Packafōma Philms
The Packafoma Post is the post-production, photo, and tech blog of Packafoma LLC, the Philadelphia production company of cousins Dax Roggio and Shea Roggio.
Packafoma and Toryville Productions once again teamed up to provide live event video of the 2024 Wawa Welcome America Festival for CNN’s national special, The Fourth in America. Live musical performances from Kesha and Ne-Yo entertained thousands of Philadelphians, who filled the Ben Franklin Parkway from Logan Square to Binswanger Triangle. The concert was followed by a uniquely spectacular fireworks show over the Schuylkill River, Boathouse Row, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. FAA certificated UAS Pilot, Dax Roggio, and producer, Tory Stagnaro, maintained real-time contact with CNN’s Atlanta control room and NBC’s Philadelphia control room simultaneously to provide both outlets with live drone shots of the concert and fireworks....
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Tangles in Time is a series of live performances and short documentary films that intimately explore the lives of people suffering from dementia and the life-altering challenges faced by their care partners....
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A 12-hour shoot with a 5 AM call time on an icy winter morning in Conshohocken….It could have been a miserable day! But my crew and I actually had a lot of fun working with Alan Kaplan, founder and CEO of Kaplan Partners, as he conducted one-on-one interviews with some of industry’s top movers and shakers....
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In an alternate timeline, no pun intended, Final Cut Pro 8 was a brilliant upgrade to Apple’s storied non-linear editor. FCP 8 introduced cutting edge innovations, 64-bit performance, and Apple’s trademark interface refinements without sacrificing existing features or compatibility with FCP 7. Six years later, with Avid in bankruptcy, Apple built on the runaway success of FCP 8 with FCP 9, an app so flawless that its users ascended to a higher plane of existence, their cinematic visions inspiring peaceful resolutions to all the violent conflicts on Earth. But here in this universe, Apple released FCP X, and I switched to Adobe Premiere Pro....
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On location in West Philadelphia: Production stills from the Packafoma commercial shoot for Drexel University’s LeBow College of Business. Shea Roggio and I had a wonderful experience working with our local Philly crew and the excellent LeBow marketing team. Having worked on college campuses before, we found the students and professors at Drexel LeBow to be particularly genuine, intelligent, and passionate about making a difference in the real world....
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When FCP Classic was EOL’d in 2011, I was one of the first among my circle of editors in LA to give Premiere Pro a shot. Technically, Premiere had been around for quite a long time, but for Mac users, it was never even a contender. Plus, if you were like me, you mostly associated Adobe’s video products with Flash, which I loathed long before Steve Jobs famously published his thoughts on the subject....
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Earlier this year we shared a handful of photos and stories from our experience shooting in the remote and beautiful Escalante region of Utah for The Nature Conservancy. In addition to the still photos, we captured video and interviewed key players in the conservation effort going on in the region. We were tasked with the unique job of with creating a video that not only highlighted the voices of the people in the region, but also starred the Escalante River and the ecosystem around it as a main character — one who the cast of characters we encountered are all trying to strengthen and preserve....
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Use my 99¢ iOS/iPadOS time-lapse calculator app to quickly determine the shutter interval (time between shots) that you should set to achieve your desired clip length for a given recording duration. iOS app includes additional features for your iPhone or iPad. Besides serving as an intervalometer, my time-lapse app estimates the memory card storage that will be required for RAW or JPG image files, based on the megapixel count of your camera. I’ve also shared some time-lapse photography examples and video editing tips for Adobe Lightroom and Adobe Premiere Pro CC....
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This is a list of missing features in the Panasonic Lumix GH3 DSLM camera that I would like to see addressed in a firmware update, plus a few ideas for the next generation of the camera (GH4 or GH5). The list pertains primarily to the video functionality of the camera, which is what makes this camera a standout....
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Photos from the Two of Us music video shoot in Olympia, Washington…As is the case with most indie productions, our crew members had to wear many hats. Thank you to our production coordinator, Liz Conroy, for taking on the job of still photographer and supplying us with most of the images below, presented here in roughly chronological order....
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