What it takes to make

Each still here represents months and months of hundreds upon hundreds of individuals working diligently. A Pixar film averages three to four years of production. Just imagine how much we take on and accomplish at Noir when we are only three.  I'm not saying we are  like Pixar in production quality... but who is? It is company's like them  that provide us with our gold standard.

Emmy Nominations!

This Saturday September 7th is the 2013 Emmy Awards Gala! (Mid Atlantic chapter). Our very own David Van Allen and Jeffrey Baxter were nominated for "Best Commercial Spot" and "Best Graphics/Animation" Wish us luck and we hope to bring home our 5th Emmy!

Ceasars Fire

Check out some Photoshop magic by our own David Van Allen! Photo by Chris Razoyk. Audio by Baker Sound. Stay tuned there is more to come!

Ferrari Test

Here is a virtual Ferrari we have been toying with. — with Jeffrey Baxter, David Van Allen and Shama Chohan.

Here's the New Kid

Check out our latest creation for the Philadelphia Zoo, Kid Zoo U campaign. We teamed up with the talents of Left Hand Creative, Visual Innovations, and music by Joe Fusco. We are really excited about the spot, congratulations to all involved!

"There's a New Kid in Town"

We've had a lot of fun working with Left Hand Creative, Visual Innovations and the Philadelphia Zoo on the new campaign for their newest attraction "Kid Zoo U".

There's a New Kid in Town: Boat House from Noir Worldwide on Vimeo.

There's a New Kid in Town:Charge from Noir Worldwide on Vimeo.

There's a New Kid in Town: City Hall from Noir Worldwide on Vimeo.

Interrogation Photo (Making of)

Created by our very own David Van Allen

Dave: I've been fortunate enough to work with some amazing photographers on some of my photo manipulations. Photographer Chris Razoyk is no exception. His amazing attention to detail and well trained eye make my job that much more fun.



Music: Killbot – sound surgery


The trick to getting this photo just right was the tone of the overhead light. Chris and I spent some time figuring out how it should look and feel in conjunction with the subject matter. After all we are trying to tell a pretty compelling story so it had to be just right. Chris and I also wanted the blue tone in the background to stay prevalent in order to give the photo a good sense of depth. Overall I feel the piece is a great success. I used Photoshop CS6 My trusty Wacom and Red Giant plugins for the lights.

Check out Chris's blog for more details on the shoot and an amazing video about it.

Chris also had a great article written up about his process in ISO1200 Photography Magazine's Blog.

Better safe than sorry

When backing up your data, you should be thoughtful about a few details. First off, always make sure the data is stored in at least 2 locations. Secondly, always get the most data on the most reliable and inexpensive device.

At Noir Worldwide we have a few procedures we use to keep us up and running. All of our data is on a server with RAID level 5. RAID 5 is designed to restore the data upon the failure of a drive. So, for example, consider a situation where you had 4 hard drives in your RAID system and one failed. What do you do? With RAID 5, you could replace the disk that has failed and the information will be rebuilt. This is helpful, but you would still lose a day while the data is rebuilt. The philosophy we developed from experience enables us to stay up and running in case of a hardware failure of this magnitude. We make this possible with redundancy.

Here is how it works: All of our workstations have a similar, but smaller RAID on them, [smaller than what? The system on the main server? Say what the system is smaller than] with the jobs we are working on. This way, if a server or a workstation fails, we can keep working while it is repaired. At the end of the day, we are quadruple redundant. Every job and project we are working on is on our server and three workstations simultaneously. A few years ago, we had to deal with an unforeseen event that ruined my well-thought-out system--a fire. Prior to having that fire, I would have stopped at this point in developing our security system. Needless to say, if you have a server and 3 workstations and they all burn in a fire, you will be without data and unable to work.

After the fire I wanted to make sure we had an off-site data backup solution. For the first year, we used the online backup system Carbonite. This was a viable solution (other than the fact that it took a month for the initial backup). Unfortunately, Carbonite and other such solutions have removed the “Unlimited” data option. As we have about 6 Terabytes of data on our server, we needed a less expensive solution.

We started by getting a hard drive dock that can easily be hooked up to any computer. They normally have a large variety of connections available. Typically, connections include USB 2 and 3, eSata, Firewire, and the new Thunderbolt. The faster the better if you have large amounts of data to deal with and move. We backed up the data that stays on the server onto inexpensive sata hard drives. Then, we began a daily procedure in which those drives were moved to one of our homes in case of fire. As we finish projects, we always back them up onto a hard drive. So we have both a work copy and a home copy of all the projects we have ever worked on.

The specific projects we are working on from day-to-day range in size from 10 gigabytes to 200  gigabytes. We all have small USB3 1 Terabyte drives. At the end of every day, we sync these drives to our server for all our current projects. This way, if a client needs something over the weekend or at night, we can access it remotely. This also covers us in case of a catastrophic event (such as a fire), and even after such an event, we could continue to work from home. Just remember: It's always much better to be safe than sorry and unable to serve your clients!