[Mark Suszko]

Lots to cover, lots of questions… first, my personal axe grinder is the “grand per finished minute” figure. That was the figure back in the eighties, with eighties-level technology and expenses. It has no relation to today except as a coincidence. You can’t say a grand per finished minute unless you know what went into that figure, or you’ll be either too high or leaving money on the table.

I’ll say it for the 845th time; calculate YOUR hourly and day rate, then figure costs of the job by specific costs like rentals and hires, then add days times the rate, plus a markup for the unexpected and for profit.

There are many, MANY threads in this section on how you calculate your personal day rate, the number below which you dare not take a job, because to do so will actually cost more money than it brings in. The very short version goes like:

365 days in a year.
How many of those days do you want off for weekends, holidays, vacations, flex time? Leave off weekends and 10 holidays, and you’re down to 251 working days in a year.
How much profit, free and clear beyond expenses, do you want to make in a year?
Total a year’s worth of ALL living and working expenses, from cat food to transportation, Mortgage, utils, meals, insurance, medical, dental, social security, and various taxes, etc.

Add those last two lines, profit and expenses.
Divide that figure by the number of working days you wanted, tells you how much per day you have to make, minimum, to reach your nut.

Stop cursing. Control your breathing. Realize that this is why freelancers charge more than someone working on a salaried job for the same work. You are picking up the rest of the tab you never consider because that was your boss’ job, and now that boss be you. You will be tempted to cut some expenses, like health care, because you’re young, and because you’re young you’ll be tempted to risk things like not getting insurance because, really, how often does some expensive disaster come along on any one particular shoot? I advise you to resist the urge to gamble.

That’s the bare bones day rate, not counting any job-specific expenses. You will want to try and get the local rate cards of other people at and above your level, to compare how your rate fits in compared to theirs. But don’t just copy their rate: the math they went thru to get their number is going to be different than yours, maybe severely so. They could also be deliberately low-balling rates due to a subsidy from a fat client, or they may not realize they are low-balling, and they could soon be out of business. Ideally your day rate should be somewhere in the upper half of the local range, not the highest or lowest, but a little above average. But never below your set minimum. Ever.

This is where you apply the gut-check: are you committed to getting this figure thru very very hard work, or is this maybe not what you expected? If you don’t think you can make this figure, every day, better to bail now and do something else, for someone else, and there’s no shame in it. At all. Not everyone can be an entrepreneur as well as a creative talent. That’s two full time jobs.

Now figure the time you’re going to spend on these three videos, and be conservative about it. Assume at least one surprise re-edit or extra time taken to massage a narration track due to a last-minute client whim. Assume they will tell you three times, “do it again, but make the logo bigger.” Multiply the time spent by your day/hourly rate, rounding-up, and add the expenses for the stock footage and narration and any rentals you need. Add a small markup for a reserve against the unexpected. That’s the number you want to eventually give the client. It’s the minimum number you keep in your head when you go in to negotiate, the floor number, below which, you smile, get up, and leave the table. Not the number you open with, if at all possible.

Negotiation is a whole topic unto itself.

[Mark Suszko]

My rough calculations were based on the premise that audio would not be done on the set but all in post. Your costs will easily triple if you have to construct a real soundstage and not just a video insert stage. You think you might get way with less, and you probably will, for a time… until some crucial point in a recording is ruined because of noise leaking in. It’s going to happen, not a question of “if” but “when”.

And when it happens, the Big Man you’re interviewing, who’s time costs hundreds per hour or even minute, is going to turn to you and ask:
“How come this is happening? What can we do about it?”

And your answer will be:
“Um, it was the result of corner-cutting on the sound insulation budget, and at the moment, there’s nothing we can do but wait out whatever is making the sound until it goes away.”

Sound insulation is expensive to do right because you have to address both conduction and propagation thru the air. To cancel out sound coming in thru vibrations contacting surfaces, you have to “float” the walls and ceiling with rubbery elastomeric material gasketing every edge. To counter air vibration, you need multiple air gaps layered with soft, sound absorbent materials… or a thinner wall made of super-dense material like concrete board, faced with softer absorbent panels. All designed, measured, and cut to install in a non-square, non-typical installation like an underground garage -and still meet HVAC and fire codes requirements? It’s gonna be a lot more. That’s why I suggested going offsite to a hotel or other studio rental spot for the gigs where sound is crucial, and just create a minimal non-audio insert stage for your B-roll and demo footage in that spot.

This is how you present the issue: you ask how much money the company wants to generate or save by utilizing the studio. Then you subtract the costs of doing it right, and ask if it’s still a worthwhile thing to do, to build this, or to rent at someone else’s studios. I’m going to guess it’s less convenient but more financially sustainable and practical, to rent the studio time. At least for things that need live audio.

[Mark Suszko]

Use a grid, virtually, or projected, to line things up. If I was doing this, I would find the dead center of the turntable and put a teensy mark on it, alternately, use a laser dot from a unit clamped nearby…then use a grid to space the ring so the center of rotation matches the dot. Then mask out the center dot in post, or turn off the laser.

[Mark Suszko]

Hm, where’s my other post go? Shorter highlights version: no, no prob, the other lav is likely wireless: it’s the only reason to have a lav on in the first place, if they are moving around, otherwise a fixed mic on a stand or boom would have been fine. See if they will let you take a feed from their mixer to go into a spare channel of your camcorder, as insurance.

On your own lav, tape the cables down well, and point the head of the mic so that it won’t easily catch breathing sounds or wind from the person speaking. Most all lavs are omni, anyhow.

Leave a short loop of wire as a strain relief to be clipped under the lav’s mounting clip, against the back of the coat lapel. Gaff tape this if needed.

