Over six-weeks in August and September, Coat of Arms provided editing, sound design, mix, music composition, color correction and delivery on two The Onion shows.
They were 13 five-minute episodes of The Onion’s TEDTalks sendup Onion Talks, and eight episodes of The Onion’s Porkin’ Across America, a reality food show featuring Jim Haggerty of Today Now.
“In order to make the deadline, we had two editors, two colorists, and two sound engineers working throughout the six-week schedule,” says Coat of Arms owner Jonathan Lacocque, who edited with Jeffrey McHale. “We created the music themes at the onset of the project.”
Coat of Arms team on the shows also included colorist Robert J. Williams, composer Miles Hankins, mixers Dave Kaduk and Paul Grajek, post supervisor Stacy Wolff smart, and post producer Clara Lehmann.
It was an impressive accomplishment for a company that was just six months old.
Partners draw from large freelance pool
A former post supervisor at Batpack Studios and creative director at Communifx, both in Pittsburgh, and a staffer in the Chicago Tribune’s creative services department, Lacocque launched Coat of Arms last March with writer-producer Lehman.
The partners are the company’s only full-time staffers, but they draw on a pool of some 28 freelancers. “It feels great to not only do good work, but to employ so many amazing artists and people,” Lacocque says.
In their 10 months in business, they’ve worked on a Mini Cooper ad for the Los Angeles Auto Show, the opening titles for the Midwest Independent Film Festival, hand-drawn illustration and animation for Restaurant.com’s holiday campaign and a music video for the band Donora.
Now they’re finishing a graphics package for an online series from LA-based MTP, Inc., color and titles for an indie by West Virginia filmmaker Joel Wolpert, and a music video for Warner Music Group. And there’s the “huge agency project” in the pipeline, that Lacocque can’t talk about yet.
“We always get requests for motion design and animation work, but over the last few months we’ve seen a huge spike in editorial work,” Lacocque says. “As an editor, I love this. We’re always excited to do more narrative work, and along with the Onion projects, we’ve had more filmmakers reaching out to us to help post their films and music videos.”
Strategic partnerships with production companies
Beyond the creative, Lacocque says what keeps clients coming back is strategic partnerships with production companies like Potenza Productions and Bleed Awesome, and a flexibility to adjust to needs of a project without extraneous overhead.
“It is this versatility and focus on the project that many clients appreciate,” Lacocque says. “They aren’t paying for more than they need to, and we can scale up or down depending on what they can afford and how far we can push the creative.”
Contact Ed Koziarski at edmkoz@gmail.com.
