[Mark Suszko]

… and this is why nobody invites Nick to casual parties anymore… 🙂

[Mark Suszko]

Yeah, I set it to prefer not to crash every five minutes./s

More seriously, pref changes had no effect.

[Mark Suszko]

My guess is that it’s Pretty good fake and not an actual photo. What you set the virtual camera”s lens to controls how much “fish-eye” distortion is seen. If you can’t manage it in Photoshop, you could export your image to a video editing or effects program and apply wide angle distortion filter plug-ins to the render.

[Mark Suszko]

This is an easy decision to make, heck yes.

[Mark Suszko]

There is some critical info missing. What i’d need to know, to have an informed opinion, is;

1) Did you make this in the USA?

2) Was your original deliverable a “work-for-hire”?

US rules on work-for-hire mean that you own what you made, but only your client can decide what to do with it, because that’s what they paid for: the right to use it as they saw fit, for a one-time charge. So you’re at a stalemate, unless they agree to let you use the clip differently.

When you make these deals, you HAVE to get them in writing, or the judge is going to default to work-for-hire rules, and rule against you. In writing, when negotiating, you can add modifications like, how long the client can use this for, for how long is their use exclusive, and when does ownership revert to you. You write down the price and when and how it gets paid, and when you deliver the product. Promise me you’ll do that, going forward.

As to your pricing for the clip, it’s whatever the market will bear. Determining that limit is a skill. You also have to weight how “hungry” you are, i.e. are you willing to lower your price a bit to get the exposure now.

Here is a principle I espouse on that: once you are known to have caved-in to a lowball figure, it’s incredibly hard to raise your prices afterwards. Not just with that one client, but every client thereafter, because word gets around. So know what your time and effort are worth, and base your price on a decent day rate, plus a reasonable markup…then you have to be willing to walk away from a number that’s lower. If thy don’t believe you can walk away, they own you.

What one person considers a fair rate may not be based on the same data and circumstances as your own calculations. It’s typical when starting out to look at the competition’s rates for the same level of work, and pick a number that covers your expense plus profit margin, but is also in the upper third of whatever that range is. Negotiate upwards from there.

[Mark Suszko]

There’s also tricking the camera by exposing a white card with a tint on it. A cheap way to test this is to raid the paint department at the home center for a variety of color sample chips and try balancing on those. But really you’ve already heard the best suggestions.

[Mark Suszko]

Internet wayback machine can document what they had there before. You know Beards n Hats has had a very good reputation for a long time and they market based on it, so I imagine they’ll come around and fix your issue eventually. It”s just good business.

[Mark Suszko]

I wonder if some kind of separation product like no-stick cooking spray would have helped… but then again, it may have made the view thru the glass more distorted as well. Maybe using car wax first on the glass and buffing it?…

Modern windows often are laminated layers of alternating plastic and glass components. But I can’t imagine the indoor facing surface to be a plastic one.

[Mark Suszko]

Well, our system is far from ideal, but we have project numbers for one-off tasks, and “ongoing project” numbers for separate tasks, separated in time and even by the person doing them. If you have the ongoing project number assigned, and everybody who touches a related project enters that OP number, at least the database can put everything related to that project in one box, so to speak.

As to who plays traffic cop, a lot of that has to relate to the individual personality and management style of the managers. if you really have trust in your team, you delegate more freely and don’t require an iron grip to approve everything up to their respiration rate. I’d say, as a rule of thumb, whatever it is, if it can be completed in less than an hour, let the individual operatives manage their own reporting of it by logging it to one of those “ongoing project numbers”. And maybe send a weekly running tab of just those little jobs to the supervisor to give them sense of what’s going on.

If the job takes more than an hour, or hits a complicating snag of some sort, it then goes thru the formal process.

[Mark Suszko]

They describe it like that because they believe the general public is that stupid, that CGI action is too abstract a concept. That’s laziness and also pretty contemptuous of the public.