Two heavies dangle a guy by his ankles, seventy feet above a Baltimore street. A body plummets and caves in the roof of a car. The singer empties his shotgun out on the flower vendor and assorted passersby. But it’s all right Ma, it’s only images flashing on a screen in the edit suite at Digital Cave Media in Hampden. The images are from shorts and music videos assembled by Digital Cave’s principal partners, Nick Kovacic and Matthew Riggieri.
These young entrepreneurs are well on their stated path to make Digital Cave a “leader for new cinema specialties,” and while they like to have fun doing cinematic acrobatics, they also know how to have fun delivering solid professional production services to a range of clients.
Photo by Doug Gritzmacher
This dynamic duo met some years back at Howard Community College. They fell into a gig with the Athletic Group in Columbia, shooting High School Football hi-lite and recruiting reels, but bringing the quality level typical of that genre up several notches. This led to their long-running (fifty-two episodes and counting) assignment producing Columbia Manners, a tony public-access booster show about, well, Columbia.
It’s always a good thing when you have too much work to adequately attend to your formal education, but between HCC, the college formerly known as Villa Julie, and a stint at the New York Film Academy (London edition), Matt and Nick apparently picked up a lot of knowledge and expertise. One suspects they learned most of what they know by doing, rather than in lecture halls, and that is certainly how filmmakers are born.
Digital Cave now provides an array of production and post-production services to corporate and commercial clients, including the BSO webumentary series. Projects like their short-in-progress The Meter Maid, and the Sharpshooter and Neon Magazine music videos for Bosley add spice to their diverse portfolio. (Matt co-directed the Bosley clips and Nick edits, but the Digital Cavemen trade functions symbiotically as smoothly as the brothers Coen or Matt & Trey.) Digital Cave’s collaborations with Baltimore filmmakers from Steve Ruback (of the on-going apocalyptic epic Grifter Logan to shooter Mike O’Leary to myself and so many more, points to the durability of Baltimore’s visual media creative community, where ambitious local and DIY projects thrive outside of the drought brought on by recession and absence of major productions coming in from out of town. With the passage last year of the new incentives bill, we’re seeing film production, HBO series, and the Kevin Spacy/ David Fincher/ Netflix House of Cards project bringing in work for local techies and crafts people.
It seems certain to me that Digital Cave will have ample work in any event. Matt and Nick’s mission to demystify digital production for clients and deliver a superior product by leveraging their creative talent (over and above their formidable technical skills) as well as their indie-friendly openness and enthusiasm, makes them a partnership to watch. For now they remain a word-of-mouth, low overhead operation, with ambitions bigger than just business. They want to build a bigger sandbox and pursue the fun stuff.
David Warfield
