Rock Creek recently designed, constructed, furnished and propped a living room, dining room, kitchen set for a US Navy training project on making good decisions called “Chart the Course.” Follow along as we made it happen.

The first step was to rough in our ideas. Living room about here, dining room there, kitchen there. Exterior window and front door will go to the right and a hallway to the bedrooms will go to the left.

The next step was to bring in Hank Atterbury, a Hollywood-experienced carpenter and special effects guru to build the set. Here he is on the first day of construction building the flats.

Making good progress. The reusable flats are starting to line up.

At the end of the day we cleaned up so as not to scare the maintenance people.

Next, Hank builds a wall extension, trims out our interior window, and add a front door.

Major construction is now complete.

Mostly painted at this point, starting to take shape. Next, we’ll bring in some flooring, add curtains, furnitures, fixtures, wall decorations and other props to fully furnish the space…

And here’s what the set looked like on camera!

The kitchen and breakfast island, the hallway to the back of the apartment…

The dining room area…

And, just because we weren’t done yet, after we shot the apartment scenes, we turned things around and made use of different spaces and angles in our studio to create this office set. Not bad for a three day shoot.

Let us know what you need, and we’ll build out your ideas just like we did for the US Navy.

Everyone at Rock Creek Productions is excited to welcome Mike Chirieleison to the team. He has nearly 10 years of experience working in photography and video production. Mike first started working for us as a freelancer in 2012 after he graduated from Towson University’s Electronic Media and Film Program. He has worked on shows such as; America’s Most Wanted to producing a short piece on a refugee family from Bhutan re-settling in Baltimore, MD.

We are excited to have him on board, and look forward to many fun adventures with him.

Rock Creek Productions is proud to announce the nomination of our documentary film, Peace Through Education: Stealing the Light, for a 2016 Emmy Award in the Southeast region. The film, produced independently by Rock Creek and directed by our own Aimie Burns, tells the story of Dr. Mohammed Khan Kharoti, who strove for years to build a school in and bring education to his home village of Shin Kalay, in the war-torn Helmond province of Afghanistan.

The Emmy Awards gala is on June 11th in Atlanta, and though the competition is stiff, we’ll be keeping our fingers crossed that we come home with a trophy.

The film is available for viewing on iTunes:

https://itunes.apple.com/us/movie/peace-through-education-stealing/id717247169

Rock Creek contributed nine videos to the Environmental Protection Agency’s comprehensive Drought Response and Recovery Guide.  Designed to assist small and medium-sized water utilities, the EPA’s recently published guide examines a variety of unique and successful solutions to drought-impacts across the country.  As part of the team that included environmental scientists from CSRA and water systems engineers from CH2M-Hill, Rock Creek visited communities in California, Texas, Georgia, Oklahoma, Kansas, and New Mexico to tell their stories though interview-driven videos.  Rock Creek also scripted and produced three additional videos on broader topics of Managing Water Supplies, Reducing Customer Demand, and Partnerships.

Here’s a link to the Guide:

https://www.epa.gov/waterutilityresponse/drought-response-and-recovery-water-utilities

This is an example of our of our branded titles, designed and implemented by Craig Hirshberg, incorporated animated maps and motion graphic background elements.

The FAA contracted with Rock Creek to field two video and still image crews to cover the Experimental Aircraft Association’s international fly-in convention in Oshkosh, Wisconsin and to interview experts and inventors regarding the Federal Aviation Administration’s initiative on revitalizing and streamlining the rules applied to general aviation.  This is an effort to help streamline the certification processes and approve innovative new technologies more quickly.

Here’s a link to FAA’s press release if you want to learn more:

http://www.faa.gov/tv/?mediaId=1258.

Aimie Burns gets up close with her zoom lens.

We worked our magic and cut an eight minute video, which the FAA loved.

“Amazing job on the video – we truly appreciated your professionalism, creativity and responsiveness throughout this project!”

— Emily Harcum, FAA Communications Specialist

Rock Creek recently added a set of five Zeiss Compact Prime digital cinema lenses to our arsenal.

In addition to our versatile Canon 30-105mm zoom lens, we now have five super-speed CP.2 prime lenses from wide-angle to longer focal lengths: 15mm, 35mm, 50mm, 85mm, and 135mm. These lenses perfectly compliment our large-format 4K Sony F5 CineAlta digital cinema camera.

This set of Zeiss Compact Primes helps ensure that each and every image we capture makes our clients look good. Give us a call and let us know what we can do for you.

Dave Brown and Frank Hamilton of Weber Shandwick converted our studio into an archery range in order to capture high-speed images of arrows piercing and shattering a variety of objects for their client, the Archery Trade Association.  From electric lightbulbs to water balloons, from eggs to vases filled with colored liquid and glass jars of heavy dairy cream, their strobe splattered images captured in incredible detail the kinetic energy of arrows caught in the act of delightful destruction.

Special Effects guru Hank Atterbury discusses his highly accurate compressed-air shooter with Dave and Frank.

Hank gets ready to shoot a glass vase full of blue liquid with a crossbow.

Raw high-speed freeze frames are downloaded directly to Frank’s laptop. We can’t wait to see the final results!

From left to right: Steve Agnew and Tim Phillips of Rock Creek, Mayor Lisa Merkel. (But you already guessed that.)

Town of Herndon Mayor, Lisa Merkel, took time out of her busy schedule to come visit our studio.

The Town takes an active role in supporting and promoting its local businesses, and Mayor Merkel was interested to know more about Rock Creek, our capabilities and the services we offer, our clientele, and our future plans. People sometimes ask me why we’re located in Herndon, and it’s because it’s a great place to live and work!

Rock Creek Tapped to Shoot for Saturday Night Live.

When SNL producers needed an exterior of Ford’s Theater in downtown Washington, DC to establish a sketch with Amy Schumer, Kenan Thompson, Taran Killiam, and Kyle Mooney, they called on Rock Creek Productions.  Tim Phillips and Jake Mosholder took our Sony F5 and a couple of lenses downtown to capture the Ford’s Theater façade.  We had to work around the construction site across the street and traffic and tourists, but gave SNL afternoon, golden hour, and post-cloudburst nighttime shots from several different angles.  We shot in 4K and uploaded three selects to SNL that evening in QT ProRes 4444 format.  SNL selected the daytime shot since that best met the requirements of their sketch.  Oh yeah, and that joker in the backpack … that’s Jake.  The shot was used twice to bookend the sketch.  Fun!

“Tim, thanks again for everything. Shots looked great and everyone was very pleased.”

— John MacDonald, SNL

We just wrapped up a five-city tour with the EPA where were visited drinking water utilities to tell the stories of their efforts to be “Climate Ready” or resilient to climate change. This project took us to five cities in a span of three weeks, from Massachusetts to Minnesota to Missouri.

We were threatened with rain or experienced rain in each of our locations, but overall we had a lot of fun, getting to see parts of the country we would have never else had the opportunity to see, and we even managed to squeeze in a trip to go up the arch in St. Louis. Below are a few photographs from our efforts.