[Tim Wilson]

[Richard Garabedain] “its true that there are a lot of premade templates to make the process more streamlined…if you want exactly whats shown. But if you want to edit it or make your own…then what would you do?”

Exactly. Creative COW will always be around to help, but in the end, being someone who knows how to solve problems, and how to make good things even better, will always be in demand.

It’s easy to forget, but templates have been around for a very long time. To use just one example, Digital Juice was founded in 1992 — the year before CoSA released the first version of After Effects! Behance and Envato were founded as (among other things) marketplaces for templates and elements in 2005 and 2006 (respectively). Fifteen years! There are hundreds of companies in the now nearly 30 years of desktop motion graphics (!!!) that have made things easier, verging on instant, and yet here we are, with the demand for motion graphics and visual effects stronger than ever.

The question is, where in the economic and creative chain do you want to park yourself? I think of it as not unlike cooking. Ready cooked meals are made for people who don’t want to cook, or are unable to, or who need something fast now and again. I’m old enough to have been around for the dawn of frozen food as a mass market phenomenon, and remember when it used to take an hour to make a TV dinner. The novelty was just that it was possible at all. They tasted every bit as unhealthy as they were, too. LOL Today, frozen food can be pretty terrific, and maybe almost healthy. Certainly convenient and tasty enough to use regularly.

But the only people making money from pre-cooked meals are people who make pre-cooked meals for a living, and people who sell them. That’s a very narrow slice of the entire universe of food. As difficult as things are for restaurants here in the spring of 2020, though, I think you’ll agree that no amount of really good frozen food has put even a single restaurant out of business. No amount of fast food has displaced any meaningful number of food trucks, and the food truck explosion in recent years hasn’t done anything to diminish the viability of anything from a mom-and-pop diner to a white tablecloth bistro.

In fact, what’s been going on is the diversification of food. Eating (is) (has been) better than ever. More kinds of ethnic food in more places. More kinds of fresh food in more markets. Fresh fruit year round. Good food is driving the demand for more good food, and BETTER food. There are now multiple TV networks ONLY talking about making and eating food, and some of the most popular competition shows around are devoted to food, from the Iron Chef to The Great British Bakeoff.

I really do think that motion graphics is the same. Sure, you could maybe find a way to do something that’s just in the world of templates. And people who don’t WANT to do mograph for a living, who maybe have to do one mograph-related task for one project, as part of a job for which video or graphics is maybe a tiny part, folks like that are going to need all the template options that they can get their hands on.

In the same way that if you want to cook, there are more ways you can do your own thing than ever before, if you want to do motion graphics, there are more places to do it than ever before. Maybe they’re different than they used to be, because they’re not necessarily done in post houses, boutiques, or agencies. A lot of it is being done in-house at companies of every description, government agencies, you name it. A bunch of it is “only” being seen online, which used to be considered a niche, and maybe still is, even if it’s bigger than every mainstream traditional outlet combined.

VFX is really a completely different consideration, but somewhat related, in that almost no visual effects are canned. They’re all custom. That’s not to say that big movies aren’t using After Effects — we all know that they are, as part of a toolkit that tends to contain a bunch of other things (Nuke, 3D software, custom renderers, etc etc). And they’re using plug-ins that you know and also use, from companies like Boris FX and Red Giant. What’s not often talked about is that a lot of those packages are used for fast pre-viz, and final versions are still largely hand-tuned in more complex creative environments, but hey, there are a lot of jobs in pre-viz! (I used to be a product manager at Boris FX, and I worked with a LOT of pre-viz artists!) And those names at the end of the movie don’t even come close to reflecting everyone who works on a project.

Today in the spring of 2020 isn’t necessarily the best time to be looking for a job in the production business, but speaking generally about trends, what the explosion of options tells us is that there’s an explosion in demand. If you find yourself being displaced by templates, you may need to template-proof yourself by adding skills that go beyond the four walls of After Effects — adding things like 3D, music skills (ie, using music in mograph, including driving mograph) — as well as skills related to tasks that don’t suit themselves to out-of-the-box approaches.

