[Mark Suszko]

Let him. You can only compete so far on rates alone, and it is never a good idea to undercut another guy’s rates unless you know to the penny what his true costs are and how much cushion he has in the bank. He could be living on cat food and ramen and sleeping in the back of his production van or his mom’s basement (or the edit bays, pew) to cover his margin, that’s not sustainable for long-term. At the low rate, he’s not investing any money in the gear or softwaer, he won’t be able to keep up with people that do. he also won’t be able to hold onto any talented staff. I think that means little repeat business.

[Mark Suszko]

If you mean writing that reveals itself, there are several methods, the most popular today may be using a plug-in 3-d stroke generator or AE’s stroke recorder.

Simpler, older (slower) methods involve taking a still of the finished script writing, erasing it from the end to the beginning a bit at a time while recording, and playing the result backwards to make it look like self-writing.

If the letters don’t loop over themselves, a simple soft edged wipe in the alpha channel used to be a common way to do this in the old days.

[Mark Suszko]

Can you give more detail as to the footage?

Typically, if you have a shot of the cars going past the camera, you’ll then track each car and apply the tracking data to a comp of the flashing lights.

Are you just asking how to make and track the comp of the flashing lights?

The lights on the cars are only half the job: to really sell it, the lights have to seem to react with the background. This means you’ll have to make an extra layer in the comp that carries a soft red and blue pulsing glow across buildings and things tracking with the lights, harder colored reflections in anything reflective like windows or chrome or water, and perhaps even a top layer with some tinted lens flare for the hot spot of the lights shining into the virtual camera lens. That last top/front layer with the lens flares can help hide faults in the rest of the comp by being overly bright and dazzling the scene.

[Mark Suszko]

I’m doing this from memory, not looking at the mac right now, so I may get a detail wrong, but it won’t hurt anything to try this and play around with it.

If the text has an alpha channel, put your text on a separate video track, above the program video track. Click your mouse on the front edge of the clip, then hit command-T to get a default dissolve. Drag the end of the dissolve picon to adjust it, or hit command-click to open a window that lets you type in the transition rate and if the dissolve begins or ends or straddles the clip. Same for the back end.

If the clip has no alpha channel, but you want the text to ride over background but still show background around it, do everything the same as above, but then highlight the clip with the text, go to the menu bar up top, under modify, change the composite mode to, I think, “multiply”. If that’s not it, try one of the other composite modes.

[Mark Suszko]

You can also “fix” this on the Photoshop end, by applying an action to the stack of images in one folder, to format them in whatever way suits FCp for your project needs, before you import into FCP.

[Mark Suszko]

Who exactly are you going to call? The receptionist is trained to reject you. Or mess with you. When I was younger, and before the internet (yes, kids, there was such a dark time) sometimes while working up research on some guy I wanted to meet with, I would call trying to find something out about the guy first, like his name or title, and I think it was a perverse pleasure of the receptionist, hearing my rube-ness, to just put me thru directly to the guy instead of answering my questions.

Then I’m holding a phone and stuttering and scrambling when the guy himself picks up and wants to know what I want, Especially great if he doesn’t asnswer with his full name and title. ULP!!!. I wasn’t at all ready to talk to this guy and make a good impression. Awkward doesn’t come close.

That taught me to have a backup script ready by the phone in advance, with some safe items, bullet points, special stats or facts, and reminders on it to bail me out if I got tricked like that again. You meet a lot of gatekeepers and filters on the way to the person you need to reach, and it is helpful to be able to describe yourself and what you want succinctly and in a purposeful manner, and to sound like you have a clue, so when you call, you’re a guy calling to help out, not to ask for help.

[Mark Suszko]

You’ll have to network. And not just online, but person to person.

Go to your local Chamber of Commerce meetings and hang out. Find the local SCORE advisors and give them your biz cards and promo materials, some of the small start-ups they advise might come looking for you.

If you are religious, you might want to try networking with the folks that attend weekly services with you. Not IN the church or temple, that’s crass, but say, at their next social or fund-raiser. Do they even know what you do? Maybe start wearing a custom embroidered polo when you’re off work with your personal company logo on it, or some industry “gimmee” hats or shirts, something to start conversations with. You could meet a potential client almost anywhere, but they have to know you and what you do. The shirt is an easy way to do that. But make it look good, and make yourself look good in it. Once the shirt id on, consider yourself a walking billboard and comport yourself every minute as if you’re in the waiting room of somebody about to hire you. Because you might be there and not know it.

I often advocate that people make pro-bono PSA’s and mini-docs for charities they support, as a door-opener to meeting businesspeople outside the usual front-door approach.

Everybody is conditioned to reject you coming in the front door as a salesman or other disruption to their day, but they’ll all hang with you quite casually chatting in the kitchen, where there are no stakes involved, no commitments. Charity work does this for you, gets you in the kitchen door.

The biz people all have pet charities and causes, and this is a place in the system where you can get in close to decision-makers, with no gatekeepers or filters, and establish a personal relationship that includes by definition the work you do. “Hey, I know a guy that worked on the promo for the Lung Association event we did; he’s pretty good, let me ask him about this web project.”

