Base14

Hello and welcome to Base14. We are an award-winning film and animation studio located in Los Angeles, CA. Although we are still a young company, we already have a rich and interesting history.

The Early Days

We weren’t always called Base14. The company was formed in 2002 as a collaboration of creative vision between Tyler J. Kupferer and his sister, Alysha Kupferer. The first films produced were simple Lego stop-motion and puppetry. The company worked under the moniker “Basement Productions” for a year or two. During that time, projects were half-hazard and mostly made up on the spot as Tyler and friends tried to learn the elusive art of filmmaking.

Getting Serious

As things began to get more serious, Tyler began to see the potential of the young media company. What he found, unfortunately, was a simple Google search of the name “Basement Productions” brought up three or four other companies and organizations that already were successful in one way or another. A new, unique name was needed.

What Tyler decided was that he really liked the word “base” but “ment” could be dropped. For the time, “Productions” would be kept as well. From there Tyler needed to add more identity. The term “base” is used in mathematics as the number that is raised to various powers to generate the principal counting units of a number system. Decimals are base 10, for example, and hexadecimal is base 16.

Tyler really liked the way it sounded when the words were followed by numbers, and since base 10 and base 16 systems seem to get all the attention, anything else would sound pretty unique. In a final thought, he remembered his favorite number is 7, and twice seven is 14, which seemed to fit well enough. All that was left was to Google the name, and fortunately the closest thing to the name Base14 Productions would be some font-related technical term. We like fonts, so that could be purported as some sort of basis for the name too.

Comics and Contests

The name “Base14 Productions” was used for three years and during that time, the company earned several honors and accolades. It branched out from strictly film production into other multimedia areas. New types of projects included animation, cartooning, web design, web development, interactive multimedia, print design and music mixing.

Many ambitious projects spawned during these years. In 2006, the company delved into its first long-term franchise, the comic strip “Rightfield.” Rightfield was a comedic success, running daily in the campus newspaper, the Purdue Exponent, and picking up hundreds of readers as a congruent web comic. An animated short was developed based on the comic, and marked the first serious short film for Base14. It was soon followed by another animated short, “Ara,” which wrapped up at the end of Tyler’s time at Purdue University.

Animation Takes Over

The third animated film to come out of Base14 was “Duck Heart Teslacoil,” which was developed as a project that would be fast, fun and entertaining to all. DHT was the first film to have a serious festival run and even won a few awards, included a nod from Animation Magazine.

The next film, “Girl and the Fox,” was inspired by Alysha’s mood boards and concept art as she was working on a fashion collection. The film was developed as a sister project to the clothes line, and adopted similar themes of winter, children and forest animals. Tyler also amassed a large crew of talented student volunteers to complete the film on time. “The Girl and the Fox” raised the bar; it took home huge honors including a Student Academy Award nomination and an Annie Award nomination.

Today

Today Base14 focuses almost exclusively on film and animation. Its films are viewed by tens of thousands of people all around the world and have helped many young and talented artists develop into professionals. Our latest project “Rain Dance” is due to hit the festival circuit by Spring 2013. Beyond that, anything is possible.