11
Jan
2005
On Saturday, Phil Dingeldein will serve as director of photography for a three-minute film, in what is the culmination of a Project Greenlight-like contest run by the Iowa Motion Picture Association. Three scripts and three directors were chosen, and over the course of an afternoon, all three will be filmed as part of a seminar in Des Moines.
The project is, in many ways, no big deal for Dingeldein, who's been doing the director-of-photography thing for nearly three decades. What is a big deal is that the short movie will showcase a new synergy in Rock Island - the combined efforts of Dingeldein's dphilms and Mark Johnson's Brass Sail audio studio, which rivals technologically advanced recording outfits in Chicago.
"This is where our facility really shines," said Dingeldein. Both the movie's visual and sound editing will be done in the same building, and because the aural element is so crucial to the work's success, Johnson and Dingeldein will be working closely together.
Dingeldein and Johnson have been doing their own things for a long time, but now that they share a building, there's the potential for many more collaborations. Although the two businesses aren't technically affiliated - Johnson leases the space from Dingeldein - the combination of dphilms and Brass Sail creates a one-stop shop for high-end video and audio needs.
dphilms
Dingeldein didn't want to get into video. "I wanted to be a recording-studio engineer," he said.
But the only program close to that at Black Hawk College was radio and television. And Dingeldein ended up on the television side for a reason that most people who were college students can appreciate: "I thought the people doing TV were having more fun."
After college, Dingeldein went to California to make a living but returned after eight weeks. It would be easier, he decided, to build a career in the Quad Cities doing television production than in the overcrowded entertainment job market of California.
So in 1976, he started offering freelance production services. Back then, people asked him, "Don't [channels] 4, 6, and 8 do that?" and he'd respond, "Yeah, but not very well."
dphilms' work is remarkably varied, from commercials to feature films to corporate videos. Recent projects include three-dimensional modeling for an Air Force base in Iraq and television commercials for a sports radio station in Chicago and a Houston jewelry manufacturer. In addition to conventional filming, dphilms has a computer animator to work on everything from the military base to diamond commercials. At any given time, dphilms might have 10 projects going.
Some local companies - such as River Music Experience and Neckers Jewelry - also use dphilms, although Dingeldein's reputation is more regional than local. Cost plays a role in that; a two- or three-day shoot with a dphilms crew will cost between $12,000 and $25,000, Dingeldein said, and local retailers only concerned about cost are likely to go elsewhere.
The expense is partly a function of the advanced equipment, such as a 24-frame-per-second high-definition video camera that offers a remarkably film-like image.
The list of dphilms projects is impressive, from national television infomercials (including the George Foreman grill and Time Life) to car-dealer commercials to work across the Midwest for nationally syndicated talk shows, including Oprah and Dr. Phil. With talk shows, Dingeldein's company is often hired to film outside-the-studio segments. "We crew for just about every show that comes through here," Dingeldein said.
And then there's corporate work, such as a video for the Girl Scouts and a new-employee video for Lee Enterprises. The company is also in negotiations to restore for DVD old fishing shows hosted by Virgil Ward, who died last year.
"People don't have any idea what goes on here," Dingeldein said.
Dingeldein rehabbed an old bowling alley on Third Avenue between 22nd and 23rd Streets in Rock Island. The renovation of the building cost $400,000, Dingeldein said, and dphilms moved in late 2003. But work continues; last month, dphilms finished a second editing suite in the building.
That part of Rock Island is somewhat hidden because Third Avenue dead-ends west of 24th Street, but it's a growing area, with a new building for Trinity's Robert Young Center Community Support Program Services and the smoke-free sports bar 3rd & 22. Although all those businesses are different, they create a development synergy east of the District of Rock Island. "One spurs another spurs another spurs another," Dingeldein said. "This is going to be a hot area."
The dphilms office is full of bowling motifs - including sets of pins in their proper configurations - and is dominated by open space with local art hanging on the walls. "We built a fun place here," Dingeldein said. "This is not your corporate America."
And with new digs have come new employees. "We've expanded," Dingeldein said. "It was just my wife and I for years. The move kind of facilitated our expansion"; the company has added three full-time and two part-time employees.
Dingeldein is a technician more than a filmmaker - he's primarily a director of photography and editor. The business owner is also regionally known for his use of the jib - a remote-controlled crane. His work can be seen in the Neckers commercial, with the camera moving from a close-up of bikers to an aerial long shot.
Beyond corporate work, Dingeldein has worked with local author/filmmaker Max Allan Collins on three full-length feature films and one anthology project, the recently screened Shades of Noir. (See "Collins Continues Down the 'Road to Perdition' with Sequels, Movie," River Cities' Reader Issue 504, November 24, 2004.) Collins' Real Time was the first 100-percent multi-angle feature film, with nine camera angles among which the viewer can toggle at any time.
