it for entire images and not just portions of images but the principle is the same. Take some guiding input and based on that input, produce a general output that works because of certain predictable attributes.

There's an Ai image generator that exists right now where you can input a handful of low quality selfies with different expressions and generate a truly professional looking studio style headshot with Ai and does so in such a convincing way that you would never be able to tell the difference. Especially in the very small format that most people use headshots which care as professional profile photos and corporate literature where the image is the size of a nickel at best.

Studio headshots are incredibly predictable in terms of the finished product and that predictability has been coded into an Ai generator that will make headshot photography all but niche save for the smallest of applications.

E-commerce photography: same thing. Imagine you have an an e-commerce storefront with 50 different products that need to be shot on a white a background and professionally lit for the listing photos. Set each product on your dining room table and snap a quick photo in the general orientation you like and then upload it to an Ai generator with a prompt to place the product against a plain white background with high-key studio lighting. Boom! You just saved yourself literal tens of thousands of dollars by not hiring a photographer. Again, commercial product photography, not nearly as predictable and far more creative, therefore poses a challenge for Ai.

Drone video or landscape photography, particularly of regularly photographed places, monuments, national parks, landmarks, etc. A simple prompt in an Ai generator and that Ai has literal hundreds of thousands of references to pull from on the internet to create a realistic AND ACCURATE 100% generated image or video of those places and you never have to even set foot there.

Stock photo and video: guess what, same thing. A lot of stock footage and photos are generic and therefore easily coded into an Ai program on how to reproduce incredibly lifelike imagery of a similar fashion.

Trendy Instagram shorts? Well trends by definition are predictable, once they catch one they're the exact thing that Ai is good at replicating.

Hopefully you get the point, predictable, generic, non-creative image creation is going to get replaced by Ai.

But what can you do about it as a filmmaker or photographer? Well, for one, you have to understand your job. Your job is not to create an image; your job is to elicit an emotion, to tell a story, to have an impact. Ai can do all of those things but only haphazardly at best. The only way to exert the control you need to tell the story the way YOU want to tell it in order to have the impact that you want to have is to create it yourself.

Real life example, I was at the Bass Headlamp in Acadia Maine early on in my career. I got this great composition of the lighthouse. Still one of my favorite images I've taken (pictured below). I worked hard to climb down to the ocean to shoot it. I thought I shot something truly unique, I went back to Bar Harbor later that afternoon and every postcard I saw in every gift shop and gas station had essentially the exact same composition of that exact lighthouse on it.

Moral of story is that humans can be predictable and predictability is what Ai does well. Predictability and lazy creation is what Ai will replace. So don't make the first thing that comes to mind. Ponder the work you're doing. Ponder the story you're trying to tell and the impact you're trying to have and then create something custom catered to that intention and therefore, truly unique.

And when you realize that your unique perspective can't be replaced (emotional perspective, physical perspective can absolutely be replaced hence the lighthouse image), that frees you up to realize that Ai is a tool, it might make your life easier if you can learn how to apply it to certain tasks and parts of you're process. It might not serve you at all. It might just be a buzzword you hear and pass by. But one thing is for sure, if you're not offering anything truly unique to you and the way you perceive the world in the work that you're creating, Ai is coming for you and it will replace you. How's that for a dramatic end line 😂

Thanks for reading this far 🤘🏼

08/03/2024

Can't wait to see the flare that Cody brings to this piece. It's been really amazing watching how many talented people are coming on board to make this thing the absolute best that it can be

The short film is in Cody's hands now.

Who is Cody Martin? (Aka C.K. Martin) Is an award-winning composer with clients such as Angel Studios, Netflix, Hulu, The Dailywire and more. Recently he was selected to compose branded content for The Ring's of Power!

Cody was an immediate connection at a faith-based film festival we attended a few years ago. His partnership and collaborative spirit have shown he is a go-to composer for Twinbolt for the foreseeable future, and we recommend you follow him on all social platforms as he continues to fight for faith-based productions to get the highest quality music possible.

24/02/2024

We’ve recently added a Red V Raptor X to our camera package offering.

What’s that mean for our clients? If you want a higher than 4K deliverable, no problem, it’s an 8K camera.

If you want to do some heavy VFX, no problem. It’s literally the best VFX camera on the market right now because of its global shutter and resolution.

If you need 16.5+ stops of HDR goodness to make your business or project look otherworldly… yep, it’s got that too.

Don’t know or care what any of that means and want the TLDR (even though you probably already read all that): What all this means is it’s just another tool in the belt here at Kairos Creative to create the HIGHEST quality visuals to bring your story to life.

We’re excited to be offering it to our clients starting in March

16/02/2024

We've got a lot of new faces here on the Kairos Creative page (we appreciate the migration of the Twinbolt Media crowd due to our involvement in their David project), so we thought we'd take a minute and share with y'all a little about what we do.

The Kairos Creative Co. is a full stop film production company. We produce commercial and narrative films as well as music videos, corporate video, and even some social media content.

This company started out of the spare bedroom of our owner and DP, Sam Lucas's, apartment in 2017 and now, 7 years later, we have a full blown studio, we get to work with some of the most talented people in the game, and with some of the coolest equipment. We've worked with multi billion dollar brands (yes, with a 'b'. We know, it blows our minds too) as well as with the small shops around the corner in our small little home town.

We've made some amazing friends along the way and we're excited for 2024 to be our best year yet. We've got the most talented people around us that we've ever had and we're excited to get out there and tell some incredible stories.

Thanks for joining us on our journey and we can't wait to show you what we make.

01/02/2024

When CrossPoint Church West Allis reached out and wanted a series of videos testimonies from members of their community that they could use as stand alone pieces for brand building as well as community cultivation inside their church, we got the idea not far into the discovery phase that these pieces would package really well together and string a common thread through a series of media assets that could then be used for the coming 12 months and accomplish the goal of community building as well as building brand recognition.

So we got to work building an anchor piece to identify the series and this is the result of that.

We had a lot of fun with it and leaned really heavily into some fun, abstract, imagery to set the tone for the look and feel of these videos.

30/01/2024

Frames from the latest DP/camera dept. work for Twinbolt Media's latest short film "David: A King's Calling".

Film potentially launching end of February/Beginning of March. Check out Twinbolt's page for more info on how to view!