[Mark Suszko]

Doogal,

Lots of people fret about giving away the ideas “for free” or having them “stolen”. It never feels fun to have this happen, but as there’s nothing that can be done about it in practical terms it’s something we just have to get used to and get over. More ideas will come, they always do, because you’re a creative person. That’s the part they CAN’T steal. Anyone can re-tell a great joke and get a laugh, but far fewer people can come up with the initial, original joke to start with. It’s the true comedian who *creates* the jokes that lasts long after the guy who just repeats them runs out of fresh material and fades away. This is the thing you are really marketing when you go into pitches: the stuff between your ears is what they are paying for, the scribbles on the paper are just an intermediary element.

Some small consolation: usually the folks who steal your idea after the pitch and cut you loose without a deal really don’t “get it” well enough to successfully execute it anyhow. That happened to me. I was brought in by a third party who really liked my work to pitch some creative for a well-established small business with a long history in town. The long-established company had it’s back to the wall because of modern competition and was desperately looking for new options. I spent about a week on the research and interviews, put together sample spots and a creative treatment mapping out an entire campaign, designed to re-position the business as they had wanted in about four weeks worth of ad play, alternating custom spots in a rotation designed to build the entire brand thru episodic storytelling, making the owners of the store into dramatic characters and creating the new identity thru smart humor interwoven with targeted sales copy. Something like if A Prairie Home Companion was also selling auto parts;-)

Family politics between the owners and their dad and a lack of creative courage led to them taking a pass on my work (which I subsequently entered in a local creative competition, where it handily won the scriptwriting category, thank you). They thanked me for my time, made some half-hearted offers at a trade-out for product in exchange for my ideas, and we parted amicably, but without a deal.

Two weeks later, the scummy radio station they were running all their spots on, (yes, the very one they hated so bad for their lack of good production and writing that they had brought me in for creative) was running very simplified, raggedly-produced, truncated imitations of the sample spots I had done for them, at fire-sale rate card prices.

They copied some of the superficial parts of my spots, but because they hadn’t done the research or looked at mine to understand what I was trying to do, they didn’t use the underlying strategy and formatting, none of the “brainwork” behind the spots.

The effect was like comparing a Rolex Oyster Perpetual to a Hong Kong plastic knock-off. The very lack of quality in the re-written cloned spots killed their credibility, since the themes were all about high quality and ethical treatment of customers. The badly cloned spots tanked in a week. Clients went out of business two-three weeks later. It’s not very Christian of me, but I kind of had one of those “I told you so” moments when I got the news, and I was confident that had they gone my way, I could have pulled them back into the black on the strength of my work. The more mature part of me would much rather gloat about making them winners than celebrate their karmic defeat.

I hope to someday get back into doing this kind of consulting for some other client that will take my ideas thru to completion, because I know I can come up with another winning campaign.

I think you will also have similar future success, doog, you just have to maintain your standards and not get hornswoggled, and you seem to be a perceptive enough chap based on what you posted about this gig already. You’ll make out fine eventually, just keep kicking out the ideas until one of them catches fire.

Ideas are a dime a dozen. They’re looking for the guy who’s supplying the dimes;-)

[Mark Suszko]

See, here’s why Charlie is more successful in the business than me and is a moderator here: where I try to visualize Heather Graham in my sleep, he’s visualizing vectorscopes.

ONE of us has screwed-up priorities;-)

[Mark Suszko]

If you can’t afford to buy good ones, then rent them, at least you KNOW you’ll get good performance for the money spent.Witht he prosumer toys, you’re never sure when or if they are going to flame out.

Myself, I swear by Lectrosonics. Never lets me down. Ever.

Another option is to go dual-system and plant minidisc or Iriver digital audio recorders on the people, then synch the audio up in post. No RF hits, but added post time, and uncertainty due to lack of real-time monitoring. But many wedding guys like this option.

[Mark Suszko]

Actually, i believe if you examine a color wheel, what you want to use to kill spill for gelling the backlight on green screen is magenta, not blue. Blue is right next to green, contaminates the key.

