[Mark Suszko]

I’m conflicted about this; it sure sounds like they have overstepped their charter. You are well within your rights to challenge that unequal competition.

OTOH I am a huge proponent of Public Access and such stations across the country are under considerable threat right now. In my state a new law apparently has given the cable providers a loophole to legally abandon their requirements to provide PEG channels and access programming. Some who provide digital cable services are taking the access channel and putting it in a “ghetto” spot accessed thru “channel 99”. So you can no longer call it up with a simple single click up or down the dial like any paid commercial channel. That is he kiss of death, as far as viweers go. ATT U-Verse may not offer any PEG or access at all. Now, if you are a cable provider, that’s also unfair competition with your cable service. My slant on this is that all providers to a city have to either provide a studio space and technical support for access, or pay into a common fund that supports the one access studio, and all the services must take and run their programming. A very small price to pay for a franchise that amounts to a license to print money.

The access channel definitely should not be trying to break your rice bowl, that’s not their aera to play in, but at the same time, they are clawing for their very lives right now. I think for the sake of a healthy democracy and community identitiy, we need to preserve non-commercial channels of community communication. Maybe you should try to go after the specific management that’s breaking the rules, rather than the organization as a whole. You certainly have a valid grievance.

[Mark Suszko]

P.S. You know what muslin is good for? Wrinkling up. Deliberately ball up the whole thing and then unfold it to create a crinkled surface and light that from almost edge-on, and it can look great, this was a long-time popular thing you don’t see used as often anymore. If you gel the light, you get a nice two-tone effect. If you hit it from opposite edges with two different gel colors, the interactions are very interesting sometimes.

[Mark Suszko]

There are cropping tools to mask off the top, bottom and sides where there is no green. That much, you can do right in FCP or PRemiere or Avid right on the timeline, you don’t need aftereffects to do it, necessarily.

Your green is badly lit in that picture, the fabric should be less wrinkled, not wrinkled at all in fact, and the guitar player needs to be far enough in front of ‘ apar6t from that green that his shadow does not fall on the wall at all. You will be able to add back a shadow with more control later, turst me, you do not want one right now int he orignal shot.

Fix those things and get back to us later, good luck.

[Mark Suszko]

The dissolve to empty room effect IS easy, childishly so, if you lock down the shot and don’t move the camera in any way. Build that effect in a wider than normal frame, then pull that frame in with keyframing tools and you can, within limits, impose the pans and zooms after the fact.

[Mark Suszko]

One of these days, it would be nice if Ron had a way to compile every variation of this thread into one sticky note we could just point everybody to. Until that time, if you keyword search this particular forum for the topic of rates and how much to charge, you will have an entire holiday vacation of reading to do.

A super-condensed version.

Know your costs. All of them.
Derive a reasonable rate hourly and day rate for your costs and goals.
Stick to that rate, get paid in thirds, never lowball or discount a job because they promise you more and better in the future, or to “prove yourself”.

You are not a bank.

[Mark Suszko]

That statement reveals a lot.

Dude, you need a business plan before you need to buy any more gear. And the plan has to be more than “step one: earn a lot of green“. A fast pass over my crystal ball reveals this probability: you will be selling one or both of those cameras later this year at a loss. I am not saying this to insult you, I am telling you about something I have seen happen over and over to people in your position. Too often people think buying the cameras is all you need to start a successful video business. I had a successful wedding video business on the side for five years or so and NEVER owned a single camera. Because I had a plan and a strategy. I rented the camera I needed just for the days I needed it. I didn’t have to pay off the credit card, worry about depreciation, or obsolescence. While I didn’t charge very much for my shoots, it was over 95 percent profit, no expenses. That’s a plan.

[Mark Suszko]

Sebastian, you may also want to look into an organization called WEVA.

As far as your pricing and your career track, what I suggest is, you first apprentice yourself to an already-established events videographer, as their second-unit guy and assistant. Go out under their umbrella, with their gear. Learn by doing and observing and you will get paid a little something, not usually a lot, but combined with the experience and contacts and reputation you build, it should be acceptable to you. The guy using you as an assistant knows you won’t work for him forever and may become an eventual rival. But this won’t matter if you don’t make a fool of yourself while he’s using you. Don’t hang out your own shingle for anybody but relatives until you have done your time under a sponsor or two like this for at least a year. Your lowball pricing can become a huge trap preventing you from charging more later, plus it depresses the market for the rest of us, which earns you no friends in the production community and makes life tougher for everyone plus yourself when you want to charge a realistic price later. If you take my advice and when you finally emerge onto the market, you will bill more and be worth it.

[Mark Suszko]

I liked your one art gallery commercial for Chasens, and it gave me the following thought.

If you are looking for some kind of overall direction, my initial impression is skip music videos and law commercials: you could do more youtube art videos where you interview artists and get some sense of their personalities combined with samples of their work and of them working. Since you are a visual artist, you would likely have a good rapport with the subjects and their material and be able to ask them intelligent questions and take meaningful detail shots to point out some unique part of the artist’s talent or perspective. Take the best parts of their answers and conversations and montage that with screen shots of their work to create 5-to-10-minute capsule documentaries.

Put those on Youtube and you could try getting galleries to sponsor them, even to play them on a looped display in the gallery, as well as paid-for air time on the cable leased-access channel. Such a regular feature could help drive people to the gallery to buy, or to buy from the artist’s own web sites.

