[Mark Suszko]

[Sondre Rahm] “Do you have any suggestions? 😀 When we make movies, we are going this way: First we find the cool effects we are going to use, and then we are making a story around thoose.”

Well, that certainly works for Michael Bay:-)

[Mark Suszko]

OK, I see the shape now, so do you want to have it look like your video is projected onto it?

[Mark Suszko]

I think something’s wrong; I can’t see your picture, can you re-post it again?

If keyinmg thru or overlay is not enough, sounds like what you want is to map the video to 3-d lettering. That’s territory for a 3d CGI program or a compositor, though perhaps there’s a trick in LiveType you could do. LiveType is descended from a program called India, (if I recall right) and one of the neat functions of it was you can build your own fonts out of image-objects.

Can you make another attempt as well to describe in more detail the look you’re trying to achieve?

[Mark Suszko]

British company and all around good guys Digitalheaven have a tool just for this problem, check it out, very reasonable cost.

https://www.digital-heaven.co.uk/fcplugins/dh_legaltext.php

I love those guys.

[Mark Suszko]

I wasn’t going to add anything more, said it all before now. But we’re in danger of getting irrelevant here for Greg when we start to get too exotic in the recommendations. When the client orders a DVD, by jimbo, that’s what you better deliver. Not to say you can’t offer the added value of additional copies on various media and platforms, heck, I’ve done that myself a time or two. And at $30 retail for a cheap player, it may make sense to ship one out with the dub now and then where you can’t be there in person to shepherd the project the last mile. But just don’t tell the guy to make one very different thing when the deliverable is another.

I ran an SD dvd on my FCP system friday to check it, and the viewer blew the picture up to fill my cinemadisplay. Looked probably as bad as Greg’s clients said his did at the show. Very blocky. Re-setting the DVD controls to “actual size” made the pic smaller but very clear and sharp.

My final word (maybe) in my view is, yeah, you have to go back to the client and, for free, do whatever it takes to track down the problem and hopefully, restore your honor. Chances are good the AV guys screwed up but you may not be able to prove it conclusively. But even if the troubleshooting/ fact-finding mission shows the error was in your authoring, you need to be up-front about it, take your lumps, and then look forward, show you have a plan that will prevent this from ever happening again.

Quick old corporate joke:

Exec for IBM commits the company to a $3million dollar project that totally fails. He gets a notice to come see the Big Guy first thing in the morning. Guy figure’s he’s not going to see that office for very long at all, but the Big Boss just keeps asking detailed questions about the process, what was learned, what could or should have been done differently. Finally, the boss says:

“That will be all”.

(Troubled exec): “…B-but, um…. I don’t..”

(Boss): “What?”

(exec): “I thought… well, aren’t you going to fire me now?”

(Boss): “FIRE you!?!?! I just spent three million bucks to TRAIN you! Go earn it back!!!

[Mark Suszko]

One hour away across town? I’m betting the next time you’ll take the 2 hours to go check the setup, and bill it.

All you can tell the client is you made it right, and have proof it is right from your end, but you can’t prove a negative, there’s no way without replicating the exact setup to know ultimately who’s fault it was at the trade show. I would like to think that I would have given them my cel and have them call me the second anything went wrong, if they were in the same town as me, and I would have driven over like Gene Hackman with my own player, and a spare disk, and seen it and tried some changes in the setup. They would have seen me standing by my product and that may be worth something in an argument of “he said/she said”. But what I see here is that the projection people didn’t talk to you right away, and you didn’t talk to them before the show. Each aprty probably trusted the client to manage this job, and the client probably expected one or both of you to handle it. There was a valley where responsibilities didn’t overlap properly.

If you want them to use you again, you’re going to have to get a mutual commitment to a higher level of overall responsibility, morover, better defined responsibility, and they need to pay you more for that as well. There is no good or magic answer to this bad situation. I think that’s what I take away from the incident, that there was a gap in who “owned” the success of the overall project, end-to-end. One point of contact for everything.

