Tim Wilson
3
COW Coins
Forum Replies Created
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You make some good points, Michael. We’ll chew the cud some more on this.
I’m glad you feel that the ads are a benefit. We take this aspect of the site with deadly seriousness because we agree: it MEANS something to be here. We don’t ever want to abuse that trust.
In fact, we’ve tossed advertisers out now and again. We need money, but no such that we’d lead any calves astray.
PS. 149 posts to go.
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I’ll be honest with you — I don’t see this one coming any time soon. For Cow members, the product is the Cow, so why wouldn’t we push that information straight to you?
The answer is that the product that we SELL to people with bags of money is the traffic — the visits to the site. So we’re trying to encourage people to come to the site for general reading and posting…but yeah, once you’ve posted on a thread, we’ll also make it as easy as possible for you to track an ongoing conversation that you’re officially part of.
That’s our attempt to balance of the needs of members and the needs of advertisers. I know it looks like we have a lot of them, and we do, with a waiting list for advertisers wanting to get in. But the expenses of supporting 850,000 unique visitors monthly, downloading as much as 17TB of content DAILY are high enough that we need all the help we can get.
Make sense?
In the meantime, thanks so much for being part of the family for so long. Only 150 posts short of your “1000 Posts” Merit Badge!
🙂
Best,
TimTim Wilson
Associate Director, CreativeCow.net
Associate Publisher, Creative Cow Magazine! -
With closing in on 1.7 million posts, I hope you can imagine that we can’t possibly monitor them all by hand.
I also hope that you can imagine that our volume of traffic draws the attention of malfeasants everywhere on the spectrum from annoying to evil and beyond. They don’t manage their work by hand either. They send out thousands of bots to spam forums like ours with offers for every variety of medication for health condition, “imitation” name-brand watches and handbags, on and on and on.
There are a very small handful of words that we therefore put on moderation, and they traps tens of thousands of spam posts…and 3-4 legitimate posts per month, if that. I’m not the only one hand moderating these filtered posts, but I honestly can’t remember the last time this “came up.”
Hahahaha.
We apologize for the inconvenience, but I hope that you can understand why we find the trade-off to be worth it.
Best always,
TimTim Wilson
Associate Director, CreativeCow.net
Associate Publisher, Creative Cow Magazine! -
Great idea! We collect that information, so maybe we can sort by it, and country for nations (Argentina is the most recent example) where we don’t have enough entries to warrant further sorting. Yet. 🙂
Let us look into it.
Tim Wilson
Associate Director, CreativeCow.net
Associate Publisher, Creative Cow Magazine! -
All that said, if you have any suggestions for building traffic in the forums where you’d LIKE to have more traffic, by all means sing out.
Certainly one of the things that helps is articles. Up for writing anything? Even a few tips? It’ll pay off….
Tim
Tim Wilson
Associate Director, CreativeCow.net
Associate Publisher, Creative Cow Magazine! -
Even if you HATE the movies, buy the 3 Special Edition DVD sets. Then toss the movies in the garbage. I think the longer versions are better than the shorter ones — they actually make more sense, and as a result are more entertaining. (The end of the last movie is still goofy, but the rest of it is much better.)
But hey, nobody says you have to like the movies. Toss ’em if you want.
The thing is, those extra 2 disks per movie are the best “film school in a box” you can buy. There’s a very extensive, and downright fun, exploration of forced perspective, including how to build scenery to accomodate it, lighting, camera, even acting…among scads of great bits on modeling, animation, motion capture, literary sources and managing 1,000 horses.
Seriously, I’ve never seen anything as cool as those features. And if you can stand the movies at all, listen to all the commentaries that don’t have actors on them. You’ll learn a TON about movie making, and have a lot of fun.
As long as you don’t try to watch them all at once.
What were we talking about? Oh yeah. Yes, they used forced perspective in the Lord of the Rings movies.
Tim Wilson
Associate Director, CreativeCow.net
Associate Publisher, Creative Cow Magazine! -
Sommmmmmmewhere in the Cow, somebody talked about doing this from a moving boat in the Chicago River. As Todd and Rick mention, everything has to go right or it looks like a mess.
Our boy talked about travelling up the river, seeing that not every piece fell into place….then travelling back down while the part of the shot on shore also set up again. He said it was worth it at the end, but a looooong day.
Sorry not to get any closer, but with 1000 posts a day to search, and not remembering any more clearly than that, I’m not doing too well searching. Maybe it was one of you nutty kids?
Tim Wilson
Associate Director, CreativeCow.net
Associate Publisher, Creative Cow Magazine! -
Dylan’s been shooting a ton of stuff on RED. There’s a great recent article by him on a run-and-gun project he did for the NZ version of the 48-hour film festival. It won top prize from over 230 entries.
Also note that his recommendation re: 2K, etc. is to wait. Decidedly non-pathetic advice.
There was also an article in a recent issue of the Cow magazine (starts on page 17 of the PDF) about shooting 2K for Nissan. It was for the launch of their new Cube at the NY Auto Show, one of the world’s most important venues for new car launches. Their rig ran about $30K, and they’re very specific about the gear in the article. They recommend budgeting for a focus puller, again, decidedly non-pathetic advice.
In both cases, these are pros, shooting widely seen work, with gear very much in keeping with mid-level prices.
It’s not that you’re wrong that a proper rig starts at $75K. Some do. But there’s a wide range of truth — shooting high-profile 2K can be done with a $30K rig. It has been done. Read the story.
It’s just as easy to buy into the anti-hype. Again, not saying you’re wrong, just that there’s wide range of easily verified real-world experience that suggests additional possiblities.
I respectfully recommend standing down. If people have actually done it, and can articulately describe their gear and their work, they’re not suckers.
Yr pal,
TimmyTim Wilson
Associate Director, CreativeCow.net
Associate Publisher, Creative Cow Magazine! -
[Brendan Coots] “You will need to animate these masks (depending on what happens in your shots) but again, this is how the pros do it and if you want the best results, this is a good place to start.”
Also check out Pete O’Connell’s Advanced Rotoscoping Techniques for Adobe After Effects DVD. He gets very specific about how best to create multiple masks for difficult keys, and the easiest way to animate them – using motion tracking to do the heavy lifting!
Very entertaining stuff, as well as a crash course in many, many facets of advanced After Effects-ing.
Not just a commercial plug. Seriously, Pete’s disk will help.
Tim Wilson
Associate Director, CreativeCow.net
Associate Publisher, Creative Cow Magazine! -
[Todd Terry] “I’ve been surprised at how well the average Joe off the street can be at prompter reading… not always, but pretty darn often.”
I once told such a Joe to try and stop moving his eyes so much….and he absolutely nailed the next take. Pretty cool.
Tim Wilson
Associate Director, CreativeCow.net
Associate Publisher, Creative Cow Magazine!