[Mark Suszko]

If you mixed everything live thru a composite switcher in linear fashion, instead of editing it NLE perhaps this would perserve the line 21 data, don’t know for certain, I’d have to know if the switcher strips the line 21 or not. And most people don’t own a linear edit controller anymore.

[Mark Suszko]

The spinning video cube has been overused and mis-used for decades, but here is one place it would make sense to use it, each facet of the box is a window to a different way of working with it. Kind of a Rubic’s Cube thing. Don’t forget you can image a cube from inside as well as outside.

I really like the HP “hands” spots, where a famous person is shown mid-body and hands-only, talking about all the things they do with their laptop or tower, as they “juggle” various iconic objects and animated samples of what they’re talking about.

The idea in your third paragraph about the guy walking thru the door and thru various “worlds” is too much like something that is already on the air right now.

Here’s some free ideas to riff off of:

You talk about a “family” of apps or products: what if you had actors each portray or interpret those separate identities, as characters? Mom, dad, grandpa, kids, cousins, each one dressed and acting in a way that shows off that aspect of the product? The payoff shot is cramming these folks all together into a car or around a table or into a steam press, etc. to unify them.

Another model is the fast-food diner, with the chef serving up apps fresh and hot to the sassy waitress.

Or how about you have a chameleon walk past a row of the computer displays and instead of just changing colors, his skin keys (or is mapped) to reveal recognizeable motion footage of each of the apps working. A related approach would have one guy and one girl have all those things mapped on their bodies and faces using projection, while they talk in various accents and dialects.

Or a backwards anti-product approach? Actor who looks like they would never use the product saying they don’t know what good all these snappy features are, the old fashioned way was good enough for him. This is getting at trying to find and define the typical user/buyer’s identity and have the product identify with them and their style. Apple and MS Windows are using the hell out of this idea in their various campaigns right now.

Don’t forget the power of story. If you can tell a guy or gal’s own special story, and how this product is a part of it, in 30 seconds, you engage, entertain, and reward the audience, and lock the product into their consiousness. A great example currently running are the Columbia Sportswear spots about unusual iconoclastic people doing non-typical outdoor things, while wearing the products.

If the product can become a pivot point in a narrative arc for a character… like, the distantly separated couple keeping their flame of love alive long-distance… the idea man who gets up in the middle of the night and needs to write something RIGHT NOW (“our flash-ram-based fast-start technology means you don’t EVER have to wait to boot up, just GO!”)… you can kind of see a pattern there, you can tell multiple stories about one or two people and build their character arcs over the length of a campaign, or you can use different individuals every time. They could be real testimonials, or narrative composites.

A neat and irreverent but effective exaple of this technique is the tutorial series called “You Suck At Photoshop”. If you’re not familiar with this, and can listen with headphones, find these on YouTube and follow poor Donny’s character arc thru the first five episodes and see if you don’t also happen to retain a lot of new information on better technique for your photoshopping skills. Worked a charm for me, and made me laugh my butt off too.

There are too many reality shows on cable right now about house rehabbing and survival, maybe you could hook into that, and make a narrative that ties the product and apps into a “rehab” or “survival test” theme.

That’s all I can come up with off the top of my head right now, but then again, I had a late night last night and am not firing on all cylinders today. Pump me full of Jolt cola and a big breakfast and watch out:-)

[Mark Suszko]

I don’t see anything here but common-sense advice. I always advocate for people to find a charity they support and offer to do some pro-bono for it, to build their portfolio if nothing else. It then makes a nice calling card to use when introducing yourself to the management of the organization, …..or the folks at a corporation that contributes to that organization. I call it “sneaking in thru the kitchen instead of past the front door”.

But yes, the Craigs List model of “everybody works for free or for hamburgers” is for the birds for anything but a student film.

[Mark Suszko]

I’m not a great DP like many of you guys in the forum, but DFN has been mostly forgotten these days, I just happened to think of it because I was thinking of an old friend who used to make jokes about it. You can find many examples in old movies where it is pretty badly done, particularly in B&W. OTOH, I know a guy who works on Law and Order, and last year they used the technique for one specific shot, so it still has a place in modern usage, in it’s own little niche.

I think there’s a COW Aftereffects tutorial somewhere that shows how to track a scene of some jeeps driving down a road and make a DFN conversion to the footage.