Think of it as a virtual weekend art fair, where you browse past the tents and stop to read the little blurb cards at an exhibit you particularly fancy. I think based on the samples I saw of your work, such projects are within your capability, with a little more effort.

The other aspect of this that may be a good fit for you is that this would be a less competitive niche, one with more time to let you perfect your work on your own terms versus more commercial deadlines, and one where you already have some advantage from your existing background.

I think this is a more fruitful and perhaps potentially more personally satisfying path than for you to try to break into a highly competitive and saturated commercial production market, where as you say, you’d be playing catch-up on gear and experience and technique.

Some specific critiques, take them or leave them:

I would work some more on better cropping of and placement of vertically-oriented art shots within the horizontal frame. That is a hard thing even for experienced editors to do… there are various tricks and methods we use, you can ask more about those in the art of editing forum. I am guessing some of this also comes from your already- mentioned lack of better tools to be able to crop and keyframe those frames better.

I think you can make better use of the screen’s space by adjusting your mass relationships, color weights, fonts, using deliberately non-centered positioning, and balancing composition using the rule of thirds, and this is something that comes with practice and experimentation, as well as frank imitation of the work of previous masters until you develop a unique “voice” of your own. Pre-visualizing thru rough pencil sketches may help save you time here as well.

For the music videos what you want to avoid is a powerpoint-to-tape look and an overly-literal interpretation. Abstraction and ambiguity add interest as the viewer tries to fill in the missing white space or missing pieces. And non-literal imagery gives you the chance to add another layer of meaning or interpretation to the work. Look at it this way: a music video is three things, the lyric as a pure poem, put to music to give it an extra dimension or emotional subtext, which you then put in a context with the visuals that alternately reinforce the other two legs of that triangle or deliberatly oppose it, to tell a story that’s three-dimensional, that’s more than the sum of its parts. We are making art that is a mix of image plus sound plus time. Make all three work for you.

I found the music videos on the sample page a little too “on the nose” with their literalness. It made me think it was going for a specific and pointed visual gag, but there was no payoff to that expectation.

Don’t think for a minute this is a knock: this literalness is a phase every growing editor goes through, absolutely. I went thru a phase I call my “Jolt Cola Period” in the early 90’s where one of my metrics for good cutting was how many cuts I could make in two and a half minutes of finished running time, under the spell of a can or two of those “creative juices”. “Wow, this one has three hundred twenty cuts in the EDL, I must be good!” 🙂

After a while though, you get bored with making cuts always hit on the beat, mechanically, robotically, predictably, and making the visual always a stone-literal portrayal of the lyrics. That’s where you move up from pure technical cutting to artistic cutting. These days, I try to make cuts that nobody even notices are there, that just feel as natural and transparent as eyeblinks. If you have not read Murch’s books on editing, I invite you to look thru them for some simple yet profound ideas.

If you’re going to do more montage work like the music videos on your sample page, better be sure any clip art you are using has been legally cleared, or two things happen: One, pros and people hiring will not want to take you seriously, two, you are asking for legal troubles and expenses you don’t want.

I hope that wasn’t too brutal. You are very brave to come out here and show your work; I don’t have the guts to do it yet myself. Like I said up top, I think you are positioned to be able to do some good and maybe profitable marketing stuff in the niche area of artist portfolio/profile mini-docs for the web, direct marketing, or for gallery use. That’s where I would invest my time if you ask me, don’t try to run in all these other directions at once with the music vids and commercials. Master one unique thing first, and make it something that isn’t already too crowded with competitors, and your relative age is no longer a factor, your expertise is.

Best of luck and do come back later on and let us know how things turn out for you.

[Mark Suszko]

The vanishing thing is an old trick: dissolving between two matched copies of the same shot, one with the person, one without. The added touch here is the shots have motion, which complicates the job. You can get that by using a robotic motion control rig, or if you shoot in HD and post/output to SD, you have enough room in the HD frame to move it around in post with keyframing to make the two shots match. Or you can painstakingly roto the guy out, but that’s too much work. Another possibility is to shoot a 10 megapixel still of the empty room and use that as the plate, tracking anc compositing as previously described.

I liked that cover of the Beatle’s song, who sings it?

[Mark Suszko]

I have faced this situation often and would prefer to go with ND and CTO gels on the outside of the windows, because all my lighting is tungsten and blue gels on tungsten just choke them into irrelevance.

HMI’s work but they are expensive, make a LOT of heat, and draw a lot of power. Scrims can work but you want to be careful you don’t get Moire’ patterns showing up in it at various focal lengths, this is more of a possibility with the cheap hardware cloth than the real Rosco scrims which have a different shape to their hole patterns.

When attaching the gels outside, you want them snug so the wind can’t make them ripple, which can make noise as well as distracting flickers outside the glass. You want the gel as close up against the glass as possible to reduce reflections. Some folks knock together a wooden frame with a staple gun, gel the frame, then attach the frame to the window with staples, nails, gaffer tape, whatever they can get away with. But what if you can’t get at the windows outside?

With some care and good hand-eye coordination, you can use razor blades to trim gels and attach them to the inside glass panes of the windows with water or static or clear tape. If they fit tight and clean enough, it shouldn’t read as anything but regular glass after you white balance.

I don’t like to cut up window gels if I can help it because I prefer to re-use the stuff as much as possible. We can’t afford to throw it away, I got rolls a decade old.