Development people, aka fundraisers, deal with many people in business every day, and if you can connect with such a person, they become a sort of secret Rolodex, a connection to many possible clients. The big boys do this kind of thing thru playing golf, but anybody can work on charity stuff.

And the other thing is, even if you fail, you’ve done something worthwhile in your community and created a portfolio piece you can maybe use in the future. There is really no down side. Except that you have to do some actual work to make things happen.

[Mark Suszko]

Rick pretty much lays it out. While you may be morally and legally in the right, as a practical matter, it may be cost-prohibitive to pursue “justice” for this project. Since we can’t fix the past, please let me offer some suggestions as we look ahead to your future gigs:

Payment in thirds: one third at the start, one at first draft, one at final sign-off. You may not know how much this is going to cost in advance with precision, and as you have seen, things can happen, but if you know your day rate, and have some idea of how many days you’re going to need if everything goes right, then extrapolate the first third from that. If the work is taking longer, you can adjust the middle third somewhat. A nice thing about thirds is you get paid as you do the work, and if the project stops, you are not shorted for work done up to that point, and the client doesn’t have to pay for work not done, so it is fair to both sides.

Never give clients a clean copy of the product until fully paid: always watermark it or burn time code windows over it. If they insist on screening a clean copy, insist on walking it over to their office and playing it for them yourself.

I think where you perhaps lost control of this project was in accepting it with the bad elements in the first place. Once you did that, you committed to a certain expectation of the quality, and to finishing the job. No contractor or craftsperson can promise their work if the client shorts them on the raw materials. The pre-job meeting is where this should have been hashed out, and the work probably should not have been started until you were happy with the raw material. It sounds like not everything was ready when you started and then the client dropped the ball. And you made a diving catch for it.

I think a lot of us fall into the same category as editors or producers: we’re problem-solvers, we get a thrill out of being able to make things happen, especially in adverse circumstances, to be the “miracle worker” or “the magician” that brings everythign together in some mysterious fashion. It is very good for the ego, but here we see the bad thing that can happen: we finally come across the knot that can’t be untied. After a long string of successes, this can be tough to handle for both sides. The client, used to you making chicken soup out of chicken – well, you know… gets confused and thinks maybe you’re not trying your best, since you always came thru before. Because you always manage to clean up their mess somehow, they have little incentive to improve their side of the deal and give you better elements, in fact, they are dis-incentivized to improve and may start getting even WORSE in this regard. I don’t teach my kids to keep their room clean by always cleaning it FOR them, even if I’m faster or better at it then them: I have to make THEM do the job, or they never appreciate it or learn it.

Maybe you get upset because in order to make deadline, you have to re-create a bad element from scratch and rack up serious overtime because of it, which you may or may not put in for. In a fixed-price gig, you usually have to eat that overtime and a job could end up losing you money, at least on paper. That’s why I prefer to never work to a fixed price, but to an hourly rate, within an overall estimate, and progress payments at major waypoints in the life of the job. That way I’m not asking for a blank check, but I’m leaving room to be flexible and even to bring things in slightly cheaper sometimes.

Every so often, the client relationship probably needs to revisit a discussion of the time/cost/quality triangle. Usually you can say something after a project is finished that can put a bug in the client’s ear for next time:

“I’m glad you liked the final product, I know I could do some even cooler things the next time, if you can get me the logos in what we call ‘vector format’. Could you ask the company graphics person to get in touch with me some time about that, because I can get some of those kinds of things directly from them, and keep them on file here for your future projects. Then we don’t have to scramble so much on the next one, and the shorter time spent will translate to a better product with a smaller bill.”

See, what you did there was gently remind them to get more organized, you offered a way to help them do that, you upsold them on the next project and subtly committed them to bringing it to you, plus you hinted that doing these things can lead to a discount from saving wasted time, and being sloppy is going to cost them more. Better quality at lower cost the next time? Heck yes, they are probably going to come back. Every positive client experience reinforces the good things they do.

Most magicians work with an assistant. That’s the client. You may have to teach them how some tricks work, in order to dazzle the audience successfully.

[Mark Suszko]

Back at you, bro

[Mark Suszko]

I make an instant cukaloris on set by taking a sheet of black foil and stabbing it a bunch of times randomly with a pen, to make randomly-sized holes. Some of them I’ll make even more ragged by tearing with my fingers. Then I throw that on an omni or tota with a Lowel gel holder, after the gel (if you put the foil on first it melsts the gel or use stand-offs like sections of coil spring clipped onto the frame). I found that if I make two of these at 45 degree angles, gel one blue and leave the other clear, I get a very convincing partly cloudy blue sky effect where they interact on the wall. Usually I just go with one of these and either gel it or not as required.

You can make a kind of China Ball with an empty plastic gallon milk jug and a candelabra lamp base with a compact fluro bulb. The handle is handy for holding it up or tying it to something.