When Sam Gorski and Niko Pueringer first started shooting videos together in middle school, they never imagined that their hobby would lead to successful careers as filmmakers. Together with producer Jake Watson, they founded Corridor Digital in 2010. The company’s focus on fast action and amazing special effects has earned it more than 3.2 million YouTube subscribers. In addition to original short-form content, Corridor Digital frequently teams with corporations to bring its unique perspective to branded content.
When Sam Gorski and Niko Pueringer first started shooting videos together in middle school, they never imagined that their hobby would lead to successful careers as filmmakers. Together with producer Jake Watson, they founded Corridor Digital in 2010. The company’s focus on fast action and amazing special effects has earned it more than 3.2 million YouTube subscribers. In addition to original short-form content, Corridor Digital frequently teams with corporations to bring its unique perspective to branded content.
Sam Gorski and Niko Pueringer
Adobe: How did you get started making films?
Gorski: Niko and I started making videos back in middle school. We were just making fan films of things that were interesting to us—Star Wars, video games, and that sort of thing. With the rise of online media, we found we were able to make a living at it. If you’d have told us in high school that making two-minute films about video games and putting them on the internet could be our job, it would have blown our minds.
Adobe: What types of videos do you produce?
Gorski: Over the past five years, we’ve really worked on building our skills and getting our names out there with shorts on our YouTube channel. A lot of our topics and aesthetic comes from video games, so we have fun action sequences and visual effects that people don’t expect to see on YouTube. Our regular short-form content is usually about two minutes long, but our collaborations with brand partners tend to be longer.
Adobe: How do you shoot your projects?
Gorski: We’re always dealing with mixed media. We’ll have GoPro, RED, and smartphone cameras all in one project. That means we can be dealing with multiple formats and codecs. We used to spend a lot of time converting footage.
Things move fast online. We turn around videos in as little as a week. That means that we don’t have time for errors or delays. We were working with Final Cut Pro before, but we really needed something that could handle any format without issue.
Planning a Corridor Digital shoot
Adobe: Why did you choose Adobe Premiere Pro CC?
Gorski: Adobe Premiere Pro is one of the fastest editing platforms out there. We don’t have to transcode anything. We can throw any video, graphics, and special effects onto the timeline and start editing.
We were already using After Effects CC all the time, whether we’re adding titles or painting someone out of a shot. Having the integration between Premiere Pro and After Effects makes our whole workflow fast and efficient. We can use Dynamic Link to move between the apps and the process is completely unobstructed.
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Adobe: How often do you work with plug-ins?
Gorski: Red Giant has some fantastic plug-ins that give us a more professional touch. Some of the plug-ins are splashy effects that turn our action sequences into a spectacle. But the Keying Suite plug-ins are more utilitarian, making professional-grade compositing simple.
Adobe: How else does Adobe contribute to your workflow?
Gorski: Now that we have Creative Cloud, we’re working with an all Adobe workflow. The workflow is seamless, with all programs integrating together. Audition CC is our answer for all music and sound design. And Media Encoder CC is always running in the background to output videos to any format we need.
Adobe: What’s next for Corridor Digital?
Gorski: We want to branch into feature films, TV series, and long-form narratives. Our latest project is a series that we’re calling Snapper Hero. It’s a 12 episode series that is currently on Snapchat about social media stars who suddenly gain super powers and how they deal with that responsibility.
The series has the action and special effects that are hallmarks of Corridor Digital, but in a completely new format. Snapchat videos can only be 10 seconds long and they’re deleted after 24 hours. It’s a really interesting platform to work with. We think it creates more urgency for our fans, where they’ll be waiting for new episodes and need to watch them right away.
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