Shutterstock Footage For Thomas Dolby Film

Shutterstock has provided stock video for music producer Thomas Dolby's latest project, The Invisible Lighthouse.
Dolby, who is best known for his MTV videos and 80s megahits such as, She Blinded Me With Science, has spent the last twelve years as musical director of the TED Conference, and it was here where he first became aware of Shutterstock.
Providing footage for The Invisible Lighthouse, the film recently won awards for Best Documentary Short and Best Director at the LA DIY Festival.
Dolby is now taking it on the road this autumn with the film being screened in old movie theaters throughout the country. He personally performs the score and songs and narrates the story, live to picture, with the help of a traditional Foley artist.
Shot within ten miles of his home in the UK, the film depicts the closure of a historic lighthouse off the coast of Suffolk, at an island location formerly used as a testing zone for experimental weapons. The lighthouse featured in a notorious UFO incident referred to as "the British Roswell". Dolby had to make several clandestine off-the-radar trips to capture his footage.
Dolby wrote, directed and shot The Invisible Lighthouse over the course of a year and part of the fun was researching the new technology that helped him bring his vision together.
The DIY shooting package he chose consisted of GoPro cameras, a Panasonic HC-V700M, and an AR Parrot drone with a built-in 720p camera. Dolby taught himself Final Cut Pro X and cut the film in his self-designed wind-and-solar-powered lifeboat studio.
While editing, Dolby realised he needed to open up the project visually, and turned to Shutterstock for additional footage, where he created a Shutterstock clipbox, downloaded low-resolution watermarked 'cutting copies' of the clips, and edited them into his master; then once he was 100% sure of the content, he changed over to the HD version.
He said: "This method of viewing and editing footage through Shutterstock is ideal. It means I can complete my film assembly using quick to download low-res media, and price out the final result within my budget. Then, what a joy it is to switch to the high-res footage."
(JP/CD)