One example I’m thinking of here is explainer animations. There are definitely resources for automating these, or at least parts of them, but the more specific the thing you’re helping someone explain, the less amenable it is to prefab approaches. But I’m also thinking of things like expressions, Python scripting, and other toolsets that expand the limits of After Effects beyond the features that are in the box, all the way to the limits of your own imagination. Or that of your clients. ☺

This is starting to get into the weeds of career advice that may or may not apply to you, but the larger point is the same. Rather than viewing templates and other shortcuts as a potential threat, use them as proof that the demand for good mograph is growing. More opportunities doesn’t necessarily mean that you have the specific skills to take advantage of any specific one of them yet, so keep learning. Look at job listings at the kinds of places you’d like to work, and see what kinds of specifics they’re looking for that aren’t part of your skills today, and start building those up too.

I’ll end with an observation that’s worth exactly what you paid for it LOL but I’ve been in one aspect of this business or another since the late 70s, and the one thing I’ve come to feel more strongly about in recent years than ever is that the one group of folks who’s most employable in the widest swath of possible jobs in this industry is After Effects ninjas. And the most employable AE ninjas are the ones who can tie their AE skills into the rest of the production pipeline, either with their own skills, or their understanding of how teams work and what they need from their AE teammates.

[Tim Wilson]

Hi Isaac,

You’re asking “is filmmaking still an option” at the same time that every filmmaker, production company, and studio is asking themselves the same thing! So if you’re asking about this month, or even this year, the answer is, “I dunno, is it?”

We may know more later this year, but it may be longer than that. I’m sure you’ve seen the study coming out of Harvard today proposing that, without a vaccine, we might be talking intermittent social distancing through 2022. The authors are submitting their numbers for peer review, and they’re saying IF there’s no vaccine, and MAYBE intermittent distancing…but it’s certainly worth keeping in mind that if there’s a vaccine before the end of 2021, it would be the fastest time to a vaccine in human history.

Since you were asking in more general career terms, I’ll mostly stay there, to echo the advice of Michael and Rich. As objectionable as it may seem to toil for “The Man” while gathering resources to make your dream projects on the side, the “day job” approach to creative satisfaction is an old model that still works.

Three of the most idiosyncratic filmmakers I can think of, guys who push crazily hard to make movies that only they could possibly make, have built virtually full time jobs around their side hustles.

The first time that some folks ever saw Ridley Scott’s work was a commercial he made for Apple. It only aired once, during the Super Bowl in 1984, but people are still talking about it today. I love this particular YouTube clip, because it’s from a home tape of the game itself — you can see the game score as we cut to a break midway through the third quarter, and the promo after it. This was a real live TV spot.

You could say, yeah, a spot made after Blade Runner, but the fact is that his company had made a TON of commercials before the first person hired him to make a movie, and when they did, part of the reason why was very much because they knew what they were getting from the guy, because he had a body of real work for paying customers.

The fact is that he’s still making commercials today. He goes back and forth between them as money and time allow. And sure, he’s at the point in his career where he can do the fun stuff and get real budgets for it, including one he did for Hennessey that I wrote about at the COW last year. But he’s not doing these for love. He’s doing them for money.

Errol Morris is one of my favorite filmmakers. He won an Oscar for his documentary The Fog of War, and I feel like even that is faint praise to describe the singularity of his vision. The Thin Blue Line, Grey Gardens, Gates of Heaven — it feels like there’s nothing he can’t do. Except get paid to make movies full time. Not even close. He reckons his time is split 50-50 between movies and commercials.

He doesn’t get the glamorous stuff like Ridley Scott does, although he did get a gig for Apple. The “I’m A Mac” spots with Justin Long and John Hodgman, my least favorite campaign in history. LOL But it paid Errol, and frankly, paid a pretty good actor and a VERY good comedian and writer who all needed the dough, so I’m ultimately okay with it, even while hating it not one whit less.

