Working with the Military

The most significant project Bandito had been involved with while I had been away that summer, was a shoot with the US Air Force Combat Search and Rescue team.  So we were cutting together footage of air planes and helicopters extracting downed pilots in training exercises for the team of special operations troops.  We eventually made a bunch of commercials for the Air Force's "Do Something Amazing" recruiting campaign, as well as a 3 minute mission film.  That piece was released on the new X-Box Live video library, and became the most downloaded piece of free content on the whole system.  This success got the attention of a number of other advertising agencies, and the Pentagon was quite pleased with our work as well.  One of those commercials ended up being should during the Super Bowl pregame show, which generated a lot of excited Bandito phone calls in a short period of time.  That success led to a variety of other projects for the Air Force, showcasing the Predator UAV units, the Space Command's rocket launches, and a variety of other non-combat roles.

Eventually the Navy wanted in on that, and we were hired to do a campaign for the SWCC team.  This unit was usually considered the unit below SEALS, and operated smaller boats used to deploy and extract SEAL teams in combat.  In 36 hours, our team filmed a series of revolutions of a training exercise in Kentucky, which involved the live fire extraction of a stranded team of SEALS on a riverbank.  The original proposal was to use that footage in a silly little commercial contrasted against civilian boating guidelines, which the agency executives had dreamed up.  Beyond that simple task, using the same footage, we were able to cut together a very impressive 7 minute mission film, as well as a few other shorter pieces, highlighting individual team members.  That mission film attracted the attention of the Admirals at the Pentagon, who began a discussion about the possibility of us doing something similar for the Navy SEALS, but in a much more extensive form.  It ended up taking years, and lots of paperwork before that actually came to fruition, but those were the first steps in the process.

Back then, Bandito had done all of that work with about four editing stations, on a basic network.  But as we took on larger projects, we needed better tools and equipment to keep up.  Through the development of a number of new technology partnerships, we ended up deploying a Fibre Channel shared SAN at the office.  Video production was a fairly new application for Fibre Channel, which was usually reserved for servers at much larger banks or ecommerce companies, so we were probably one of the smallest facilities to have one at that point.  After a challenging initial build out, due to the lack of information available about such a new idea, I was able to figure it out, and expanded it myself, using parts relatively cheaply available on eBay.