Hula Post provided editorial systems for Prop Culture to be released on May 1, 2020 on Disney+ as the latest content to debut on the recently launched streamer. The eight- episode series is hosted by and is the brainchild of Dan Lanigan, one of the world’s foremost cinematic prop collectors. He came up with the idea for a show that explores several of Disney's iconic films and looks at how props helped to shape and create some of their magical moments in those movies. The movies chosen were Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, Mary Poppins, Tron, The Nightmare Before Christmas, The Muppet Movie, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe and Honey, I Shrunk the Kids.
Hula Post, under the guidance of James Tejeda, Senior Avid Technician, set up seven Avid editing systems for six editors and two assistant editors. To meet the demands of all the media involved Tejeda’s team set up 40TB of storage on Nexis, a NAS and LT07 drive. Completing the set-up, Hula’s team installed four producer stations and a DIT station, all on site at the show’s postproduction office near Disney Studios in Burbank.
The post team, headed up by Line Producer Judson Jackson who was responsible for both production and post, set up a unique workflow for Prop Culture. “We decided to keep everything in house and do the transcoding ourselves,” said Jackson, “which is different than most productions and saved us time and money.” After the onset DIT did his color correction to the raw footage, it was brought directly over to the post team on hard drives, rather than to a traditional postproduction facility for transcoding. Once there, the footage was put through a two-copy process which entailed copying the original footage over to a NAS and at the same time creating a backup on LTOs, thus creating two master copies, one tape and one on the NAS. “We were able to do this because Hula Post had the ability to provide the critical piece we needed for our production,” said Jackson. Tejeda added, “The whole process went smoothly without any issues thanks to the skill and technical expertise of everyone involved.”
Two highly competent teams made it all happen seamlessly. The Prop Culture editors, lead editor Ben Stritz, Will Simpson, Bobby Balog, Ben Bolton and Casey Lee, assistant editors Maureen Marchetti and David Scott and Hula Post’s technicians James Tejeda, Dennis Bethke, Joel Ouano, Abraxas Hicks and Juan Ramirez.
About HULA
Hula Post provides equipment rental services to the post production and broadcast communities and is an industry leader in customized workflow solutions. It offers a large inventory of editorial and finishing systems, storage solutions, and support gear, backed by the industry’s most experienced and knowledgeable support team in the industry. In addition, it offers creative space for projects in three locations across Los Angeles, a color finishing suite using Resolve and two audio mixing suites using ProTools.
