[Mark Suszko]

Question may be relevant, I often get tasked with making chicken soup out of chicken (redacted) .:-)

[Mark Suszko]

I truly believe for the small operator, the key is to find and exploit a very tiny niche market no one else in the area serves, or serves well, one where new product would get snapped up by the people in the niche. Then produce your own product for that market. Typically one way to find such a niche is thru your favorite hobbies, where you already are very familiar with a field and the players in it and what’s come before. But that’s not the only path, just an obvious one.

[Mark Suszko]

OK, I’ll file that with Egon’s warning about crossing the particle streams… 🙂

Seriously, we’ve established a diagnosis, (pilot error) but is there any fix? Can I for instance re-name the sequence immediately previous to the name of the missing reference and then see if it re-renders? Or is there any other “trick” to recovering or reconstructing that sequence?

[Mark Suszko]

I didn’t mean the back of each room for the door frame, I meant entering stage/screen right and the door frame wiping across the shot or being in the frame on either side as a border, as the way to cover the transition between environments. Old trick that goes back at least as far as Hitchcock. Easier to do now with AfterEffects.

If your door is at the back of the room, and the actor walking forward “towards” the camera/audience, revealing a new room each time the camera pulls further back, you have a dolly-back move, not a trucking shot. This can still work, but you have to add another layer for what’s behind the doorway each time he goes thru it, while still revealing a portion of the previous layer/room in the doorway behind.
Or just write in that he closes the door behind him immediately after every entrance:-)

[Mark Suszko]

My CE says two thou, over one thou for certain. We use them every day.

[Mark Suszko]

What specifically is the question? Are you wanting to charge for booking additional make-up days in case of a rain-out, and/or asking what should the policy be for billing, if the dates are booked but not used? Does the policy change if a conflicting client opportunity for those reserved days presents itself?

I would say adding a rain date effectively blocks you from making money with someone else for that day, so as a business person you should bill it, but only *if* anybody else calls in asking to have that date and you have to say no, its reserved.

How much?

I think if I had the pull, (was able to take or leave a client) I would bill it like a travel day; it is in the service of the same client and precludes you from making money with anybody else for that day. I would however convert it to a no-charge if the held date was “released” in a reasonable amount of time so there was at least a *chance* I could get another paid gig for that time. That to me is the best of both worlds: you are responsibly covering the bases for the current paying client, and not charging for time not used, but keeping yourself flexible if other options present themselves. I think anybody you ask would agree it is fair to charge something for your “waiting around just for you” time. I have a union contract that says if they want me on “stand by” status, after hours or on a weekend, i.e. gear packed and loaded in the trunk, ready to move out and shoot something on five minute’s notice, and I’m stuck standing around waiting for that call, at the office or at home, they have to pay me for that time because I’m effectively on their clock, not my own. On the weekends it’s based on double time, and it should be: they are taking away from the 2 days a week I have to be with my family full-time, going somewhere or doing something, and that is worth a lot more.

Now if the client is super-big, you’re super-broke, with few other prospects, and you don’t dare upset them, you likely have to eat the extra day in the name of good client relations. Maybe put it on the bill and then “discount” it.

Or just raise your rate, because giving away a free day effectively just cut your day rate in half, when you think about it. Less than half, since usually the rain doesn’t come. I think if that was the case, your overall day rate for that client could stand to be raised a wee percentage as a means to get back the value of the “lost” days, at least in part. You don’t have to tell them specifically that that’s why the rate has gone up this year. But in essence you’re still billing them for that lost day, just not full rate and in their face.

[Mark Suszko]

When they “rep” for you they are acting as an agent for you, drumming up business. Typically, a rep takes a percentage of said business they helped you get. Somewhere between ten and twenty percent, I think, but don’t quote me on that. This could be good or bad. Depends on how much of what kind of work they throw your way, what they are charging and what amount they give you after they take their cut. Also it means that all your time is spent actually working creatively and not out beating the pavement looking for assignments, and it is only fair that someone else taking that burden on for you should get a “taste” of the profits for their effort.

Some of these arrangements are very lucrative for all parties, others are more like sharecropping and shopping the company store. Certainly the agent company is alwyas going to consider you both an asset and potential rival. From the other side of the desk, they have to worry that you might want to eliminate the middle man (them) and pocket the agent’s percentage by trying to steal away all the hard-earned clients.

They are first of all looking to save money over the costs of hiring a full time employee with benefits and all the other government-ordered paperwork and costs, by using you as a freelancer on retainer, where you as a contractor have to handle all that stuff for yourself. When there is no work, they don’t pay any contractors. Well, except if they have a retainer fee. That fee is highly negotiable and could be reasonable or paltry, depends on the bargaining situation.