Dingeldein and Collins are working on special features for a box set of their collaborations to be released by the famous B-movie studio Troma sometime this year. Dingeldein said they'll be recording a director's commentary this winter, probably in February.
One of the Collins/Dingeldein collaborations illustrates the technical skill on-hand at dphilms. The movie Mommy was shot on video and was also the first feature edited, output, and released using the Avid system. The Lifetime television network, which doesn't air movies shot on video or edited/output with Avid, showed the movie. The image had been manipulated to look like film, Dingeldein said, and it fooled Lifetime executives. "Nobody really knew that was shot on video," Dingeldein said. "We had done it good enough that it fooled everybody."
When asked about pursuing more artistic pursuits, Dingeldein said he doesn't have time to do unpaid work. "I've got a business to run," he said. "If I walk out the door [to work on a nonpaying project], I lose 500 bucks. We've got six scripts we can pull the trigger on any time. ... We're just waiting for somebody to make the investment."
He added that he, Collins, and one other person are developing a business plan to shoot three of the projects in the next three years. The next step is to find investors.
Brass Sail
Like Dingeldein, Mark Johnson started small. In 1994, he opened a studio in a 10-by-25-foot section of his garage, with a five-by-eight-foot drum booth. It wasn't glamorous, but it was good enough to start his own studio business.
"I was off and looking for [new] places [for a studio] about five, six years into it," he said. In September 2003, he was talking to Copia owner Mike King, who mentioned what Dingeldein was doing on Third Avenue. Dingeldein and Johnson went through the space the next day, and six weeks later, the design and financing were done.
"The idea that I was an audio company intrigued Phil," Johnson said - particularly the idea of having both audio- and video-production facilities in the same place. "He really pushed to help get things done."
The garage had an inherent downside - one couldn't take corporate clients there - but more than anything Johnson wanted to be able to compete with the region's leading studio, Catamount Recording in Cedar Falls. That studio has technical features that no Quad Cities facility could match. "The idea of this studio was to stop losing customers to Catamount," Johnson said. "A lot of musicians were going out of town to find a studio."
Many of those features - such as "floating" walls and ceilings that sonically separate recording areas, keeping vibrations from one place being heard in another - have been replicated at Brass Sail, which Johnson designed himself and built with the help of his stepfather. It opened at the end of March 2004.
"From a sonic standpoint it exceeds my expectations," Johnson said.
The studio has four distinct recording areas - a vocal booth, a drum booth, a band room, and the control room - with sight lines that allow all the musicians to see each other. So a full band can play live with top-quality sound reproduction.
"The studio spaces are buildings within a building," he explained. "We've isolated the walls" so vibrations don't transfer. "Everything is sonically isolated."
And that makes Brass Sail unique in the Quad Cities. "Nobody's gone to these extremes to build a studio in the Quad Cities," he said. "This place just offers a lot of flexibility."
In nine years at his garage studio in Moline, Johnson helped record 15 full-length CDs. After less than a year at the Rock Island site, he's finished five CDs, including releases from the spy-lounge group The Metrolites, Christian vocalist Kim Wiseman, and the jazz group Just Friends.
"I like the way you can see through," said Paul Hale, who leads Just Friends. "Everybody can play together now." Because of the isolation, "if somebody messes up, you don't have to re-do everything."
Johnson, who is a self-taught engineer, is the rare person who works on both the creative and technical sides of the music equation. "I became an engineer to record my music," he said. "I didn't want to pay big studio rates."
He's also a rarity in that he wants the recording experience to be more than just laying down tracks. He would like Brass Sail to be a place where musicians can learn to write and better use their instruments. "I want to make it more enjoyable for them," Johnson said.
"He's very good technologically," said Fred Classon of Just Friends. "He knows the sound he wants to hear and will help you find it."
Johnson also prides himself on providing whatever a band or musician needs. "A lot of what you get here is service rather than just punching the clock," he said. "You're not just getting an engineer." On Wiseman's project, for instance, Johnson acted as producer, songwriter, and primary musician.
Of course, "the budget will reflect that," Johnson said. A band wanting to do a four- or five-song demo will typically incur costs of $1,000 to $2,500 at Brass Sail, while a fully produced CD will generally cost between $3,000 and $6,000. Costs for recording along with songwriting and production assistance will range from $8,000 to $10,000.
"When you look at Nashville, that's still a bargain," Johnson said.
Beyond music CDs, Johnson also writes music beds and commercial jingles, and does voice-over work.