[Mark Suszko]

I was able to capture into my Discreet Edit*6 in composite format, make cuts to shorten the captured footage, and play back out preserving the cc data. If you ADDED new footage, what I expect would happen is, the line 21 captioning would drop out where the new footage came in, leaving some garbled remainder frozen on the screen super, and then pick up after that point when you got back into the old footage, but that re-entry would probably be a little garbled as well, until the cc data got refreshed and “caught up” to the encoder.

The cc signal is recorded on the line 21 vertical interval portion of the video signal, in NTSC SD video, so any edit of the video also destroys the caption data in that segment. When we go to digital, I have no idea where that data is kept in relation to the video, it is now some kind of metadata, but I suspect it is still matched to the original picture and will not “stick” if you insert new shots.

Reading between the lines of your question, my opinion is you’ll have to re-caption the new master after you make your new edits.

[Mark Suszko]

With a plug-in like echofire, you can send a live video of your photoshop canvas out to a monitor and/or recorder. I think though that you’d still see a cursor.

You might try a demo of Artmatic Pro or Synthetik Studio Artist. This last option may be perfect for what you’re trying to do. It offers recording functions that don’t show the tool, only the live results, and you can work in automatic mode as well as manually in the same project. You might set up a screen recorder to only see the canvas portion. Playing with Synthetic Studio Artist to convert stills to paintings using your tablet will easily kill many hours if you’re not careful. Enjoy.

[Mark Suszko]

You would be amazed at how many lights and accessory gear it takes to make a convincing “night” shot. The amateur mistake is to assume shooting in the dark is enough, then you find out all you have is grainy, useless mud on the screen. That’s not noir, that’s nowhere.

After generations of theatrical and cinematic and TV use, audiences are very used to seeing something lit with blue light and understanding that to mean “night”. But the source of the light still has to be “motivated”. If you’re outdoors, it is assumed to be moonlight, so it should come from one angle in the “sky”.

You might be able to light a small area with cheap home depot flourescent tubes and blue filter gels. But also for your budget, I would consider using another technique that’s been used on high-budget, low-budget films and TV shows for decades, called “day for night”. It has gone out of fashion these days for many reasons, which are fun to discuss, but may work fine for your needs. The primary merit of DFN is it is cheaper than actually lighting a night shot, but you trade off some believeability unless you do it right.

In day-for-night, you shoot when shadows are long, and the sun is weak, early in the morning or in the afternoon, preferably under a cloudy, overcast sky; you under-expose and filter the daylight to simulate a night shot, but one with more “free” daylight in it than you can afford to do in real darkness on under $100. The final steps of the day-for-night shot are made in post using colorization tools and more filters to crank the contrast and add blue tint and otherwise tweak for verisimilitude. Be sure to remember to have night lights on in your day for night, like car headlights and street lights, porch lights, and the like. These will help later.

You can easily test and practice this look with digital stills and photoshop, before going out to shoot the movie. Google tutorials on day for night for some tips. The very inspirational web site “worth1000.com” runs DFN conversion contests occasionally, look one up and compare the before and after. Come back and visit when you have more questions or some samples to show. Best of luck!

[Mark Suszko]

At the risk of scratching open a healing wound, I can think of one area where he might be able to ‘write off’ the hours, though not necesarily in IRS terms; If it was donated to a political campaign or organization under the heading, “In-Kind Contribution”.

Now, the rules are different in every state, but when you make a campaign donation in Illinois, it is recorded and reported as public information if it is worth more than a certain base amount. The contribution can be in cash or check, or stocks, etc. or it can be physical things and services, like rental of an office and office furniture, computers, software donations, printing jobs for banners and flyers and mailers, building a parade float, and yes, making videos.

This came up in the last campaign when it was discovered John Edwards was basically hiding a “fee for services” by paying his mistress a salary to make campaign videos for the internet, at what appeared to critics to be highly inflated rates compared to the final product. Not trying to make any political point, just showing that donating your time and skill to make a video for a political organization can be given a cash equivalent value. Ask an accoutant if that kind of “contribution” is deductable. For you, I’m guessing not, for the organization, maybe?

[Mark Suszko]

Digital Juice and Artbeats both sell nice explosion footage. And they advertise right here.

You can also create your own with a plug-in called Wondertouch ParticleIllusion.

[Mark Suszko]

Paul, tell us what gear and software you have.