I have had plenty of times in my life where I’ve killed myself to put out a perfect product on time and on budget and handed it off to the next person or persons in the chain, only to have a failure somewhere once it was out of my hands. Very frustrating. If you don’t want that to happen, the thing I see to do is get overall control of the project and cover everything end-to-end, all the way to delivery: then you only have yourself to blame and nobody else.

I tend to prefer that: take all the responsibility, take all the blame as well as the kudos. I can’t always get it though, some projects are just too big and you NEED to partner with others to succeed. Then your interpersonal skills matter as much as your techincal ones.

[Mark Suszko]

The first thing I would do to troubleshoot would be to get the stats on the AV company’s test disks to see what they were and how they were encoded, and compare them to what you’re burning. All this should happen without any sturm and drang, no finger-pointing, just a trouble-shooting mission. Though if things are as you say I suspect the Av company messed you over and is playing dumb now. They might not have known it though, so don’t get into blame games you can’t prove yet. Because at this point it looks like you both share the blame, you for not checking this out earlier, and them for not trying harder to troubleshoot it.

In hindsight, you or the project’s producer might have called the AV company to get this standards info, and sent test disks over to try out on their system before show time. OTOH, one should expect a standard DVD to play the same everywhere, unless otherwise specified, without needing any special handling. Now that level of pre-production hand-holding I’m talking about is not always possible, especially if you are not the producer in charge and the show is at a distance from the place you’re working. Like two states over. This is where religious adherence to broadcast standards protects you. If everything is NTSC/FCC/SMPTE legal, you’re never to blame.

You played it at Circuit City on a blu-ray player, which upconverts SD to fake an HD look… that’s probably not a fair comparison, unless the AV company also used an identical BD capable player. You said your product was SD, so the proper test is on an SD machine. I am going to assume your video levels were checked against a scope and waveform monitor during production, at least the virtual ones in FCP, before the product went out, and the DVD was rendered at the proper screen resolution. Your software should retain the last settings you used, so write them down for comparison purposes. I also check against a glass CRT monitor, not just an LCD for final QC, because the CRT points out problems LCD’s can’t.

Bring your own SD DVD player to the AV company and hook it up to the same screen for a test using various cables. If it looks great, try it next with their DVD player, hopefully the same one they used, and compare. This will still not be definitive since settings on the screen may have been changed since the event. If you can get the model number for the set, download a PDF of the manual and go thru it for a clue about the various settings and hookups. If I had to guess, and took you at your word that it plays fine at Circuit City or wherever, I’d guess the monitor had been set up wrong, it probably is usually set for HD viewing in some way that distorts a normal SD signal… But like I said, the fault has to be shared since it should be part of your job to check these things out with testing.

Other possibilities: You didn’t catch a wrong setting when rendering, because final cut is able to play back so many different things well, and you didn’t notice because you didn’t test it over several different players. I always test important DVD’s on at least three consumer/prosumer players and a PC and a mac. Then again, I’m a paranoid about these things. It helped me a few weeks ago when a client kept telling me part of a DVD I’d made wasn’t working on their computer. I knew it did, because of the multi-platform testing I’d done, and eventually they admitted it was a user problem on their end, and we solved it. Used to have similar problems with stereo/2-track audio videotapes watched by clients that had their VCR or TV audio channels set wrong. They complained audio was missing or had bad levels. In those cases, I had to often go over and re-wire their system properly, or walk them thru settings on their remotes, to prove it to them the tapes were really fine and their setup was hosed. For the ones that were repeat offenders, we just made all their stuff mono and never had further troubles:-)

Also, not every AV rental company is equally skilled and equipped, and it could well be that the operator that day messed up, used settings from a previous job that were not proper, and the evidence got lost by the time you could look into it.

You may well never know the whole truth. However, as I said, if your product meets all broadcast standards, you can point to that as cover with some assurance the problem is not on your end. Best you can do now is troubleshoot and look to the future.

