Base14

Hello and welcome to Base14. We are an award-winning multimedia design company currently located in Savannah, Georgia. 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 M. Kupferer. The first films produced were stop-motion animations in the form of brickfilms and puppetry. This led to the company’s first complete piece, entitled The Silly Owl. The name “Basement Productions” first appeared in the opening credits of the company’s second notable film How Smoochy Got His Groove Back.

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. Notable achievements include the first live action piece A Snow Day Production and the educational stop-motion film The Immigrant. These films were extremely crude, but the foundation was being laid for a passion for art and storytelling that would have long-lasting effects.

In September of 2003, the company released its most ambitious project yet, Beowulf Reloaded. This film was quickly followed by Symphonix Commercial and our first documentary, The Quest for the Frisbee. By Spring 2004, Basement Productions was starting to work on projects that could be taken half-way seriously. The company produced The Purchase in association with Risk Entertainment, and placed first in a local film festival. Simultaneously, the company made it’s first 2D animated short film, The Joy of Cola, which also placed in the same contest.

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. Not only was someone already using the name, several people were. Tyler decided he needed the company to be original and marketable in the future, which meant he needed a unique name. But his Basement Productions had already made an impression on the local community, so the new name needed to be similar.

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. In no specific order, he found two parallels to the word “base” that related to his past experiences.

First, 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. But “base” is also used in math to describe the number raised to the logarithm of a designated number in order to produce that designated number. (To you and me it’s the little number after the “log” part.) 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.

Secondly Tyler had to decide which number. He thought of the old television show “Hogan’s Heroes” that he used to watch. In the show, all the characters live in a prisoner of war camp called “Salag 13.” “Stalag” is short for the word “Stammlager” which translated to English would be close to “base camp.” By combining the Base 10 saying with the Stalag 13 name, Tyler would get Base 13 Productions. It was close, but somehow 13 didn’t flow off the tongue just right. Also, he thought using the number 13 might give the company a dangerous or risky connotation. Tyler wanted it to sound more contemporary and stylistic. In a final thought, Tyler remembered his favorite number is 7, and twice seven is 14. It only takes one more number to go from 13 to 14, so it seemed appropriate.

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. That was that, the company now had a new, cutting-edge name that still held some of the nostalgia of the old name.

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. Yes, things were certainly getting interesting for Base14 Productions.

Then in 2006, Base14 Productions 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. By the end of the school year, the company took it’s next big step with the release of the film Biological Warfare Ain’t Easy: A Rightfield Movie. This animated short was to be the crown jewel of the Rightfield comic franchise, and fulfilled that expectation when it won the company three first place awards in Spring 2007. Having now proven itself as a serious player in the amateur animation industry, the stage was set for Base14 to try even bigger and better things to come.

Over the Summer of 2007, Tyler lived and worked in Sydney, Australia as a means of reinvigorating his creative visions. During a concert at the Sydney Opera House, Tyler was inspired to create a new animated short that would be a moving drama rooted in a solid story. Ara was born. Anticipating the huge creative undertaking that Ara would be, Tyler decided it was time to bring together all the elements of Base14 Productions. He shortened the name to simply “Base14″ in an attempt to simplify and strengthen the identity of the company. Then, to accompany the “simpler, stronger” strategy, a new corporate website was launched in a blog format. This allowed for news and production updates as well as the opportunity to debut a new pseudo-weekly comic series, “Base14 Comics.”

During the Fall of 2007 Tyler assembled a team of some of the best computer graphic artists at Purdue, and began a nine month long process to plan, produce and promote the animated short Ara. Eventually, Ara claimed all the same awards Biological Warfare won a year earlier, but failed to go much further. Still, the technical and cinematic challenge of Ara made Base14 a stronger and sharper company in every regard, and instantly instigated the planning of future works that will be highly marketable.

Today

The company is currently undergoing “core talent enhancement” while Tyler works on his masters degree in Film and Television at Savannah College of Art and Design. One major project is in the works for next year’s festivals and some minor things are bouncing around. We still have a long way to go and lots of work to get done along the way. But in this industry, with a healthy mix of excitement and curiosity, anything can happen.