But Johnson still looks at Brass Sail as a place to play as much as work. "How many people get to say they go to work to play every day?" he said.
The project is, in many ways, no big deal for Dingeldein, who's been doing the director-of-photography thing for nearly three decades. What is a big deal is that the short movie will showcase a new synergy in Rock Island - the combined efforts of Dingeldein's dphilms and Mark Johnson's Brass Sail audio studio, which rivals technologically advanced recording outfits in Chicago.
"This is where our facility really shines," said Dingeldein. Both the movie's visual and sound editing will be done in the same building, and because the aural element is so crucial to the work's success, Johnson and Dingeldein will be working closely together.
Dingeldein and Johnson have been doing their own things for a long time, but now that they share a building, there's the potential for many more collaborations. Although the two businesses aren't technically affiliated - Johnson leases the space from Dingeldein - the combination of dphilms and Brass Sail creates a one-stop shop for high-end video and audio needs.
dphilms
Dingeldein didn't want to get into video. "I wanted to be a recording-studio engineer," he said.
But the only program close to that at Black Hawk College was radio and television. And Dingeldein ended up on the television side for a reason that most people who were college students can appreciate: "I thought the people doing TV were having more fun."
After college, Dingeldein went to California to make a living but returned after eight weeks. It would be easier, he decided, to build a career in the Quad Cities doing television production than in the overcrowded entertainment job market of California.
So in 1976, he started offering freelance production services. Back then, people asked him, "Don't [channels] 4, 6, and 8 do that?" and he'd respond, "Yeah, but not very well."
dphilms' work is remarkably varied, from commercials to feature films to corporate videos. Recent projects include three-dimensional modeling for an Air Force base in Iraq and television commercials for a sports radio station in Chicago and a Houston jewelry manufacturer. In addition to conventional filming, dphilms has a computer animator to work on everything from the military base to diamond commercials. At any given time, dphilms might have 10 projects going.
Some local companies - such as River Music Experience and Neckers Jewelry - also use dphilms, although Dingeldein's reputation is more regional than local. Cost plays a role in that; a two- or three-day shoot with a dphilms crew will cost between $12,000 and $25,000, Dingeldein said, and local retailers only concerned about cost are likely to go elsewhere.
The expense is partly a function of the advanced equipment, such as a 24-frame-per-second high-definition video camera that offers a remarkably film-like image.
The list of dphilms projects is impressive, from national television infomercials (including the George Foreman grill and Time Life) to car-dealer commercials to work across the Midwest for nationally syndicated talk shows, including Oprah and Dr. Phil. With talk shows, Dingeldein's company is often hired to film outside-the-studio segments. "We crew for just about every show that comes through here," Dingeldein said.
And then there's corporate work, such as a video for the Girl Scouts and a new-employee video for Lee Enterprises. The company is also in negotiations to restore for DVD old fishing shows hosted by Virgil Ward, who died last year.
"People don't have any idea what goes on here," Dingeldein said.
Dingeldein rehabbed an old bowling alley on Third Avenue between 22nd and 23rd Streets in Rock Island. The renovation of the building cost $400,000, Dingeldein said, and dphilms moved in late 2003. But work continues; last month, dphilms finished a second editing suite in the building.
That part of Rock Island is somewhat hidden because Third Avenue dead-ends west of 24th Street, but it's a growing area, with a new building for Trinity's Robert Young Center Community Support Program Services and the smoke-free sports bar 3rd & 22. Although all those businesses are different, they create a development synergy east of the District of Rock Island. "One spurs another spurs another spurs another," Dingeldein said. "This is going to be a hot area."
The dphilms office is full of bowling motifs - including sets of pins in their proper configurations - and is dominated by open space with local art hanging on the walls. "We built a fun place here," Dingeldein said. "This is not your corporate America."
And with new digs have come new employees. "We've expanded," Dingeldein said. "It was just my wife and I for years. The move kind of facilitated our expansion"; the company has added three full-time and two part-time employees.
Dingeldein is a technician more than a filmmaker - he's primarily a director of photography and editor. The business owner is also regionally known for his use of the jib - a remote-controlled crane. His work can be seen in the Neckers commercial, with the camera moving from a close-up of bikers to an aerial long shot.
Beyond corporate work, Dingeldein has worked with local author/filmmaker Max Allan Collins on three full-length feature films and one anthology project, the recently screened Shades of Noir. (See "Collins Continues Down the 'Road to Perdition' with Sequels, Movie," River Cities' Reader Issue 504, November 24, 2004.) Collins' Real Time was the first 100-percent multi-angle feature film, with nine camera angles among which the viewer can toggle at any time.
