[Bill Davis]

Yep,

The simplest, easiest and most professional solution is a 5 ton grip truck and folks who know how to use everything inside.

The cheap “indy” solution is to rent a bunch of scaffolding then go buy a bunch of army surplus white silk parachutes to build what would essentially be a big-assed softbox around the band.

Then pray HEAVILY that the wind gods take pity on you.

Since you storyboard is heavy on macro shots – I’d suspect that smaller grip gear like Westcott 6×6 frames with silks, diffusion and black fabric would also come in pretty handy. (And be a lot easier for a small crew to control)

Finally, as someone who has shot in Arizona my entire career, estimate the amount of water you need to provide for all the people involved and then either triple or quadruple that amount along with plans to go get more if necessary. Plus slip at least one good pair of needle nosed pliers in your first aid kit and bring a lot of compressed clean air – desert dust is a subtle enemy.

Texas desert in August? You sure know how to have fun.

[Bill Davis]

Man, am I glad my middle initial is “G.”

When I was back in college, I used to work as a DJ in a swanky Disco. One of our occasional customers was Chris Bonano. I didn’t really undersand who he was – just that he would stop at the front door and have our head bouncer lock his gun in the safe when he came in for an evening.

I was sitting in the next door dive coffee shop one night after work with a couple of the cocktail waitresses from the club and another of the older waitresses came in with Chris and a couple of his “friends.” We all sat at a table together. Seemed an OK guy. Wasn’t long after that that Chris’s dad got tied up in a big anabolic steroids trafficking mess and got dumped out of the witness protection program, iirc.

Some people are just destined for larger lives than us mere mortals, I guess.

[Bill Davis]

But Neil – why not just buy a cheap LCD monitor and mount it on the opposite side of the sticks from where the operator is standing and feed it from the BNC tap?

What I’m saying is that is there something that’s preventing you from directing from near the camera? Why go to the hassle to send an RF video signal when you can just set up a monitor wherever you like and have your crew run a line to it?

I’ve been directing that way for more than 10 years and my crew knows that the camera gets set up first, and “video village” gets set up second.

On my set, Video Villlage is a folding 2-level production cart that has a 13″ Sony Pro monitor on the top level, and my laptop for directors notes below. This lets clients and content experts and whomever else is mission critical – stand around me and watch right along. Something that you just can’t do holding a 3″ gizmo in your hand.

But, of course, that’s just how I work. YMMV.

[Bill Davis]

Here’s my 2 cents.

You have two primary issues. Set lighting and character lighting.

Let’s start with set lighting. You’ll need enough overall illumination to expose the whole frame accurately. Your Lowel V-lights while not ideal, should do an OK job of this. As others suggested, NEVER use them directly pointed at the scene. Reflect them off something. A white ceiling is good. A couple of 4×4 sheets of white foamcore is also OK. (the formcore is angled toward the scene, the V-lights are then aimed AWAY from the scene but directly at the formcore which reflects the light directly back toward the scene, creating overall soft illumination for everything. This will be “flat” lighting with little talent or character dimension.

So next up in character lighting.

Again as others have noted, your softbox can serve as your keylight for the human talent. What really remains is to make the other “stars” of the show – the puppets – pop. I’d consider buying as many small fresnel lights as you can afford. You don’t need anything big. Arri 150’s or similar would do fine. These are under $150 a fixture and there are a LOT of them in use, so you might be able to find them used. They’re light and easy to rig on cheap stands or clamped to virtually anything. Ideally, you’d want two of these per character on stage. One as a character key – one as a back or rim light. Used with cheap Harbor Freight dimmers, you can control the intensity of the key verses the rim light for each character. The fact that they’re fresnels will let you use them directly on the characters “faces” to make them stand out of the overall scene.

What you want is a decent overall light level with the characters standing out as the brightest elements of the scene – each with a rim light to provide separation from the background.

One more note. whoever chose the black shiny drape for the “stage” background clearly didn’t understand video. It’s a giant light sink with nasty sparkles. I’d replace that first.

Let us know how things come out.

[Bill Davis]

Anthony,

Traditionall standards MAX OUT at 85 words for a :30
160 words for a :60.

Yes, you can find skilled high-energy talent who can do a bit more, but virtually anyone will start to sound rushed at a clip much faster than this.

This presumes a wall-to-wall professional announcer pace. At that clip, there’s not a whole lot of room for interpretation other than in-line inflection or time for anything other than very minor pauses.

It also presumes that if you have any music bed, you’re going to duck it ASAP and it will play a low-priority supporting role, rather than really be a part of the construction of the commercial since that pace won’t allow your announcer to hold for stings or work WITH the music bed at all.

The truth is that most local commercials – particularly radio commercials – are badly overwritten.

