This weekend, experienced and budding filmmakers alike will be doing their best to make magnificent films of up to seven minutes in length in just 48 hours.

The 48 hour film festival is stressful, fun and manic all at the same time, especially as the filmmakers don’t know what genre (thriller/romance etc) they will be shooting until the start of the competition. All creativity (writing, shooting, editing, and adding a musical soundtrack), must occur within the 48 hour window beginning Friday evening at 7pm and ending Sunday at 7pm. To add to the mayhem, they must also include some random elements.

In years gone Toby Ricketts (from Tandem) has teamed up with Andy and the guys from The Outwits and this year they’ll again be entering and using Tandem Studios as a base, but… at the other end of Tandem Studios, Logan McMillan from Gorilla Pictures will be working with his team on their entry, so a very busy weekend in the studios.

Let the battle of the films begin!

Heres the film that The Outwits won the Christchurch event with back in 2007. Toby is one of the henchmen in the film and he mixed the audio, as he will again this weekend.

It’s April in the twenty-tens already and we feel like we’re sitting atop a highly-tuned Harley rather than a tandem built for two!

We’ve changed our logo, our website, added a few staff, and really defined our direction for the next few years. As you know today’s media is all about content and that’s exactly what we do; using our experience and expertise we create content for the wide variety of media channels available in both traditional, new media and social media. Find out more at our new website www.tandemstudios.co.nz

New staff: Sean Davies is in the new Mac video editing suite. Kineta Knight is both Social Media Editor – providing strategy and content for client’s social media, website and other communications; and editor of the website we designed and run for the NZ Parliament www.inthehouse.co.nz.

Steve Lyons is on top of Sales, and Deb Stanaway our resident Producer. Jonny Pipe is Studio Manager and is busy developing our ‘music for games’ business (already we’ve made music for three games, with a 4th soon to begin)

Growth: as the new staff suggest, Tandem has seen a lot of growth in business over the last year, including television commercials, website builds, documentaries, and the creation of a world first ‘Parliament TV on demand’ website called www.inthehouse.co.nz for the Office of the Clerk

Voice Agency: still the biggest agency in the South Island by a country mile, and still attracting great new talent – like the legendary Michael Morrissey (Telecom and a few other ads over the years).

The Voice School: we’ve just had one and there’ll be another in a couple of months. We have professionals teaching the skills and business of voiceovers – the only course of it’s kind in the country! Classes are small and the whole weekend’s a blast!

Check out our blog which is updated on a daily basis, and please note the new email address – ‘firstname’@tandemstudios.co.nz

Tandem Studios was proud to collaborate with the Christchurch Press recently to bring you Richard Dawkins’ lecture held recently at the town hall. Richard Dawkins is one of the worlds most promenent evolutionary biologists and atheists, and in promoting his latest book ‘The Greatest Show On Earth’ gave a 2 hour talk at the Christchurch Town Hall.

Podcasting is the perfect vehicle for distributing this kind of long-form content, and we’ve used it sucessfully to promote lectures, talks, and presentations in a variety of situations.

If you do not record events like these, then they are lost forever. It is so easy to capture this content and make it available forever so that it has a much larger effect over a longer time.

Click below to have a listen to the first episode of Richard Dawkins at Christchurch Town Hall:

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Click here to subscribe to the entire free podcast.

And here’s the video!

Tandem held its Voice School over the weekend, introducing interested talent to the voicing market.

Having voiced commercials for radio and television for a few years now, I didn’t think there was really any need for me to attend a voice school. I mean, I’m getting work, so I’m obviously OK at what I do, right? Ahhh, yes, the arrogance of youth..

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Le Race is one of New Zealand’s leading annual hill-climb cycling events – racing 100km from the centre of Christchurch, over the Port Hills to Akaroa.

Tandem Studios’ Dave Dunlay was this year’s MC for Le Race. Here is a video he shot over the course of the day – 20 March, 2010:

Take a tour of Tandem Studios with Creative Director – Dave Dunlay…