[Bill Davis]

Excuse me?

If you have “a 35-year career in commercials and features behind me” and you are NOT paying the people you are working with for ANY reason – isn’t that a bit self-indulgent?

I too have the same years of experience as you. And I know the incredible hours and Hurculean efforts that any worthwhile project in motion pictures requires.

Clearly, from your new description of your project, artistic, unusual, mixed media, multi-format – what you’re actually doing is EXPERIMENTING. And if that’s true, then you’re setting up a situation where ONE person stands to gain exponentially more than others from the success of an effort like this. YOU.

In fact, if you were asking for volunteers for a STRICTLY commercial project in order to bootstrap something like a series, documentary, or other on-going enterprise with a reasonable chance of securing long-term employment for those pitching in – I’d have LESS issue with your approach.

BTW, I mentioned “resume” films because I think that’s the SINGLE category where there is SOME inkling of justification for asking people to “pitch in and help without proper payment” – It PRESUMES someone is building a reputation on a shoestring.

That you are NOT personally in this category makes it more suspect, IMO.

I will suspect that at NO point during a single one of those features and commercials would YOU have accepted working without pay.

And if you’ve had 35 years of career success, YOU SHOULD HAVE SAVED TO PAY FOR YOUR EVENTUAL DREAM PROJECT. Period. End of story. Or not, Perhaps you got wiped out by medical bills, or uninsured mudslides, or whatever. But if so, IMO, this is NOT the time to ask people to volunteer crew for your fancy DREAM shoot on a whim. It’s time for ALL of us to work hard to generate PAID work for everyone in our industry. To shelve the dreams temporarily and concentrate on finding and building PRACTICAL projects. Why? Because everyone is HURTING out there. And one practical project with PAID positions is worth a HUNDRED fancy “maybe someday it’ll pay off” projects.

Right now, in our business, there is a HORRIFIC race to the bottom in terms of valuing the human assets REQUIRED to make films. One can stand WITH the “do it for nothing for me” crowd, or one can stand against them.

If you’re content to stand with the freebee crowd, I have the PERFECT right to point out the discontinuity.

No. I don’t know all your circumstances. Just what you wrote here. And that struck a very OFF note for me.

I acknowledge that I could be TOTALLY wrong in reading the situation and your intent.

HOWEVER – Like all the other long time professionals in this business I’ve watched with sadness as the Craigs list mentality has infected a lot of what otherwise would be life sustaining work.

And I’m tired of it.

Note please, that someone gave my view a 5 star notation, so I’m clearly not the only one who holds this opinion.

Perhaps your project is somehow NOT like the dozens before it – post after post on this board by “producer” after “producer” who want ALL the work for FREE and then want to come here and ask those of us with experience for FURTHER help by handing out our hard won experience, again for FREE.

Sorry, not playing today.

[Bill Davis]

Agreed.

8 inches certainly. 8 feet – possible for someone with 20/20 vision, perhaps.

But 8 meters is more than 24 feet. I suppose it’s “possible” if you have eyes like a hawk.

But I’m thinking the scale is skewed.

[Bill Davis]

I just think it’s so weird when I read this kind of post.

Someone’s making a “no budget” resume film. Yet they manage somehow to get hold of a RED to shoot on. Somehow, there’s no budget to support HUMAN talent. Yet, there’s ALWAYS somehow enough money to support the EQUIPMENT necessary to take their shot at the big time.

What seems so weird, is that the chances of driving ACTUAL quality higher has virtually NOTHING to do with gear – and EVERYTHING to do with the human talent that surrounds it.

I keep suspecting that if most of these folks grabbed a 1999 era Hi-8 camcorder and spent their life savings on talented PEOPLE to surround themselves with – script help, lighting help, sound help, directing help – that they’d have a FAR greater chance of ending up with worthwhile work in the can – AND they’d be leagues ahead in a real movie career – rather than gaining expertise in operating technology that’s almost sure to be obsolete in a few years.

Weird.

[Bill Davis]

Out of sheer coincidence, I was the voice talent on most of PR stuff that went to congress relating to the Apache during their production life.

It was originally a product of McDonnell Douglass prior to their sale to Boeing – and the main manufacturing plant is out here in Mesa, AZ.

I’ll never forget how weird it was to narrate the ghostly green IR scenes of an Apache during Desert Storm combat popping up to take a “picture” of the battlefield (after which the aircraft could drop below the hill and target stuff based on the geometry of that snapshot!)

What was really amazing was when a whole mess of opposing soldiers actually jumped up from their concealed positions in a combat situation and literally tossed their weapons asside and surrendered directly to one of the Apaches – simply because of it’s arrival on the scene. First time I think an opposing force literally surrendered to a THING in the history of warfare!

Reminiscing asside, If the tape isn’t marked “Secret” or “Classified” or other wise restrictively labeled, you could argue that it’s a tax funded government video and therefore public domain. There might be someone around these parts who has a machine to that spec who could read it.

The primary question being what’s it worth to find the gear in operational condition and someone who could make a dub. If it’s important and I could help, let me know.

Good luck.

[Bill Davis]

Why in heaven’s name would you need to hide the mic? These are Concert Venues. Do you think they don’t know that recording requires microphones?

He’s AUDITIONING for gigs. They want to HEAR as clearly as possible how he plays. Period. They’d also, I’m sure, like to watch his hands and playing technique. Nothing else really matters.

I’d take the TLM-103 and mount it on a mic stand with boom arm and place it about 10 inches out from his forearm and facing directly at the sound hole.