I nearly fell out of my chair when I saw this spot for Chipotle, though, because you can actually hear Errol in it speaking off camera. He actually does this in his documentaries all the time, because he’s never had the money (or inclination, honestly), to have a crew put him in a chair opposite his subject and speak face to face. Instead, he just yells from behind the camera. LOL I love this. He’s also genuinely good at connecting with people, which is why his documentaries work so well. I mean, you can say these are artless and stupid, and plenty of people in the YT comments do exactly that, but I love his directness.

I’m a Zillow nerd, and I love this clip of Errol talking about his Zillow campaign. He speaks very specifically about his search for idiosyncratic stories, and because houses also touch on HOME, he finds it very easy to reveal those stories, whether it’s a person trying to recapture something about their childhood home, or someone running away from home.

You’ll get to see one of Morris’s most distinctive inventions, the Interrortron, which uses the principle of the teleprompter to allow him to both shoot the interview AND have face to face contact with his subjects. They don’t stare into a lens when they speak, they look him in the eye, and at the same time, look directly in to OUR eyes. It’s certainly part of what made The Fog of War so powerful — basically looking Robert S. MacNamara in the eye for an hour and a half while he talks about being part of the strategic teams of everything from Hiroshima to Vietnam.

What really strikes me in this Zillow spot is Errol falls into his own “trap”, not that it’s a trap, really — the Interrorton is a tool, and you can see it here working as intended, as I think he winds up telling us more about himself than he intends to, and it’s beautiful.

He also says, and I’m paraphrasing, but you’ll see it, “Zillow is a website, how can you be emotional about a website?”

I’m pointing this out to you specifically, Isaac, because once you can answer that, you can see why a documentarian who only cares about personal stories, and who wants to peel back social niceties to get to the truths that people might not have intended to reveal, will pursue that same passion in commercials. You could just as easily be doing this with corporate video or anything else. The stories are where YOU find them. Errol shows you how a campaign for a website that shows you pictures of houses with no people in them can be DEEPLY personal.

For a more glam example, he was a hired gun for the Oscars, too. I adore this 2002 film as a bit of filmmaking, where pretty much the whole thing hinges on his ability to connect with people, to get them to give him something real without a script. Here you can see where he first perfected the “white screen” approach that he later used for Apple and that other people merrily swiped too. He’s the first to admit that he stole from commercial photography, but I’ve watched this every few months since it first aired because I really, really enjoy it. A bunch of civilians, plus Trump, Jerry Brown, Wavy Gravy, Lou Reed, Iggy Pop, Fran Leibovitz, Al Sharpton, Tom Brady (Errol is from Boston after all, and in 2002, Tom WAS Boston), plus a couple of surprises I don’t want to give away. And yeah, some of my favorite parts are Errol barking back at the people he’s interviewing.

But even with an Oscar in his bag and some of the most influential documentaries ever made, and commercial gigs with extraordinarily high profiles, he still has to hustle for distribution. Some of his shorts wind up on the PBS series POV. He’s done a lot of films for the New York Times web series Op Docs. He’s done six shorts for the ESPN series, “It’s Not Crazy, It’s Sports.” Some of these, he might have been paid to do, but other times, it’s just a matter of finding an outlet. Not every option is open to him, so he takes the ones he can get.

Probably the most idiosyncratic director of them all these days is another of my favorites, Werner Herzog, and talk about a hustler! He pays for his directing career with acting (including an unforgettable role in The Mandalorian), writing books, public speaking, and teaching out the wazoo. He’ll do a class for almost anyone, I think, as long as they’re paying.

He opens his class on guerilla filmmaking by confessing that he stole his first film camera. It’s not a confession as much as it is a challenge, like to a duel. Are YOU ready to steal a camera? Because if you’re not, he says, you really need to ask yourself if you’re actually ready to make films. Other lessons include forging government documents, picking locks, and the basics of shooting a gun, all skills that he has used while making his own films.

One of the craziest clips I’ve ever seen is when Herzog is getting interviewed outdoors in LA by the BBC, HE GETS SHOT by some rando, asks “What was that?”, says it wasn’t much, and KEEPS GOING.

The hustle on this guy is freaking relentless, and when you read what he went through to make some of his movies, he really seems unhinged….except that he’s also freakishly rational. This is what I have to do, so I do it.

