Pitch Films

We trekked up to Tunkhannock, PA to meet up with Chris Murley, Director of The Underground Miners Group and restorer of original mine equipment. Our goal was, capture some authentic sounds of the coal cars and mining tools that we could use for Foley and also as some percussion for the soundtrack. We pulled into Chris’s back yard where I was amazed to see he had an actual working coal car engine, 3 cars, and railway tracks. We climbed onto one of the cars, went for a few rides, and banged around with some pick axes and old mining car axels. We were able to capture some great sounds and had a lot of fun in the process. We even got a featured on IronMiners.com. Thanks Chris!

After hitting the ground running with some great interviews we decided to devote a day to research. We picked up Eric Bella (Anthracite history expert/high school student) who led us to the Office of Surface Mining. There, buried in an unmarked drawer we found a massive archive of old Knox related newspaper articles. With scanner and laptop in-hand I began scanning away. We got a good start but there was too much to get through and the joint was closing in an hour. Everyone in the office was really helpful and supportive of the project. In realizing that they should have a digital copy of these articles for their records, we were able to request scans of the articles we didn’t get. Obtaining these scanned headlines are essential to the project and finding them (for me) was on par with discovering one of the 12 crystal skulls!

The web is a powerful place it’s hard to believe that after all theses years Empire at 3 3/4ths is still going strong. Recently some cool dudes at Game Trailers decided to put it up, I guess Star Wars stuff never goes out of style. It’s funny that this video holds up because stop-motion animation has improved so much since we did this. I mean with all the tons of cool programs out ther like “iStopMotion” by Boinx everybody should be doing this stuff. Nonetheless we here at Pitch Films are extremely happy that Empire has stood the test of time and is still being watched, loved, and talked about all around the world.

I’ve had a habit over the past few years of filming a lot of random stuff with my Canon Digital Elf. It’s really small (about the size of a wallet) and it’s great to shoot random moments and behind the scenes stuff. So I’ve decided to take all this footage I’ve shot and start editing them into short segments for the web. My version of a Home Movies series if you will. This first one is called The Job and it’s a cool little insight into the kind of work Al and I do out here.

So we figure, this video contest racket is easy! Let’s enter some more! Malibu Rum had got together with YouTube to promote their new banana rum flavor. First prize was 20 Gs and contestants were asked to make a minute long commercial on ” How do you Malibu?”. This had stop-motion drunk bananas written all over it. Our very first flick was a stop-motion short entitled Evolution. It was for a film class I had at Penn State (circa 1999) which we shot one long weekend in Grandma Brocca’s garage. It felt good to get back to our roots. This one wasn’t going to be easy but it was a helluva lot of fun. (Just check out the Pics) Pole-dancing bananas and coconut DJs party down to a sweet Banana Boat Song (Day-O) remix by RJD2. We built sets during the day and shot at night for four days straight. I still can’t believe we didn’t win this one. The Fix was in.

May I present our entry into the Malibu Banana Rum Video Contest – The Secret Malibu Banana Rum Tape.