Listen and adjust. Particularly the lower registers. You want rich, warm bass notes – something that too much distance from guitar to mic will fight.

The TLM 103 should have no problem with that or with reproducing a guitar with both clarity and a nice “live” sound with lovely spacial sense of the room.

Maybe a little more angle to to the players body so that the people judging the effort can easily see both his right and left hand movements.

But that’s it. You should get an EXCELLENT recording of the guitar. And in this situation, that’s what really matters.

[Bill Davis]

As Richard said, this is truely a terrible position to be in.

Here’s the only advice I can give you. It’s a lot of work and that sucks, but there you are.

Grab a bunch of paper and create a “score” for the entire film. That’s a timeline indicating second by second the flow of the entire movie.

I make these when necessary by drawing horizontal lines on a sheet of paper with a drawing program and labeling it with 0000-0059 numbers spaced evenly along the line – so the first line represents the first minute of the movie – second by second. Then drop down and make a line for the second minute 100-159. And the third, all the way to line 1159-1200 of a two hour movie. (use as many sheets as necessary.)

Then listen to the WHOLE movie listening to only ONE ear of your headphones – either the RIGHT or the LEFT track – SOLO – with nothing else to be heard. (doesn’t matter which track)

Use magic markers to mark EVERY line of dialog in your new timeline as to whether it’s Good (green magic marker?) so-so (yellow magic marker) or poor (red MM.) working ABOVE the timeline.

Then start over and do the same to the OTHER track (other earphone) – using different colored magic markers in the space BELOW the line.

At the end of this tedious and annoying process you’ll have determined one thing as clearly as possible.

Whether you have MORE usable material on the mostly boom track or on the mostly lav track.

Whichever it turns out to be. Next go and do your best to cut the ENTIRE movie with that track. The point is that you want a soundtrack that’s as CONSISTENT as possible throughout the whole movie, even if you’re suffering spots where you have crappy results because your new DOMINANT track is flawed.

Then go back and attack all the places where this dominant track REALLY sucks by using the other track to patch things as best you can.

It’s going to be a LOT of tedious work. And in the end you’ll NEVER be really satisfied. But it’s the best you can do.

Take heart that even if the boom ends up being the DOMINANT track and it sounds roomy and less than ideal, the human brain adjusts pretty quickly to the sound of things, and if you have visual clues like lip movement and story progress to help them, the audience will get conditioned to the sounds pretty rapidly – AS LONG AS IT ISN”T CHANGING EVERY 10 SECONDS – which is what you risk by trying to bounce around between one recording track and the other.

My 2 cents.

Good luck. and let us know how it goes.

[Bill Davis]

This topic really deserves a book. But in terms of a couple of short ideas that have helped me.

The FIRST priority is establishing rapport with the subject. This typically means having them pay more attention to YOU than to the process of taping. So I’m also a proponent of rolling the camera as soon as everyone is settled and not even mentioning that you’re recording.

Then, try starting by asking a series of questions that the interviewee will be COMPLETELY comfortable with – Here in Arizona where most everyone is a transplant, I commonly use “So tell me, what part of the country were you born in?” It’s a dumb question. But the point is that that EVERYONE knows the answer to it PLUS it allows you to follow up with “So when did you come out here”? Or What was it like growing up back there?. The purpose is SIMPLY to start them talking. And then keep going in that direction, by asking them OBVIOUS stuff that will give them confidence in talking, until you subtly look for an opening that lets you direct the conversation around to the subject at hand.

The best interviews I do are where the subject eventually asks “Shouldn’t we be recording this?” and you can answer – “We’ve BEEN rolling, in fact, we’re almost done.”

Interviewing is about rapport. It’s about psychology. It’s about eye contact and intense listening. It’s about body language and smiles and silent nodding and encouragement and making the subject feel like everything they say is the MOST important thing in the world.

And it’s nearly impossible to do well while simultaneously running video or audio gear.

A few basic ideas from someone who has done a few hundred on-camera interviews. Hope they help.

Good luck.

[Bill Davis]

Including Powerpoint slides in your video that were created on a machine running Win 2k and with a custom font that the art director “just LOVED” which was in turn created using Fontastic circa 1997 – by the girl he was dating at the time. Priceless.

[Bill Davis]

Oh, since nobody else addressed it….
Moleskin typically comes from the Dr. Scholes foot care section of your local pharmacy.

While you’re there be sure to ask them if they’re currently carrying the ultra cheap, non-lubricated, non-powdered, non rippled condoms – the ones that are useful for covering an on-camera shotgun mic in the rain. They’re getting increasingly hard to find locally since people seem to think condoms are ONLY useful for sex and that the public will ONLY buy ones in NEON colors that have the external appearance of overly bumpy living sea creatures.

YMMV.

[Bill Davis]

(wailing at the TOP of my lungs…)

BUT GUYS… That’s NOT what I WANT.

I want a gizmo that when I push button *A* everything I say into the mic comes out the speakers sounding just like Ernie Anderson. Button B is Casey Kasem. Button C is Hal Riney. Button D is Thurl Ravenscroft. Button E is Don La Fontaine… you get the idea, right?

I want a BUTTON that makes my VOs PERFECT. Me – but better – like THEM.

I want to hook this up to a $49 unbalanced mic – but it’s got to sound EXACTLY like a Neumann M149 through a Grace Preamp and Pultec EQ. only smoother, edgier, punchy but not annoying, even if my REAL voice sounds like a whining teenager that’s just been kicked in the balls.

Come on guys – this is the digital era. Why can’t I have that?