[Mark Suszko]

I used to use a lot more backlighting in the 80’s to help separate people from the background, it was the style and how I was trained, to always use 3-point in just such and such a manner. And that certainly has it’s place.

These days though, I tend to minimize their usage because in the real world, not every darn thing is back-lit like that in every direction you look, its unnatural. I like it to be subtle if I’m using it. The separation I used to generate from the stronger backlighting back then, I now tend to try to instead get that separation with depth of field control and selective focus, or just overall differences in contrast ratios. I don’t want my shots to “look” lit.

As far as shot blocking, well, a LOT of this depends on what kind of look and results you’re trying for, and of course budget and time. Ask yourself what you’re trying to capture out of the couple, for me, it is usually the dynamic of how they are together, so I would tend to dwell much more on the 2-shot and let your eyes decide to follow the speaker or the listener reacting, as the situation warrants. Not every video needs to have a cut happen every seven seconds, you know:-) If you force the eye with a lot of cutting to and from doubles and singles, you can force or telegraph the action and timing down a path you want, or you can just let a moment unfold more organically in front of the camera as it happens. Either is valid, they depend on what you’re trying to say with this footage.

Just my own opinion, but, If you watch a lot of the “semi-scripted” i.e. partly ad-libbed comedies like Larry David’s show or RENO 911 or to a lesser extent, The Office, see that the coverage and direction is a little wider and more open, the cutting then tightens up what is an organic, ensemble performance, not a line of boxcars of individual performances, all compartmentalized and assembled in order. The singles there are used more as punctuation, and as cover to tighten-up the performances and link between scenes, but not generally as a rule to drive the major action. One of the things you notice about Orson Welles’ way of framing shots is that he uses his theatrical stage background a lot; instead of the camera driving where you look, he leaves a wider frame and has action, lighting, movement or cessation of movement, actors changing who is upstage, and audio cues all drive your attention around the frame where he wants you to put it. Could have forced that with camera moves and cutting, but one nice thing about this other way of doing it is you don’t get tired of watching it repeatedly, because you can find something else to look at each time you run it thru. I think you get this a bit with Altman films as well.

But enough cineaste’ talk. On to practical suggestions, maybe.

You can use single camera on a two shot the first time thru, and just plan to re-ask every question and pick a different shot than the first time. This doubles the shooting time, and tape stock used, which is okay if that’s not an issue. But the questions coming the second time do not ever elicit the same honest and immediate response as they did the first time. Again, depending on the needs of the program, this may or may not be an issue, but know that the second time they answer, that answer is now coming from the head, not the heart, it is at least partly rehearsed and not as genuine.

Something I would suggest you try if stuck with one camera is to not be afraid to pause between asking questions to re-frame, then tighten up/clean up in editing. One technique that could help is to direct one question to one person, then pause, re-frame on the second, and don’t ask them the same thing, but ask them to rate the other’s initial response and correct anything in it that’s not right. Have them alternate this.
What this is doing is giving you control over where in the narrative one person interrupts the other: ultimately your edit controls that, instead of just reacting to a live situation and hoping for the best.

Or if you want to cover it live, unlock the servo zoom, or set it to ultra-fast, and then manually pop between singles, tighter singles, and 2-shots with whip pans and snap-zooms during a breath or natural pause, If my camera is little further back, I generally can pull this off in one second or less if my focus has been pre-set, then the edit later cleans it up. You might lose one sentence or part of one, and this can usually be cut around in post without losing the sense of the comments.

I have done the trick of shooting an HD frame 2-shot and zooming to single in post for an SD finish edit. While doable, I think I can still see a little drop in rez, not bad, but there. On the plus side, that’s a great trick because you always get perfect matching action between the wide and the single, since they came off the same take. 2-cam is great when your talent is not pro and can’t be counted on to be consistent take after take. I think it saves more money than it costs, in those situations.