If you haven’t watched any of his movies, the one I’d start with is Encounters At The End of the World, which is a very informal, light-hearted documentary about scientists at Antarctica, in which one of the most extreme filmmakers to ever pick up a camera gets up close and personal with some of the most extreme scientists. Some of it is downright hilarious, especially a talent show sequence. There’s some unbelievably gorgeous underwater footage, some of the most beautiful images I’ve ever seen, and because it’s Herzog, some unexpected meditations on intensity, derangement, insanity, and even death. With apologies for the aspect ratio of this clip, it really blew me away:

Talking about intensity and insanity, Werner plays a villain in the first Jack Reacher picture, starring Tom Cruise, and I think that both of these are worth your while (although the books are better, I say having read all 24 of them) who mangles both of his hands on purpose, for reasons that are downright psychotic — but hey, that’s why you hire Werner Herzog. LOL He leans into it for sure, but this is a guy who, when there wasn’t money to make films, moved to Mexico to become a rodeo clown and smuggled TVs across the Texas border for pocket money.

Or so he says. Is any of this true? Your guess is as good as mine, but it’s sure right on brand. LOL

I don’t have much of a point except to say that every filmmaker is also a hustler. Heck, look at Scorsese, who’s still busting his hump trying to get his next picture made, with Paramount basically telling him to pound sand, and that’s AFTER his entire g-d career, including the Oscar-nominated The Irishman, still playing on a TV or mobile phone near you. Nobody’s going to make it easy for him, ever, no matter how many times he proves himself.

Same for Ridley Scott, Errol Morris, and Werner Herzog. They’ve each made a lot of people a lot of money, each had a huge influence on the industry, and each in their 70s hustling harder than kids in their 20s. Heck, probably hustling harder than THEY did in their 20s.

So there’s your question. Can you find the humanity in commercial work? Can you keep asking people for money? Are you ready to steal a camera? Okay, this is the COW, we don’t support stealing cameras. So are you ready to move to another country where you don’t even speak the language and become a rodeo clown if that’s what it takes?

There’s always a way. None of them are easy.

[Tim Wilson]

I wrote about it here on the COW: Adobe Productions: New Collaboration and Productivity for Premiere Pro

A couple of things jumped out at me from Adobe’s presentation:

1) Although very much intended for collaboration, there’s a lot to like about Productions for individual editors, too. My favorite is the notion of cross-project referencing. An individual Production can contain bunches of projects (Adobe’s customers have tested up to thousands; they haven’t found any practical limitations in either the number of projects or users attached to a Production), but media files aren’t copied. This keeps the sizes of individual projects small, and performance high.

Imagine a documentary that you’re working on over a period of months or years. Lots of iterations, only one set of media for all of it. Or imagine that you’ve got a client with lots of assets. By assigning all client projects in a single Production, you get that same advantage: no need for multiple copies of say, a logo animation. It’s in the Production once, and in as many projects as you want.

2) I didn’t include it in my article, but I’ll spill the beans about one of Oliver’s questions after the presentation: ProRes RAW support is available to everyone in the beta version of Premiere Pro as of today. You can download it in the Creative Cloud app.

And don’t forget: BRAW support already available for free in all Adobe apps via a download from Blackmagic Design’s website.

3) Just a nerdly observation here. Adobe’s Van Bedient hosted Adobe’s presentation, and one thing I learned about Van when I worked with him at Avid: he’s a straight shooter, very customer focused, and not at all prone to hype. A soft spoken guy, he was also a heavy hitter who wore job titles including Strategic Accounts, Director of Market Development, and Director of Enterprise Accounts. You think he might have learned a thing or three about large-scale collaborative workflows?

The point he kept (politely, but unmistakably) hammering in his presentation is that Productions is READY. He mentioned movies it’s already been used on, like the latest Terminator and My Name is Dolemite, as well as currently in production on Fincher’s new movie “Mank”. He mentioned the shared storage vendors who’ve already certified this. He mentioned cloud partners who’ve been working with it. He used words like battle-tested, and I’ll say it again because he did, READY.

