[Mark Suszko]

No, you don’t. Around $50-$60 at a pro photo store will buy you a suitable paper roll that’s reusable or disposable, enough for two complete one-man setups at least. Bill it to the project.

You can go even cheaper than that, if you don’t mind sewing fabric sheets together from a local sewing supply place. With careful and even lighting, I’ve made successful Chromakeys with tarps and plastic sheet picnic table runners from a dollar store. Where there is a will, there is a way.

[Mark Suszko]

If you’re wanting to send me video files, skip it; I’m still on dial-up and would be an old man by the time the download finished.:-) Anyway, your lawyer stuff may be proprietary, best to keep it that way. But good luck with it, let us know what you wound up doing. Making it a DVD is still making it a video, I don’t understand the distinction you made or are being forced into. Whatever, best of luck with it.

[Mark Suszko]

Saw your list of horrors, it was only missing the badly-composed and themed powerpoint transfer to be complete. Seen it many times.

You seem to have a grasp of all the varieties of way to show the forms, I can’t help but want to concentrate on the thematic structure of what you’re doing with them.

Many times a show of this nature uses a metaphorical approach to help tie practical concrete steps to the overall ideas that can’t be illustrated directly. An example: building the house, you refer to each step in the sequence you’re teaching to a step in construction. Laying a foundation. Raising the walls, adding the roof, etc. Another kind of construct would be to use a chef in a kitchen demonstrating a recipe that is the steps of your client’s procedures. Other examples will pop up if you use some imagination. Now it is really easy to go overboard with this kind of stuff, and spend too much energy and attention in setting up the metaphor compared to making your actual content points. be careful suggesting this approach if you have a guy or gal in management who fancies themselves in a re-creating of a big-budget movie as the star, and you just gave them an excuse with this program:-)

We did a show way back in the 80’s with some people that were loose and open to ideas… librarians. Crazy folks, they tried all kinds of themes for what would otherwise be dull lectures… I remember a super-hero themed one where i got to do some neat special effects… corny, but they liked it.

One time we made their show a game show, the subject knowledge about a specific new computer cataloging system was what all the categories were about, because with people buzzing in with right and wrong, but common answers, we had a simple structure there for explaining in short, peppy bits what the reasons for the answers were, and reinforcing certain ideas, with light humor to help keep people awake. How this will play with lawyers, well, can’t help you there:-P. If you had the chromakey capability, you could for example shoot from overhead looking down and have your presenter(s) “walk” along a game board like a Monopoly or chutes and ladders or “Life” type set of paths, with critical waypoints along the “road”. Such a thing can be played for laughs or played very straight: during the first Gulf War over Kuwait, one network did this kind of thing with a huge virtual map the presenters could walk over, to show where cities were and troops in relation to them, and I thought this helped make the region more understandable to people with little background on it. But this is not within your current resources.

I look over your points 1-6 and it seems more like something that can be communicated best in a PDF flowchart or some simple self-directed hypertext than a linear program. Your lawyer audience is too smart to have to be led by the nose in such a pedantic way. And that reminds me of this project…

Late last year I did my first foray into authored DVD’s using DVDSP on the mac and it was a baptism by fire, but very satisfying. It was a training tool for ethics officers, presenting gray-area situations and then asking what to do for each and why.

Each play-acted scenario presented offered four choices at various decision points, and each choice branched to either a congratulatory message with reinforcement that you chose correctly, plus a consequences tag video showing the “happy ending” or….

….. a “sorry, wrong” segment that explained why that answer was wrong or incomplete, then the wrong answer automatically sent you back to the decision menu of 4 questions until you got it right and looped out to the next “chapter” or main menu.

You could take the chapters in any order you wanted, or just pick one chapter, whatever you had time for. You could not advance until you mastered a segment. This approach I found to be effective because you as a viewer could blast thru the parts you were already competent in, to get to the scenarios that might trip up the inexperienced. The DVD could be watched alone but also in a group, with a facilitator to pause and poll the group before moving thru the answers. Since lawyers bill for their time, seems like this might have some attraction. It has some of that game show element, but in a less overt way because its an interactive quiz. The DVD’s are way cheaper to distribute than VHS too, and easier to update.

This was a monster for me to assemble, two-three days shooting, (big cast) a month of editing and compositing virtual sets for the host, about 14 hours in the authoring, even though we kept it simple. I can do it faster the next time, now I’ve done one. Since each of the five or so scenarios had between two and four questions or decision points in it, each question had four possible answers, and each answer, an independent custom reaction, that was a lot to keep track of in the scripting, shooting, and editing, never mind the authoring. I used local pro and semi-pro talent from the city theatre community and they really made the thing work, by being able to create realistic characters, reactions and most of all, very consistent performances for the various alternate endings and branches. They didn’t cost much but they gave it a million-dollar look, more than any dolly or jib shot.