Dingeldein and Collins are working on special features for a box set of their collaborations to be released by the famous B-movie studio Troma sometime this year. Dingeldein said they'll be recording a director's commentary this winter, probably in February.
One of the Collins/Dingeldein collaborations illustrates the technical skill on-hand at dphilms. The movie Mommy was shot on video and was also the first feature edited, output, and released using the Avid system. The Lifetime television network, which doesn't air movies shot on video or edited/output with Avid, showed the movie. The image had been manipulated to look like film, Dingeldein said, and it fooled Lifetime executives. "Nobody really knew that was shot on video," Dingeldein said. "We had done it good enough that it fooled everybody."
When asked about pursuing more artistic pursuits, Dingeldein said he doesn't have time to do unpaid work. "I've got a business to run," he said. "If I walk out the door [to work on a nonpaying project], I lose 500 bucks. We've got six scripts we can pull the trigger on any time. ... We're just waiting for somebody to make the investment."
He added that he, Collins, and one other person are developing a business plan to shoot three of the projects in the next three years. The next step is to find investors.
Brass Sail
Like Dingeldein, Mark Johnson started small. In 1994, he opened a studio in a 10-by-25-foot section of his garage, with a five-by-eight-foot drum booth. It wasn't glamorous, but it was good enough to start his own studio business.
"I was off and looking for [new] places [for a studio] about five, six years into it," he said. In September 2003, he was talking to Copia owner Mike King, who mentioned what Dingeldein was doing on Third Avenue. Dingeldein and Johnson went through the space the next day, and six weeks later, the design and financing were done.
"The idea that I was an audio company intrigued Phil," Johnson said - particularly the idea of having both audio- and video-production facilities in the same place. "He really pushed to help get things done."
The garage had an inherent downside - one couldn't take corporate clients there - but more than anything Johnson wanted to be able to compete with the region's leading studio, Catamount Recording in Cedar Falls. That studio has technical features that no Quad Cities facility could match. "The idea of this studio was to stop losing customers to Catamount," Johnson said. "A lot of musicians were going out of town to find a studio."
Many of those features - such as "floating" walls and ceilings that sonically separate recording areas, keeping vibrations from one place being heard in another - have been replicated at Brass Sail, which Johnson designed himself and built with the help of his stepfather. It opened at the end of March 2004.
"From a sonic standpoint it exceeds my expectations," Johnson said.
The studio has four distinct recording areas - a vocal booth, a drum booth, a band room, and the control room - with sight lines that allow all the musicians to see each other. So a full band can play live with top-quality sound reproduction.
"The studio spaces are buildings within a building," he explained. "We've isolated the walls" so vibrations don't transfer. "Everything is sonically isolated."
And that makes Brass Sail unique in the Quad Cities. "Nobody's gone to these extremes to build a studio in the Quad Cities," he said. "This place just offers a lot of flexibility."
In nine years at his garage studio in Moline, Johnson helped record 15 full-length CDs. After less than a year at the Rock Island site, he's finished five CDs, including releases from the spy-lounge group The Metrolites, Christian vocalist Kim Wiseman, and the jazz group Just Friends.
"I like the way you can see through," said Paul Hale, who leads Just Friends. "Everybody can play together now." Because of the isolation, "if somebody messes up, you don't have to re-do everything."
Johnson, who is a self-taught engineer, is the rare person who works on both the creative and technical sides of the music equation. "I became an engineer to record my music," he said. "I didn't want to pay big studio rates."
He's also a rarity in that he wants the recording experience to be more than just laying down tracks. He would like Brass Sail to be a place where musicians can learn to write and better use their instruments. "I want to make it more enjoyable for them," Johnson said.
"He's very good technologically," said Fred Classon of Just Friends. "He knows the sound he wants to hear and will help you find it."
Johnson also prides himself on providing whatever a band or musician needs. "A lot of what you get here is service rather than just punching the clock," he said. "You're not just getting an engineer." On Wiseman's project, for instance, Johnson acted as producer, songwriter, and primary musician.
Of course, "the budget will reflect that," Johnson said. A band wanting to do a four- or five-song demo will typically incur costs of $1,000 to $2,500 at Brass Sail, while a fully produced CD will generally cost between $3,000 and $6,000. Costs for recording along with songwriting and production assistance will range from $8,000 to $10,000.
"When you look at Nashville, that's still a bargain," Johnson said.
Beyond music CDs, Johnson also writes music beds and commercial jingles, and does voice-over work.
But Johnson still looks at Brass Sail as a place to play as much as work. "How many people get to say they go to work to play every day?" he said.