It always bothers me when I’m looking at, for example, an interview from the bonus section of a DVD, and it is entirely one locked medium single shot the entire 20 minutes or more. The editor then has to do a lot of unnecessary and distracting trick moves or bumps to title cards to cover his edits between each question when all that had to happen was to bump into a wider or tighter zoom during a breath or pause. If you ask leading questions, it should be easy to cut out the questions and turn the whole thing into a natural self-narrative, no fake transitions needed except cutting between different focal lengths. I think tromboning zooms in and out of a single cam shot are way more home-movie-like and distracting than anything else, no matter how slow and smooth you can do them (and I can make them that smooth and slow, I just hate doing it too much)

I am doing a bunch of interviews lately for some great oral history recording sessions, mostly of single subjects but occasionally couples, and we decided it was worth the bother to shoot 2-camera with a locked medium shot on one and a hand-aimed tight shot on the other, both cameras so close together the lenses almost touch each other, (No fancy double mount needed, the legs of the tripods interdigitate between each other) which gives any future editor some creative freedom plus matching action in post.

[Mark Suszko]

Step one: get John Morley’s Corporate Scriptwriting book. Seriously. This is an excellent guide to the process, and if you follow the recommended steps in it, you can practically guarantee success.

While you’re waiting for Amazon to ship it to you, I’ll just touch on a couple things.

A lot of failed videos of this sort are done in a “ready, fire, aim” sort of way. The right way to go about it is to first do a needs analysis, and this has to be more than “you need to make some kind of video by the end of the month”. Since your video is supposed to help solve a specific problem, the very first thing to do is define that problem as clearly as possible. For a CSR training, this could boil down to such things as:

Standard new hire orientation in “the xyz company way of doing things”
Speed with which each call is handled: tips and tricks
The personal dynamics, i.e. making the customer feel good about the service
Specific methods one uses to diagnose a customer problem
How and when to escalate a call to a higher authority
Sales issues like how to upsell a costlier service while getting the original issue dealt with
How to handle rejection and anger

There could be more or others too. But you have to define what the deficiency is, and what the desired corrective action or response is supposed to be, i.e. what the viewer will know and/or do differently after watching. Try not to build the pile too high and force too many jobs on one video. Don’t try to make something that’s an orientation, a sales training aid, and a customer catalog all in one program. It is not efficient or effective. Keep like with like.

So you have the problem and the desired corrective measures to be taken.

Now, ask yourself, is this something a video is GOOD at conveying? Or is some other method better?
You don’t want to just put the employee manual on tape, that’s a misuse of the medium and wasteful, as well as generally ineffective. Video is good for explaining or illustrating things the manual can’t show well. Think of one reinforcing the other, not trying to replace it. Use paper collateral materials and a web site or powerpoint or spreadsheet alongside the video, and you let each do the thing it is best at, as well as making updating easier.

You must also do some research. One of the common problems that makes projects like this fail is to make a lot of assumptions up front that turn out wrong, and one of the most common assumptions is that the tastes and likes and language of the target viewer is the same as those of the people that pay for and approve the video. While it is important to please the bosses, you need to research to define the audience in terms of their educational and social levels at a bare minimum, the video is not FOR the boss, it is for THEM. You don’t talk to the Board of Directors in the same idiom and with the same vocabulary as you do to loading dock workers. Plus, you have to sell the bosses that a project they don’t personally like or even understand is speaking clearly and well to the target audience in their own language. You need a tool to help you do all of this.

So, the needs analysis is done, the problem is defined, the goals are laid out, some kind of metric is decided on to judge efficacy, like a simple quiz after the video, or a decision to monitor, say, sales or failure rates or whatever, a month before the video and a month after as a comparison….

… with that info and some research, you move on to the most important stage, that tool I mentioned: the Creative Treatment. This is a blueprint of the video, how it will look, what it will say, the narrative “hook” it uses to convey the important points, and what a viewer is expected to know and do after seeing it.

It is NOT a script. Script comes later in the process.

It describes the script. It says, scene by scene, what the script will say, what the scenes look like. It can have notes for each scene that explain why the scene and dialog are the way they are, what issues in the list of needs it addresses and the strategy behind them.