You can take that for what it’s worth. With a customer base as large as Premiere’s, and as prone to breaking stuff as you lot are, I have no doubt that you’ll be poking holes in it soon enough, but I’ve been watching Adobe presentations since the early 90s, and I don’t recall ever hearing the word “ready” a single time in nearly 30 years. Before I heard Van saying it, a LOT.

Again, just a nerdly observation, but I definitely observed it.

So, yeah, let the games begin!

[Tim Wilson]

[Patrick Sheppard] “Bessie’s Bovacious Industry Banter”

You know what, I seriously think I may use this as the subtitle/description at the very least. ????

[Tim Wilson]

Hi Jim,

So sorry I missed this earlier! The good news is that in the intervening days since you wrote this, the service has been restored.

It turns out that the recent surge in activity here on the COW required us to spin up a new server. We had to turn off the site for a few minutes to do that, so we waited until last Friday night, Pacific Time Zone, to do it. Most of the world had paused to take a breather by then, so very people might have noticed.

In the meantime, another service not fully up to snuff is our email notification system, so I hadn’t gotten a notice that anyone posted here. Yikes! Working on that one now.

Thanks again,

Tim Wilson
Editor-in-Chief
Creative COW

[Tim Wilson]

[Herb Sevush] “” OOOWWWooh … I mean Baaahh … Baaa ???””

Perhaps a sign of how old we BOTH are, but I recently came across a fan video for this track that used the Betty Boop classic “Dizzy Red Riding Hood” as the visuals!

[Tim Wilson]

[Michael Hancock] “Abbreviated to BAAA. “

Okay, this made me laugh out loud!

Keep ’em coming!

[Tim Wilson]

[Oliver Peters] “[Bob Zelin] “As for 5G ? Well – Tim can tell us about that more than anyone else now. But of course, that won’t be the ultimate solution for what we are talking about.”

Remember, the “sales pitch” for 5G is all about IoT – “smart homes,” self-driving cars, etc. What sort of bandwidth draw is that going to be?”

That was exactly my point in…this thread? Another thread? I don’t remember. LOL But yeah, 5G isn’t for anything we’re talking about. Even for mobile, it’s not going to be many places, and when it arrives, for many people it will be SLOWER than 4G. Not forever, but remember when 3G and 4G first showed up? Same deal. Started slower than the thing they were replacing, because by definition of early maps, more people were on the fringe of new coverage and it was flaky, where their old coverage may have been slow, but it was predictable.

What we need is all about the pipe to our homes, offices, home offices, etc.

[Tom Sefton] “If nothing else will be examined after this worldwide event by the most hard nosed bean counter for a post production house, the justification for renting a large facility with space for multiple edit suites is number 1.”

That’s also what I was talking about just above. It’s not that the tsunami that took out Sony’s HDCAM manufacturing ENDED tape. It accelerated the end, though, by a LOT. It’s not that the writer’s strike ENDED scripted programming in prime time. It’s easy to make the case that the scripted programming since then is generally better, and there really HAVE been some scripted TV shared experiences of a breadth that was supposed to be over — but Mark R. at Bunim/Murray, or anybody who still has a TV, can tell you that the balance irrevocably shifted toward unscripted, and it may never tilt back. Certainly hasn’t in the intervening dozen years.

There will absolutely be A return to “normal”, but there will be other NEW normals that won’t look like anything like this. Yes, the nature of this and similar threads here is that we’re lamenting this, or fretting, or speculating or what have you, because we’re all way, way downstream from where a lot of these decisions will be made. But there will be bean counters and other bosses who’ll be looking to the folks on this thread who are actually working on this stuff (eg, not me) for advice. The more advice we have to share with each other, the better-informed these decisions will be for all of us.

[Tim Wilson]

[Oliver Peters] “You seem to be suggesting that remote workflows are here to stay as the norm.”

“Here to stay” and “the norm” are two separate things with no conflict whatsoever. Everybody, and I mean everybody, had built workflows that were “ready for anything that we’d need to deal with.” Guess what? That generally didn’t include this, and now it’s going to have to.