The graphic flow chart DVDSP generates filled up all of one of my cinedisplays by the end, and looked like the Union Station train switchyard. But you get into a pattern with these things, they recycle certain parts and it becomes like a fractal: the big overall version mirrors the smaller components. If you make a small one first, the big one is much less intimidating, all you are doing is hooking modules together thru common menus, the graphic display makes it easy as pointing arrows to connect… it was very much like plugging patch cords into a router bay.

To the point, I believe in my heart this is better television because the viewer is actively engaged in shaping the presentation, it is not linear, yet the information is kept consistent no matter how it is presented. It is hard to make a better recommendation without seeing all the actual materials you have to work with, but I really like this approach and would recommend some version of it for this kind of work.

If the interactivity scares you, know this: you can do something very similar using plain old powerpoint. Create the slides and then you can drag and drop hot buttons that hyperlink between various slides you designate. Gives you all the same functionality as an interactive DVD, but simple as playing computer solitaire. Better yet, with one click it converts to HTML and can run on any web browser, even if you’re not on the net, so you can run it as HTML or as a powerpoint.

Of course, this is more of a graphics-and-sound-oriented approach, (though you can also embed video in powerpoint, I hate that) but you know, it’s no sin to tell a client some other media choice serves his needs better than video, if that’s the truth and is more effective. Some will even thank you and trust you more for protecting their butts. This is what we do for clients, the added value, not just blindly take orders, but advise and collaborate where we can to make it even better. Even if the final product doesn’t turn out to be a video.

[Mark Suszko]

Every 2 years I have to do a teleconference and DVD explaining a bunch of election forms and schedules to untrained people working in election campaigns, updating the rules. It has to assume you know nothing every time because of high turnover of the user base.

What we settled into, and think works well, is to use chromakey to let the speaker literally “walk you thru” the forms in super-scale. If you remember the opening “flag shot” of of George C. Scott in “Patton”, we blow up the form, or parts of it, to look that big at times, then go into details a paragraph or two at a time to fill the screen, so legibility is terrific, with the presenter doing a kind of weatherman thing with them.

Frequent cut-aways go to even tighter detail shots, where we show the writing of names and numbers, one screen-filling line at a time. Animating onto the blanks helps a lot, as does using a highlighter type box overlaid on sections as a voiceover addresses them. I frequently pop back out to a full-screen shot of the form with the relevant section highlighted, as a way to keep viewers oriented.
In our programs, we open up phones adn take Q&A on-air from actual users during the initial presentation, and save that in the DVD and web stream that goes to people that missed the live teleconference.

For things that are functionally like tax forms, I think this is a winner.

However…

These kinds of programs face a grave danger of becoming “radio with pictures”. If all you end up doing is reading the material to a camera, give up; give up now and re-write, because this program really could just be an email. People can read for themselves, better and faster than you. Having skits where two people read to each other is no better.

There’s a lot of “stuff” you need to go thru when planning one of these out to make it as effective as possible. Copying the old formats that don’t leverage the thing video does best may just be copying old mistakes, too.

[Mark Suszko]

His performance in
The 7-Ups” was underrated, as was his role in “The French Connection”.

Ditto the paypal suggestion, ATM’s generally have a $200-$500 daily withdrawal limit for any one account, but there are banks and Currency Exchanges and Western Union Wire transfers. Amex in particular touts their ability to make some kind of payment arrangement for ANY situation, for example, traveller’s checks. Love finds a way, and so do banks.

I would give a few extra days leeway this time of the year due to spotty banking hours and heavy mail traffic.

[Mark Suszko]

He may be mean, but he’s certainly not wrong.

[Mark Suszko]

Marsha, you might do well to visit the indie and documentary forum here on the COW for some second opinions.

[Mark Suszko]

Well, are you showing it to any festivals? That seems to me to be a simple first step, entering it in festivals and contests.

[Mark Suszko]

I would not go with the stills camera thing yet. I think it requires too much tinkering for a beginner, has the same demands, if not more, on an editing system, and you need to devote your attention elsewhere. Something like the Panasonic HVX200, used by a competent shooter may be adequate, IMO.

Get away from the idea of owning a camera, go talk to the local pro rental places and ask for some hands-on demos in the shop, which are generally free. Work on raising the money for the rentals and creating your accounts with these suppliers. I would not shoot on 16mm, the costs are just out of your league.

He’s not for everyone, and some of his stuff is just raving crazy, but you might want to look at some of the online free “courses” of DOV Simmons for some inspiration. Particularly about budgeting and timing.

[Mark Suszko]

You probably didn’t know this, but there’s a specific forum for this kind of message on the COW, this forum is not it however. If you think about it you’ll realize why it has to be that way.