Scene 3: Boiler room, morning. CSR Bob and CSR Joan, getting their cubes ready for the shift about to start. Bob tells Joan he’s feeling jumpy after a hard shift with a lot of yellers angry at him. Joan suggests point a,b, and c as tactics Bob should try the next time this happens, offers to sit in with him on the first bad experience. Time passes, and Bob gets a hot one. He motions to Joan, she comes over and listens in. Joan scribbles on a note card to try tactic “B” at this point. Bob starts to try “B” but loses focus and starts falling into old habits, letting the caller intimidate him. Joan gets Bob’s attention back to using the proper tactic, and the call resolves in a better fashion.

Scene 4: Break room, down the hall from the cubes. On coffee break: Bob thanks Joan for the coaching and she reinforces/reiterates the checklist of items in tactic B that worked for Bob. We dissolve to a graphic of the items while a narrator makes a point about which of the three techniques to try first and how long to try it.

That’s how it looks in a treatment.

From it, any competent script writer can write the actual dialog. We didn’t use a lick of real dialog, but you can clearly see exactly how the video is going to go there. Dialog at this early stage is a danger, because somebody with approval/disapproval authority might see one word they have a problem with and kill the whole deal. I’ve seen it happen.

But before that dialog is written, the treatment allows everybody to grasp clearly what the project will and won’t be. At this point, the data in the treatment about scenes and characters and effects allows you to calculate a schedule and thus a budget range. Now you have NUMBERS! Now your entire organization can talk knowledgeably about this project and approve, or make changes, on paper, before they cost money and time. Then the script with real dialog is written based on the treatment, and now if some authority has an objection, you can point out how the item in question fits the overall plan and why it is there, and you can if necessary negotiate changes that still fit what the treatment calls for, without throwing all else into disarray. Nobody will be able to say they didn’t understand what they were approving when they approved it.

It is really false economy to skip this step and go right to a script: you’ll often find doing it that way results in a lot of stop and back-up repeat work, and results often in finished projects that get killed just before release by someone who says: “that’s not what I thought I was approving”.

So after Treatment approval and script approval, you go into pre-production, production, post-production, and the evaluation. I like to keep the eval step simple. What I suggest is to write five questions any person similar to the target audience should be able to answer after having seen the video. If they get all five right, bonus time for the producer. I call it a win if they get three out of five. Two or less, and something’s horribly wrong here.

There’s more to all of this, Morley’s book covers it well and quickly. I’ve made a living for decades using it as my guide.

[Mark Suszko]

Yeah, I think Perrone has enough ways to frame up the forms by now. My bigger worry was about the overall narrative framework around those shots, but it may be one of those times Morley was referring to when “less is more” and you just sit back and let stuff happen in front of the camera, without artifice.

I always get a little opinionated though, when I see clients/customers not making the most of what video offers. I hate it when all they want to do is read their powerpoint slides into a lens. People know how to read. It is pointless to make a video where all you do is read to people. Unless you’re Robert Frost reading poetry or something of that nature. But there’s always a line of people that are just fulfilling some written requirement to make a video, who don’t know better, and just want to read into a lens. It insults the audience. It says “you’re too lazy to read this document, so I’ll read it to you”. That adds nothing to the audience understanding anything about the document. Excuse the ranting, but this is just an area that’s near and dear to me.

Back towards contributing something concrete: when I handle the various election forms, the scanner sees thru to the other side of the flimsy paper they are printed on, and you see ghosting that’s very distracting to the eye. I take an intermediate step of xeroxing the forms onto heavier single-sided pages before I subsequently scan them, saves a lot of photoshopping otherwise and actually improves clarity for my applications. If I know some sections will need special attention, I may blow up special copies of those parts during the xeroxing, just to save some time in the scanning and editing later, regarding sizes. While you could just arbitrarily scan everything at a huge resolution, that’s inefficient use of drive space and RAM, and adds some extra effort to the graphics card that may not be necessary. So I precompose in the pre-scanning step wherever it is logical to do so.