Biscardi Creative Blog

We’re pleased to announce our first original Pilot goes into production this week. The new travel series starring Bobby Rivers and Widdi Turner will be in Atlanta and areas south of the city this week highlighting some great areas to explore. Bobby is a pop culture icon who is best known from VH-1 and “Top 5 with Bobby Rivers” on Food Network. Widdi is well known to the fans of “Good Eats” on the Food Network playing a multitude of memorable characters with host Alton Brown.

Executive Producers Walter Biscardi, Jr. and Cheryl Collins head up the production team. Cheryl created the original concept and together with Walter, worked out the final design for the series. Marsha Walton is the Supervising Producer and the camera operators will be Chris Palmer and Brian Gaffner, both veterans of productions with BCM. Production Coordinator extraordinaire is Jeanna Thomas, without whom our lives would be much more difficult!

This will be a very fun show, full of pop culture references and most likely destined for PBS distribution in the States. More details as they become available and watch for announcements on the new website here.

This series represents the first phase of a new division of Biscardi Creative Media focused on bringing original programming to television and independent film projects to theatrical release. We’ll have a full announcement on the new division in the coming weeks. Needless to say, we’re really REALLY excited about this new phase of the company.

It took a few years longer than expected, but we finally have a new website up and running. It’s still a bit of a work in progress, but we decided to go ahead and take it live. We’ll modify it a bit over the next few weeks.

You can probably tell we had a LOT of fun taking the Team thumbnail photos. We’re all having fun with Guitar Hero and Rock Band over here so it was only natural that we’d break out the guitars for the team photos. And Molly the Wonder Dog decided to do a crazy spring happy dance giving me some really great opportunities to catch the true spirit of this one of a kind dog.

A brand new feature is our Articles Page which will include feature articles by myself and other team members along with Tutorials on all things Final Cut Pro, Apple Color and editing in general.

So enjoy the new digs and be sure to stop by often. We’re going to be doing lots of updates and changes to it over the next few weeks and months. In fact, we’re planning to start a new video gallery of fun projects created, well just for the fun of it!

Well here we go. Ever wanted to build your own facility from the ground up? I’m going to walk you through the process as it happens. From this land, a new facility shall rise!

Yep, just raw land at the moment. Almost 2 acres of it, though we can only build on a small portion of it due to the topography. But you should see Molly the Wonder Dog’s eyes light up at all those trees and wide open spaces! This piece of land is about as close to the ideal land as I could find. Our current location has woods out back and a yard for Molly to run so it’s a pretty quiet and peaceful location. It’s been tough to find something like that on a larger scale.

But thanks to the hard work of our real estate agent, Gary Allen, he found this great lot with nothing but woods behind it, in a quite area. So when we walk out the back door, this is pretty much the view we’ll see each and every day. I’m planning to landscape some of this but leave the majority of it pretty wild with as much fenced in as possible to allow Molly plenty of room to explore and chase tennis balls. I’ve found it’s really important to our clients to have a place to just step outside to take in some fresh air and not just go stand in a parking lot. We’ll have a pretty nice outdoor area when we’re all said and done if everything goes according to plan.

Right now we’re moving through with the necessary work that needs to be done before we can actually close on the loan. So what’s involved? Well the bank needs a lot of financial information both from you personally and from the company. Fortunately for us we already went through a lot of this back in December so all we need to do is update everything.

They also require drawings of what the building will look like, the budget from the contractor (licensed contractor of course!), an official survey of the land and an appraisal. Once all of these things have been delivered and the bank is satisfied with all the numbers, we’ll be able to close the loan and finish the deal. Timetable is generally 30 to 45 days for this work to be done.

Concurrently to all of this happening, we’re meeting with the building designers to get all the engineered drawings taken care of in advance so with any luck, we’re ready to start moving dirt the same day we sign the loan. A while back I purchased Punch! Home Suite, a 3D home design software for the Mac. I used it to lay out the interior of the building, to scale, which we are then giving to the designer. This cuts down his work since all he has to do is transfer my drawing to his plans. This is a really cool little piece of software if you plan to build or even remodel a space for your needs. It’s one thing to sketch out some ideas, but quite another to lay it all out to exact scale. Then you can really see how much space you have to work with.

So there you go, latest update. As of right now, the Surveyor says “yes, your building and parking will fit.” Final, formal survey to come next week and then we really get going with the designs.

More details and pictures as they become available! It’s going to be a fun ride!

Well at long last, we have found the new home for Biscardi Creative Media. At least we hope we have! For the second time in just over 4 months, we have a contract in place to purchase about 1.6 Acres of land on a lot that really brings together everything we were looking for.

Room to expand in the future and a quiet area that backs up to the woods and nature. In fact walking around the property today all you could hear were the birds chattering away back in the trees. So Molly the Wonder Dog will have plenty of room to show off her ball chasing skills and we plan to make the back yard area an ever evolving natural environment. It should be a nice place to simply get out of the edit sessions and relax, go read a book, enjoy the sunshine and just enjoy life.

The facility itself is going to be a 6,000 square foot building that will eventually house 8 edit suites along with a full color enhancement / 5.1 surround sound mixing suite. That mixing room will also serve as a client theater that should hold anywhere from 12 to 20 people comfortably. We’ll have a nicely expanded kitchen and game room area (finally!) which will be re-christened Rebecca’s Atomic Lounge. We even have the sign ready for it and everything. And we’re leaving a large portion of it as unfinished space where we’ll have some basketball hoops and who knows what else to blow off some steam.

So this is a great beginning of a new chapter in our company and I’m looking forward to documenting our path from now until the final board is put into place. I have to thank one fantastic commercial real estate agent, Gary Allen, who was beyond patient to put up with me and the fact that I was looking for “a very particular situation that’s not like normal commercial buyers.” If any of you in the Atlanta Metro area, especially north of the city need a great commercial agent, he’s the man! You can reach him at garye (at) windstream.net