Listen to the better national spots – transcribe them – and you’ll notice that they often take a “less is more” aspproach. That’s because the writers know that getting one or two concepts across CLEARLY is a much better commercial strategy than trying to jam seven concepts in an ad – only to have NONE of them stand out enough for anyone to remember.

Oh, and when the client tells you they want close the ad with a call to action that includes a phone number – ask them the last time THEY were listening to the radio and actually wrote down a phone number themselves.

FWIW.

[Bill Davis]

If you have a 30 second VO that times out at 31.5 – then that’s NOT a good take. And if the talent can’t PERFORM the script inside 30 than might have a talent problem but more likely you have a SCRIPT problem.

If your script is like 99.8% of the copy written today – there are probably several simple, clean ways to re-write it to cut it down to BELOW a MAX of 85 words – which is the long time industry standard for a :30

(And by the way, when you’re counting words “Highway 505” is NOT two words – it’s FOUR which is why experienced copywriters will write it as “Highway five oh five” so it doesn’t screw up the word count functions)

Unless this is a used car screamer – using tech to speed up and pitch shift the track – is one of the last things I’d use to fix things.

Change script first, hire better talent second, speed and pitch shift something a distant third.

But that’s just me. A guy who’s participated in more than 2000 VOs as producer, writer and voice talent for more than 30 years.

Good luck.

[Bill Davis]

It’s perfectly possible, just not particularly cheap or easy – particularly the “unteathered” part.

You’d need 2.4Ghz wireless video transmission and reception units, battery power adapters and an LCD monitor screen. Depending on how robust and bullet proof you’d probably be looking at between $1000 and $3000 to make it happen sorta reliably. (I say “sorta” cuz when you use radio-wave anything, interference is always an issue)

Wired is easy. Wireless is not so much.

I’d question, tho, how much you’d actually use it even if you got it to work. I base that on the fact that years ago, I got a smoking blowout deal on the historically venerable Sony RM VJ-1 video microphone unit – which had a lovely 3.5″ LCD screen in a handheld unit COMPLETE with zoom and focus controls in a sleek handheld unit tethered back to my camera. I guses the idea was that a producer/reporter could become a 1 man band.

It’s been sitting in a box for about 10 years now and I don’t think I ever took it in the field more than twice.

In practice, nobody who has much sense goes to shoot anything important without a confidence monitor somewhere on a cart. And it’s easier to just walk to that to get a REAL look at the picture than to carry something around.

I’m shooting more with my Canon 5d these days, and it has an app that sends a live view picture to my iPhone, so maybe possibly, this might change the way I look at hand held monitors in the future – but right now, I’m not holding my breath.

YMMV.

[Bill Davis]

How sophisticated do you need your prompting software to be?

For years, we used Presentation Prompter. It’s solid, but basic. (you need a hardware VGA reverse unit if you want to be able to flip the prompter at the head and still read the laptop display in the clear)

Their new software “Flip-Q” allows software reverse on one unit and upright text on another, but can be a bit finicky to launch properly. That’s offset by a simple mode where the prompter text is presented properly on 3/4 of the screen width, and a small inset reverse copy is presented in the upper left quadrant.

I do a lot of dialog scenes for my corporate work where two characters need to interact with prompting for the complex dialog and I use that “inset” mode with a dual camera setup a lot and it’s pretty bullet proof.

So again, you need to match your software to the kind of work you’ll do most often and make sure it has the capabilities you REALLY need.

Flip-Q is made by Prompter People and is available for MAC.

Hope that helps.

[Bill Davis]

Mark,

Actually, that’s hardly any leverage at all. What you’re hearing from everyone is that the ONLY leverage you have in this type of situation is NOT to deliver the masters until their account is paid in full.

There’s NOTHING wrong with working this way for an out of state client you don’t know well. Even if they have the BEST intentions, lots of stuff that’s none of your business can get in the way of those intentions. Whether it’s temporary cash flow issues, uncertain financing, THEIR bad clients not paying in a timely fashion – there are just LOTS of reasons they might want to defer your payment for weeks or even months.

And if you’ve delivered the work, there’s simply nothing practical you can do about this situation.

Listen to what everyone’s saying. If they need proof of performance, deliver blatantly WATERMARKED DVDs. But cash up front is totally FAIR for any new client that you don’t already have a long established relationship with – and none of the responsible clients will even BLINK at this.

If they claim the need for a fast turnaround, by all means use Pay Pal or figure out a way to take a credit card and assure them you’ll happily send everything the SECOND the funds clear.

Good luck.

[Bill Davis]

Hey Mark,

In some situations, all you need to do to win the game is to punt and rely on your defense to hold.

And in accordance with one of the sub-sections of Murphy’s Law, don’t be surprised if the damn thing wins some kind of award!

Good luck.