Tape over the controls of your recorder, or set the “lock” unction, so it isn’t turned off at the wrong time by someone.

A proper mic to mouth distance is about from the outstreched pinkie and thumb of one hand.

[Mark Suszko]

It’s not unusual. He’s got spunk.

[Mark Suszko]

Cheer up. To an extent, no matter how good your camera directions were, any video of a stage play ends up a “franken-edit”, by the very nature of shooting stage plays. The nature of a stage play is presenting all the visual options to an audience and letting them play the role of live-switch director in their own individual minds, as each member of the audience chooses, moment by moment, where they focus their own attention, as it is drawn by movement, by lighting cues, by sound. Welles’ filmmaking was so interesting partly because his style was a hybrid of theatrical technique enhanced by the grammar of film shots.

Sure, you can average-out the most likely choices of what most people would focus on from moment to moment, and put camera shots on those, but it will never be quite the same as staging the action for the cameras specifically. The very first movies just placed a locked-off wide shot in the center of the audience seating and rolled the iso. It wasn’t until later, when film makers learned they could move the camera around and edit between different angles and takes, that film began to develop it’s own aesthetic.

Specifically to your question of options for improving the shots: is there a chance you can layer a tighter shot of the narrator speaking to the audience, in a half-dissolve, or picture-in-picture wipe of the wide shot? The layering can obscure some of the loss in resolution and detail.

A tip for next time: bring your iso cameras to the dress rehearsal, and use those for super-tight close-ups from angles that would be impractical for the actual audience show…like in the front row seating and even on the edge of the stage. When you mix these in with the three camera positions from the “actual” show, you create the look of a 6-camera live switch. You also have some “insurance” to cover blown lines between one version and another, and backup audio, across multiple recordings.

[Mark Suszko]

Ned made some very good points about insurance and protecting yourself.

You are not the first person to have this problem, and that’s why if you go thru a search of your state or local film office’s resource guide, you can find dedicated production accounting services that will handle your payroll and other paperwork and guarantee you’re “legal” in every aspect of HR and payments, insurance, permits, clearances, government paperwork, etc. Of course, they charge for the service. If you think they are unaffordable, consider the worst-case scenario. Expenses like these are what separate the real Business people from the quasi-pros, who play Russian Roulette with compliance, hoping the odds never flip bad… and are one reason the Pros cost more. Even at your small-scale “beginner” level, you could at least drop a hundred bucks on an accountant firm to consult with. It’s not an expense, it’s an investment in success.

[Mark Suszko]

No, they don’t have to read the special script: you do, Bob. You train the thing to a high accuracy on yourself, then you put on headphones with a boom mic and you listen to the video, repeating everything word-for-word. It’s called: “re-speaking”, and that’s how you fill in the missing piece the A.I. has having trouble with – different voices, with different accents and dialects.

[Mark Suszko]

Besides the sharpening, another technique a sometimes works is to layer additional versions of the shot, and adjust the highs, mids, darks separately, even applying the sharpen filter to only one such “channel” in the luminance. Then you adjust the opacity of each layer to get a pleasant result. it’s not really *sharpening*, but making a difference in “apparent sharpness”.

[Mark Suszko]

A separate discussion on the lighting.

If your catalog shoots are for clothing, you’ll need wider shots as well as detailed closeups, and you need a setup that you can more or less “set and forget”, so you can run a lot of product thru the set in a short time.

The wide shots will show some floor, so budget for a roll of vinyl sheet flooring you can roll back up when not in production and someone’s parking there. The grease and oil on the garage floor will eventually damage a sheet vinyl floor from beneath, unless it is shielded somehow. Another way to go is to paint the floor with garage floor paint. Pick a medium gray color, flat, not gloss.

If the shots are all table-top kind of stuff, the floor is likely never going to be seen, and the lighting can be brought in closer.

In both cases, you’re going to need a base of soft lighting that doesn’t create harsh shadows. I suggest translucent shower curtain material, stapled to a simple rectangular wooden frame, with some slotted-in removable feet at the bottom to make the panel self-standing. These will store flat against a wall somewhere and take up little space. Behind this, you place your lights, shining across the entire expanse of material, to create 2 large softlight panels. Two panels, one on either side, angled at 45 degrees, shine into the shooting space. The back wall gets it’s own lighting, from some cheap PAR can lights or strip lights washing along/across the edges, plus, you’ll want a light mounted high and to one side on that back wall, shining on the backs and heads/hair of the models, giving them a “rim light” to help them stand out from the background.

Because of angles for lighting and camera-to-subject distance issues, your 24-foot wall is really the short side of a trapezoid, viewed from above, with the largest side (camera side) taking a horizontal space up to 60 feet, 40 at least.

Budget as described:
Two DIY diffusion “butterfly” panels@ $30 each.
Eight parabolic reflectors with clamps using 200-watt soft white incandescent bulbs for the curtain or wall: $100
Main lights for the diffusers: Two, 1-K halogen spotlights, ebay used $50-$200 each. Or, 2 Joker-Bug HMI lights@$900 each.
Back/Rim light for talent: one used 1K spotlight, PAR can acceptable, Approx. $100.
Light stands and assorted stingers and power outlet boxes/dimmers optional. Assume $150-$300.

Ballpark estimate, assuming everything breaks the cheapest way for you: $1,500.

If you don’t have adequate 120-volt ten-amp service in the parking area, you could get a generator, as long as you’re not recording sound. LED or Flourescent lighting is much easier on the power requirements, but can cost more. We need to really know much more about what’s being shot, to make better and more on-point suggestions.