On greenscreen, it’s a “magenta” gel, on blue screen, “bastard amber” gel.

as you were… ‘;-)

[Mark Suszko]

There’s a computer program developed by NASA that can increase at least the percieved resolution by combining information from preceding and following frames/fields. Look up one of the COW moderators that works for NASA and ask him about it. Another company, redhawkvision, offers something similar. Genuine Fractals offers a fractal codec for phtoshop that is supposed to allow you to blow up frames without decreasing resolution, apply this to a frame movie of the clip and maybe it could help…. You might google these and see if they could be of use.

But I think you know the ultimate answer, that you can’t fix what’s not there, and you’re starting with half the resolution. It will look sharper if you shrink it, but if it’s surgical footage, that will be of limited use to the audience. I don’t know if transferring to HD would help, probably not enough to matter.

[Mark Suszko]

Don’t expect any of the paint, cheap copy or expensive original, to work right unless you first lay down a good flat white primer. It will make or break the resulting chromakey color and texture.

[Mark Suszko]

IANAL, but my guess is the radio station’s license does not likely cover the video commercial.

Methinks you have to buy the actual rights for the clips, both the songs and clips from the artists’ music videos. You don’t have to like it, it’s how the business is set up.

But there’s another consideration. What is hot on their playlist at the time the spot is cut may well be dead and buried a week or two later. If the spot is to have “legs”, you will want to concentrate on visuals and music that don’t need to be updated every week… unless you can talk them into a maintenance contract for continual re-edit/updating (evil grin). Or maybe they only want a spot to run for one week and never again? Seems like bad business planning to me…

Most times I see radio spots on TV, they use needle drop generic stuff that sounds kind of like what they might play, and visuals that are equally generic. If their on air hosts are a major selling point, then it’s almost all them.
Don;t let them bamboozle you about the rights being cleared: it’s your butt on the line along with theirs if it’s not, so CHECK IT.

[Mark Suszko]

From the point of view of an editor, I would add to your list:

Leave “handles” on your shots, you need pre-roll and post-roll of a minimum of six seconds, preferably 15 seconds. Not only does this give the editor room for more creative transitions, it also adds a safety margin around the best part of the take if your shooter is constantly backing up and reviewing the tape. I don’t get why some guys do that to excess, smacks of a lack of confidence, but then again I shoot on hardier formats that may be more reliable.

Shoot a minute of room tone, wherever you are shooting, and mark it as room tone by shooting a scribbled note saying so while doing it.

Shooting some tape of your white card while white balancing may be helpful in post when really precise color correction is needed. It leaves a consistent white source to sample. You could be audio slating the tape while doing this, so if the tapes don’t get labeled right away, they can still be identified immediately on first play. This could be combined with the room tone recording.

The basics require establishing shots and cutaway shots. Be sure to look for reaction shots that can fit anywhere: facial reactions, wringing hands, walking thru a locked-down shot, hands on keyboards, etc, etc. Please change your shots if you have to break during interviews, or while the questions are asked. Jump cuts are for amateurs.

When framing up shots, Please, please please look at a monitor with overscan to check for intrusions and continuity bugs. Also, look at the vertical objects and surfaces in the shot and compare to your framing: if your tripod is truly level, is your shot level, or is the shot a little keystoned? Fixing that at the camera is always preferable to adjusting in NLE.

Tape is the cheapest commodity in the video business. Roll on everything, always, something handy may turn up. I can’t use what you didn’t shoot. You can always reuse the tape later.

[Mark Suszko]

Thanks, I knew it was going to be something simple;-)

[Mark Suszko]

I think you’re right. However, it might be possible to build such a post business if you hook up with a pro camera shop, one that serves serious amateur and commercial photogs. The referrals there alone might pay for it, making anniversary montages out of animated stills is a very popular gig, and if you can do it better and faster than joe and jane civilian who lack ‘puter skillz, there may be a niche market there you can exploit. The reason I think it might work there is that it leverages the camera store’s film developing business: they get more film sold and processed and maybe scanned, you keep them from getting bogged down in the editing.It’s a win-win.

You will have to figure out what to do about copyrights, both on the pro pictures they bring you, and for whatever music they want you to put on. Let’s not have that conversation here right now, it’s a separate issue, but it is something you will have to factor into the business plan one way or another.