AVATAR WAS RECENTLY FEATURED IN THE ST. LOUIS EGOTIST STUDIO INSIDER

Studio Insider: Avatar Studios

March 29th, 2013

Company Name:

Avatar Studios

Year Founded:

1999

Physical Location:
2675 Scott Ave, Suite G
St. Louis, MO 63103

Online Location:
Website: www.avatar-studios.com
Facebook: www.facebook.com/avatarstudiosstl
Twitter: @AvatarSTL

Company Philosophy:
Avatar provides the highest level of service from “script to screen” to create engaging and effective communications tools for our clients. Our passionate, talented team of industry creatives utilizes the vast resources at our disposal to ensure each project yields a powerful product that delivers on the client’s objective and timeline. We configure a production design and schedule based on the client’s needs and overall scope of the project, whether it is a high end shoot or a quick “run and gun” job. Our goal is to let our work establish personal relationships, and allow those relationships to grow into strong collaborative partnerships.

Client List:
We help agencies look like heroes, and the corporate world communicate.
We also assist our fellow production companies round out their creative endeavors with equipment rental, post services and crew staffing.

Personnel Count:
32

Best Achievements from Last Year:

A Fall From Grace Trailer – Director Jennifer Lynch and Apothecary Films chose Avatar Studios for the production, post-production, and sound design for the trailer to the upcoming film “A Fall From Grace” which was shot throughout downtown St. Louis. We were up against some pretty ambitious timelines, and the production required Director of Photography Doug Hastings to manage several crew members, utilize helicopters, boats, cranes, and jibs to capture all of the incredible footage. Jim MacMorran planted the voice over from Bill Pullman into the trailer and added his own original sound design. Perhaps the most important thing that came out of the trailer was the awareness it raised for the lack of tax breaks for filmmakers in the state of Missouri. Our friends at Apothecary are continuing their fight to bring more films back to the show-me state.

Against The Grain Original TV Programming – Avatar was able to use our in house agricultural gurus to co-produce the documentary, “Against the Grain” that aired on 175 stations nationwide. The documentary was filmed from 2011-12 and chronicled the up and down lives of America’s farm families in the midst of the recent climate volatility. Our own Brad Shelton line produced the documentary, and Doug Hastings was again responsible for the lens work. Scott Betz edited the vast amount of footage down to final 45 minute piece. We take a lot of pride in our Midwest roots, and this project allowed us to feature our core expertise, while also bring to mind a serious issue across our region.

3 Things The World Doesn't Know About Avatar Studios That It Should:

1. Avatar Studios is the largest full service production and post production facility in St. Louis. We boast a 2,200 square foot sound stage on site with a full light grid, 2 dressing rooms, and full prep kitchen. Those attributes, along with our on-site set construction ability allows us to help you dream up just about any environment to shoot in the studio. We can shoot simple table top or green shoots, but we have also built beaches, decks, living rooms, and car dealership showrooms on our stage.

2. All of the content we provide is specially designed to be flexible tools for our clients to utilize across different platforms. We provide truly flexible options for the content that we develop for our clients. We are resolution independent, which allows us to accommodate just about any media placement in today’s world of total media convergence. We license all of our work for it’s main purpose as well as the internet, so our clients always have the flexibility to feature the video on their website or YouTube channel to increase its reach and visibility.

3. If you are lucky enough to supervise an audio session with sound engineer Jim MacMorran, there is a good chance that he will offer you a glass of scotch from his private collection. Just be sure not to ask for too many revisions.

Our Space

Our Work

Motion Reel – We are experts in Adobe After Effects and Avid, and have years of experience behind the camera as well as providing creative support to designers and shooters. Above all, we love making creative and visually engaging videos out of any concept, existing art, or video.

Ascend Retail – This piece was one of seven to be used on Firestream Worldwide's website. Firestream's Marketing Department wanted to better explain each of their software products simply and concisely, but with their high-tech image in mind. We accomplished that by shooting a spokesperson on our sound stage using motion tracking technology along with high-end motion graphics and 3D animation.

Trane Mantra – The Trane “Mantra” video was a quick turnaround project that essentially challenged us with bringing a company’s mission statement to life with no more than a script and a PDF file. We applied some motion graphics to existing stock photography and video to paint a beautiful picture of their corporate mantra.

Fall From Grace

Against the Grain

AVATAR TAPPED FOR NATIONWIDE RETAIL MARKETING STRATEGY

Avatar Studios was tapped by Anheuser-Busch to create content for a major retail marketing strategy. The brewery is pushing approximately 8,000 point of sale (POS) video displays into convenience, grocery, and liquor stores nationwide. Producer Jim Duff teamed with Avatar to create seven videos for brands that include the new Budweiser Black Crown. These short videos feature table top shooting of the product, beer pours, food and ingredient pairings. “The content we created for the integrated retail displays will illustrate each brand’s quality, flavor and hit the brands’ market niche” said Bill Faris, Avatar President.

Bill Conerly and Brad Shelton coordinated product, props and sets for the multi-day shoots in our soundstage. Lensed by Director of Photography, Doug Hastings, the videos were edited by Dan Bussey and Jack Larson. The various brand videos will cycle through displays nationwide in 2013.

See all of the videos and more at our Digital Display page.

ERIC HUNT JOINS AVATAR STUDIOS AS ACCOUNT EXECUTIVE/EXECUTIVE PRODUCER

We are pleased to announce the newest member of our team, Eric Hunt, who joins Avatar as Account Executive/Executive Producer. Hunt most recently served as an Account Executive at St. Louis-based Schupp Company. He holds a bachelor's degree in Sociology from Brown University in Providence, RI and is a St. Louis U High grad.