This is why contractors have to charge more than salaried staff for the same job. Not necessarily because they are more expert, but that they have to cover all these other expenses that a salaried person never sees, whether there is work or NOT. The question is then, how much more one can charge as a contractor, before the contractual status is really no cheaper or more convenient to the companay than a full-time staffer. Contractors can always say no, especially if NOT on retainer, when they have a schedule conflict or just don’t want to do a particular gig. Salaried people usually have to bend to the boss’ whims whenever.

Before you go back to negotiations, inform yourself. Do a detailed analysis of ALL your costs versus the days in the year you want to work, and figure out from that your true minimum hourly and day rates. You can’t afford to take the job for less than that figure. Then compare the numbers they are offering, based on aconservative estimate of how many gigs a year you’ll do. Be brutally conservative at this stage, assume a bare minimum of work. It may work out that after they take a percentage off for their efforts, they can’t pay you as much as you can pay yourself working sans retainer but as a fully fledged independent.

I can’t tell you which way to jump, I don’t know your specific numbers situation. But if you check the achived COW threads on salaries and rates, you’ll dig up a huge amount of added info to help your decision process.

Good luck, remember, first man to say a number loses.

[Mark Suszko]

If it was me, I’d use a hybrid setup, with a green wall and floor, but with live prop door frames for the actor to go thru. I’d walk the actor in a trucking wide shot from left to right, each door frame he passes thru defines the next area, which is composited in later of course. How much he interacts is limited by the camera angle since from the side-on trucking shot, he’d have to turn his back to the camera to interact. I suppose you get a better angle if he walks *behind* each new user in their environment… say the layers, from front of the lens to the back wall would be:

1 Door frame
2 Copier stand with copier
3 Person operating the copier
4 Actor/spokesperson walking thru the shot, pausing to say something over the other guy’s shoulder to the camera, or standing next to them, then passing thru to the next environment as that whole shot is tracked left.
5 The green screen with a backdrop of the environment.

In that setup, the compositing is relatively noncomplex; since all layers stay within themselves, it’s just a multiplane shot. The guys that win Canne Ad awards and make uber dollars take it a step further and break the boundaries between the image planes to really “sell” a 3-d composited environment, using a lot of roto.

You could go either way, flat layers or complex 3-d, I think it really depends more on the script and how it is to be delivered, (dead serious versus with a little wink and nod) than on how much heavy duty compositing you throw at the job.

You could even go for an extreme low-tech look and go with roll-down classroom map type obvious fake backgrounds all on one set, with other props like potted plants or surfboards being hand-pushed and pulled into the shots from the sides by stagehands, and still get a point across. The copy point in that script would be that the machines are so consistent, and so well connected, it really seems like where they are doesn’t matter.

This is something you have to work out in the marketing meetings as you tweak the verbal and non-verbal messages and strategies. Start with the copy points, the selling points, of the script, and evolve the effect to sell that, instead of starting with a cool visual device and trying to shoehorn the script to make it work. Someone should be able to watch the spot without sound and figure out the metaphors being played out, or what you have is a gimmicky spot that doesn’t sell the product, just the talent of the compositor.

[Mark Suszko]

I’ve mentioned this before in a similar context. If you’re not religious, you can still take a lesson from the parable of the vineyard and workers.

Master owns a big vineyard and the grapes are ready to harvest, nearly bursting, and bad weather is threatening to damage some of the crop before it can all be brought in. Master hires a number of gatherers first light and they go to work. Mid-day, gauging progress and feeling the winds shifting, master decides they need more help to make it on time, goes out and hires extra workers. Close to the end of the day, it’s almost done but not quite, master brings in a few more guys for the last hour. Crop all in, he pays everyone off and wants to go home to dinner. But the foreman is upset.

“You paid those guys that just worked an hour the same amount that you paid us to work all day since morning!”

“Yeah, what about it?”

“That’s just wrong!”

“What’s wrong? Did I or did I not, pay you exactly what we agreed to this morning?”

“Well, sure.”

“Who’s money is it I paid with?”

“Yours”.

“Do I or do I not have the right to do what I wish with my own money?”

“You do”.

“Then don’t be jealous of somebody else getting a good deal, when you yourself got a perfectly square one”.

This is a story I have to tell myself quite often, as I think about other people taking credit for my work or having a success that eludes me. If no union or contractual obligations were broken in the way the credits were assigned, just let it go, brother. Just let it go.

[Mark Suszko]

Sometimes the problem is too basic to see, too simple to notice… are you selecting control track by mistake? Some decks need to be in local mode before the change from one mode ot the other takes effect. Can’t tell you hoe many times a simple switch on the front panel got bumped but not noticed, and led to a long troubleshooting session, when all I had to do was a methodical sweep of the panel settings first. Usually, if you call someone else into the room that hasn’t been looking at it, they spot it instantly, because they haven’t built up the same perceptual “blind spot”.

“Oh, you wanted to RECORD that?”