Bruton Stroube is a multidisciplinary studio and production company, based in St. Louis, Missouri. Their post division, Outpost, uses Louper to livestream edit and color reviews. We spoke with Lucas Harger, partner of Bruton Stroube and founder / supervising editor of Outpost, about collaborating on the Toyota Adventure Seekers TVC, building soundscapes for feature film Stages, and incorporating Presentation Rooms into their remote workflow.

Hi Lucas, can you tell me about your team at Outpost and the scope of work you do?

At this point we have seven full-time editors, as well as sound designers, a colorist, post producers - the whole post pipeline. We do everything from commercial Super Bowl spots to HBO documentary series and scripted features.

Let’s look at your spot for Toyota Adventure Seekers - it’s an exhilarating edit!

We’d done a national campaign for Toyota Racing and that transitioned into some work for their Trucks. For Adventure Seekers, we got access to footage from around ten other commercials that they shot in the campaign. They sent us all of the raw, uncut media, shot on locations around the country. We probably had 35 days of production footage to go through - so it was very editorial.

Dramatic skies in Toyota 'Adventure Seekers'

The footage was really awesome, it was beautiful. They had minimal boards as they wanted to explore the footage once I'd received it. I began playing with different approaches to pace, vibes and aesthetics, trying to give highs and lows, quiet moments and loud moments and make it as dynamic as the footage was. That led me to a more orchestral track - something that felt organic, that had those highs and lows. And then when I sent that over, we hopped on stream and they're like, “Yeah, that the one -  let's start from there". 

The creative team was from Saatchi & Saatchi. They’re really great collaborators with sharp ideas and instincts. Especially as you go through rounds of reviews and higher levels of people start to engage with your cut, you understand why they are where they are in the organization. They’re just really creative and dialed in on what works and what doesn’t. They want to make a great spot, a great concept and a great commercial. And so it's really fun when I get the opportunity to work with them.

Toyota 'Adventure Seekers'

With this kind of edit, navigating so many scenes and storylines, the sound really needs to pull you through.

Yeah, definitely. We wanted to create this organic experience of being outdoors - you want to feel it. If you're seeing the outdoors, that's only half of the equation, in my opinion. Then you need to bring in the sound, it feels more like nature if you hear it. So we really leaned into that. And then also the power of the trucks: the badassness of them, the weight and the depth and the presence. You can really amp that up as well. 

The way that I approach editing in general is sound first. You can sell any cut with the right sound. I get inspired a lot by sounds, so if I’m ever stuck in an edit, I'll just go through my sound library and think, “That's interesting. I know a shot that could go with that.” From a creative standpoint, the sound design was completely built in the edit, because you don’t know how long you can hold a shot, how you can transition, until you get the sound in there. I spent a lot more time in the bottom half of my timeline than the top half, for sure. And then obviously, they came in and did a really great mix. 

Lucas' edit timeline

How was Louper used on this cut?

There was no traditional director on this job, as the footage was from across multiple other shoots, so it was me and the creative director working together to bring it to life in the edit. Once you get into the big agencies and the national broadcast work, there are a ton of people in the room, physically or digitally. There were two people in Dallas, where Toyota's based, and two in Santa Monica. Everybody was from all over the place. So in these Louper streaming sessions, I’d have up to nine people in the room and they would just be on mute, camera off. And then I'd be working on the cut with the creative director and maybe the art director. 

Then I'd export it, they'd send it off and we’d just sit on stream and wait. They would jump over to a Presentation Room with their boss, get his feedback, then pop back over. We’d get notes on the file, and then we'd get back to work. So we had a Presentation Room and the Livestream Room going at the same time, just bouncing back and forth. And we’d just keep that up all day for the duration of the project. They would use it as a working session too - they'd just jump at the opportunity to use Louper, they’d usually hang out in there during the project.

A truck navigates rough terrain

Can you tell me about Stages - the feature you’re working on?

I’ve been working with the director, Ryan Booth, for over ten years. Stages is his debut scripted feature, about a mid-career musician who's trying to make a pivot. The main character in the film is played by David Ramirez, who is an incredible singer-songwriter. So he's basically playing himself in the film.