It’s a matter of perspective. When I lived in the Florida Keys, we didn’t consider a file truly backed up unless it was stored higher than the 100 year flood level (11 feet, which was harder to accomplish than most people think), and accessible if there was no power and the sherriff had set all the traffic going one way, out of town, which means it had to be north if me That may sound ridiculous, but I needed to access files exactly this way every couple of years, and one year, had to do it twice. I stayed in business when other colleagues had to leave the business altogether.

That’s where we are now. Yes, creativity is collaborative. Yes, we’ll go back to how we did things a couple of months ago at the earliest possible opportunity. If history teaches its anything, we know that some of our friends and loved ones will die because they go back too quickly.

But in no circumstances will we go all three way back, with never a thought again to even one member of the team working offsite. The future will include more of both, in spades.

My worry isn’t necessarily that we won’t crack this nut. It’s that bosses WILL figure it out, and find a way to make our lives more miserable as a result. It’s already hard enough to unplug from email. Soon you’ll take a sick day and the boss will remind you that you spent half of 2020 working in your pajamas, so don’t even thinking of pushing out that deadline just because you have the “regular” flu.

Look, it’s no different then a flood in New York City, which so many people said was never gonna happen, or an earthquake that crushes a bridge between San Francisco and Oakland, ditto, or a tsunami that takes out HD tape production, or a ridiculous low speed chase and subsequent trial that pretty much puts an end to daytime soap operas in the English-speaking world. Nobody in our business was planning for those events in advance, but everybody in our business came up with a plan afterward.

Floodwaters recede, we accelerate the move to tapeless, transition to reality TV, we keep rolling because that’s what we do.

What we’re doing here is continue a conversation on a thread that you started. LOL too late to decide you don’t want to talk about it.

And seriously, if there’s or facility anywhere in this country who’s not already actively working on a plan for what happens if current conditions continue, or what to do when it happens again, or when some other crazy unexpected thing disrupts production… you just don’t get to call it unexpected anymore.

Disruptions are pretty much becoming more common than not, aren’t they? LOL Anybody not getting their cows in a row by now, I know that Bob is ready to put an end to social distancing, and I’m sure he will be only too happy to show up at your place with a baseball bat and show you everything you need to know about disruption, and tell you everything hes been learning about remote workflows so that no kid half his age will replace him because they’ve been thinking about this stuff and he hasn’t. He has, RIGHT BOB?

[Tim Wilson]

[Bob Zelin] “so with your wonderful fast 1G internet connection, are you downloading the full resolution
video media from your server, or production companies footage, and editing this media ?”

And if he was trying to edit full resolution files remotely, I can only imagine the poetically hyperbolic abuse you’d be hurling at him. “Don’t you know about ProRes? Don’t you know about proxy workflows?” Only with a lot more punctuation and all caps. ????

I know for geezers like you and me, Bob, it wasn’t that long ago that uncompressed was the Holy Grail. Shoot uncompressed, edit uncompressed, maximum quality, simple workflow, nothing could be easier or better. Until it wasn’t. LOL Forget about camera compressed HD. Along comes Avid with DNxHD right after thre turn off the century, cue Apple guys laughing at the absurdity of cinema quality compressed workflow, delivery, and archiving until along comes ProRes four years after that, and nowadays, uncompressed doesn’t look quaint or quirky or romantic like shooting film. It looks like you don’t know what you’re doing.

Even RAW is hardly RAW the way we originally understood it. And sure, you CAN edit 8K RAW, but apart from a demo at some already fossilized future trade show, why would you? There’s certainly no reason to insist in these (hopefully) unusual circumstances that this is the only right way to edit, or even the most desirable one if you could.

I think we’ve acknowledged that there may come a time when one socially isolated individual needs to make his or her way to the office to push a couple of buttons to relink the full res media and send it on its way… but it appears that as long as the media is actually mounted somewhere, even that may be less necessary than we thought just a few weeks ago.

So for you folks who are actually managing these kinds of remote workflows, we’ve talked about products and platforms, but how does full res media enter into the picture? Does it?