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Dumbest thing ever said contest
It’s the middle of winter and most of us are stuck inside. Many of us snowed or iced in. So what better time to have a Dumbest Thing Ever Said in a Production contest?
I’ll start. Several years back while setting up for a shoot the client was watching the monitor beside the camera as the various lights were added to the scene. Large soft box key light, beadboard reflector, background light, hair light and kicker each turned on one by one. Staring at the monitor he remarked, “Wow, that’s really something. You can actually SEE what each light DOES.”
OK. Your turn.
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4 Replies
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Ok here’s my quick one….
This happened about 10 years ago… as a sucker, I volunteered to do a PSA for a local theatre company’s production of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.
I concepted something simple, said I only needed the lead actor to show up at my studio for an hour, and be sure to bring the coat.
The kid showed up without the coat, and said the costumer and director refused to give it to him (it was valuable, and they didn’t want to “spoil the surprise” of people seeing it for the first time).
Well, we made do without it.
After the PSA was finished, the director watched it and said… “Wow… now I wish we’d given you the coat… because….”
Wait for it
Wait for it
“… we didn’t know it was going to be in color.”
Mind you, this was around 2004.
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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One of my first jobs out of college…1996. Shooting a PSA for the health department for my state. We were shooting on 3/4″…on a deck separate from the camera. It was a small crew. Director, camera operator (me), assistant camera/audio, boom operator. All of us recent graduates of our film program.
After we finished shooting for the day, the assistant camera operator popped the tape out of the deck and said, “OK, where do we send this to get processed?”
Shane
Little Frog Post
Read my blog, Little Frog in High Def -
Okay, one more.
About ten years ago I was screening a finished video for an industrial client. He had seen an early cut and many of the shots but not the finished product. This was a pretty smart and savvy guy, or so I thought until at the end of a few minute video when he gushed, “That’s amazing! How did you ever find music the exact length of our video?”
What could I possibly answer? After the fact I knew the answer on the spot should have been. “Pure luck. We’re extremely lucky that’s why we can charge for what we do.”
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I had a client who, upon watching the screening, insisted we remove the color bars, tone, slate, and countdown from the front of the tape, because “it looks unprofessional”, and “the numbers don’t even go all the way down to zero”, and “Someone at the TV station might make a mistake and play that part on the TV”.
In a script meeting, a long time ago, I had a line where an actor, playing a state worker, was talking about having great insurance, just as good as the insurance State Troopers get. A member of the client’s committee said they didn’t want ANY references to troopers or emergency workers in the video, because whenever they see a state trooper, all they can think about are them getting killed in a gun fight and how sad that would be to imagine the widow and kids without a dad…. they went on for like a minute about all this stuff they called up in their heads when they saw “state trooper”. I asked them what the section of the video applicable to State Troopers was going to say.
“Oh, that part’s fine”.
The most trouble I have had is in trying to help people visualize something conceptual, when they have no imagination at all. They have to see it completed before they understand what it is, and if you show them a rough draft, they can’t see beyond the rough and imagine it finished and perfected. For these kinds of clients, I have to spell everything out in written form in a Creative Treatment, and hope they “get it”.
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