Singer-Songwriter David Ramirez performs on stage as Ben Garza in 'Stages'

The film takes place on a tour across the country, starting in Austin and ending in Birmingham or Tulsa. They went on this tour, they’d throw a free show, pack out a venue and then shoot for three or four hours while the live show was happening - but they could still direct it, stop the show, move people around. It was very real and authentic because they actually performed live, we recorded all the music on the day.

A packed venue on 'Stages'

It must have been awesome to work on a film where live music is such an important part of the story.

Totally. We really wanted the sound to be immersive and hyper realistic. But it's very hard to find crowd noises and crowd sound effects, because whenever there's a crowd, there's music in the background, so it's hard for library creators to get clean crowds.

So we got about 65 people to come out to the studio and we piped the sound into silent disco headphones, and spread them out all over the room. Then we had sound recordist Matthew Mikkelsen come down from Duluth. He brought his ORTF mic - there's only a couple of them in the country - to capture hyper spatial audio. Then he had a binaural head that he put up to be the perspective of the musicians, and then he put mics all around the room. And for two hours, we were able to direct these crowds to cheer and laugh and hoot and holler. And then we could layer it all in. We have an Atmos room, so we could plug the ORTF mic files into Atmos and it was crazy. If you close your eyes, you swore you were in that room. You could hear the trash can being rolled back here, someone over here laughing, it was insane. Then we could build the soundscape in Atmos. We played the music through these loud speakers so you could hear the room reverberation in there. It was awesome, it was a lot of fun. And it gives Outpost Sound Designers, Mark Bartels and Beth Davis, a ton of assets and textures to build the worlds.

Were you receiving footage while they were still on tour?

Yeah, they would send us proxies every day and we would sync and assemble the scene. So we had a full assembly of the film about two days after they wrapped, and Ryan and I could just jump straight into editing. I’ve flown out to NYC and cut with him, he’s flown here to STL to cut with me. But in between, we're streaming. It's mostly me and him that work together, but when a cut is ready to go to the EPs, we'll send them a link that they can review or download. And there are also three working EPs that Ryan and I will jump on a Louper Presentation Room with, and we'll walk through the film. They’ll communicate their notes, and also the notes from the broader team. We'll put all their notes on the file. That gives Ryan and I direction for where to go next, to keep the film progressing. And then we'll flip back over to stream and we'll keep tinkering and refining it, notes in hand from our Presentation Room.

Film still from 'Stages'

Overall, how have you integrated Louper into your remote workflow at Outpost?

We use Louper to livestream edit and color sessions, we have three rooms and they are in constant use. And then we use Presentation Rooms a lot as well. It puts clients in a different mindset when they're walking into a Presentation Room rather than a working stream, which is nice. And with the live note-taking - everyone can see the notes popping up as we're adding them. We can walk away from that session confident that all the notes are on the file we just presented. Nothing gets lost in an email thread or on “which link was that?”

Some clients prefer Presentation Rooms when they're reviewing internally. They’ll say “Hey, can you set us up a Presentation Room? We need to show our boss, we need to show the CMO.” We'll just kick them a Presentation Room, load up the file and be like “hop on whenever you want to hop on”. I like that someone else can drive the ship, I don’t have to be in there. I just send a Presentation to the client and we'll designate that Room as theirs. And then when they're done, we take it down. So we use Presentation Rooms for a lot more of the client-facing stuff, and for the creative working sessions we are on Livestreams all the time.

It's had surprising applications for many different clients. It’s great because other people can drive and scrub. It sounds like it might get annoying to have another person controlling the playhead, but it's not, because they can go to where they want to go, so it’s very freeing. It makes the process more conversational - rather than the editor becoming a keyboard monkey. We offer it now as an option: “do you want to stream or do you want to do a Presentation Room?” It's a little bit of a mind shift - it's not a Review Link, and it's not a Livestream. It's in between.

Lucas in his edit suite at the Bruton Stroube

Lucas Harger is a partner at Bruton Stroube and founder / supervising editor at Outpost. 

Meet the Bruton Stroube team and see their work.

Toyota Adventure Seekers campaign Agency: Saatchi & Saatchi. Post House: Outpost. Editor: Lucas Harger. Colorist: . Sound Mix: .

Stages feature film Director: Ryan Booth. Post House: Outpost. Editor: Lucas Harger. Sound Mix: .

Images of Lucas in his edit suite, and the BTS video of the Stages sound recording courtesy of Bruton Stroube.