[Mark Suszko]

I would just be happy if my clients could keep nomenclature straight.
I can’t tell you how many times I have clients talking about CD’s when they mean DVDs, DVDs when they mean CDs, film when they mean tape, cameras when they mean decks….

“Can you send someone over? We can’t get the projector to play our film”
Is that a video projector, or a film projector?”
“We’re watching a film”
“So it’s a movie projector?”
“Yes, and our boss thinks it’s hooked up to the VCR wrong”
(click)

“Hey, this CD doesn’t play in my TV”
“Its not a CD, it’s a DVD”
“Well that won’t work, my computer isn’t hooked up to the TV, I don’t even think you can DO that…”

“This DVD doesn’t play on my computer”
“Do you have a DVD drive in your computer?”
“Sure, it plays CD’s.”
(sigh)

“I’m sending you a quicktime file on a CD-Rom, so you can see what the spot looks like”
“That spot wouldn’t play on my DVD player”
“Did you try playing it on your computer?”
“No, my computer won’t play DVDs”.
(sigh)”That’s why I sent you a CD-Rom with a Quicktime on it”.

“Can you email me the CD or DVD?”
“Usually not, the file size is too large to work as an attachment, but I can send you a link by email; click on it, and it will let you download the file via automatic FTP. Then you can play it”
“Why are you making me do all that work, and besides, we aren’t allowed to use the web here at work… can’t you just attach it to an email?”
“it won’t fit”
“Squeeze it down, I know you have a squeezer program on your computer”
“But that will look pretty bad, even if it works…”
“Do it!”
“Fine”
(ring)
“Hello?”
“Yeah, that spot’s awful, we don’t want to use it.”
“Really? Why?”
“It’s all pixelated and jerky-looking, especially when we play it full-screen. You guys were supposed to be professionals, this looks like poo, I’m having my nephew re-do it on his computer”.
“but you…”
(click)
*sigh*

[Mark Suszko]

Those softboxes look like what I use (Lowel Rifalights) to light my chromakey walls.

Be sure they really ARE designed for continuous duty: some folks bought still photographer’s softlights which were designed only for use with momentary flash units, and these melted or caught fire when used with tungsten lights inside.

Another shooting and editing tip: if you shoot on white paper, you can try layering in your FCP timeline using simply the “multiply” compositing mode right in the timeline. Can be surprisingly effective.

[Mark Suszko]

No, let me be clear, whether it is white or green you shoot, you need to have manual control of the iris to make this work right. If you can’t get manual iris control on your camera, forget this whole thing. You need very even lighting across the backdrop and a way to control the contrast ratio between back and front. That’s before you even get into the keying software.

Shooting green without lights can be done… outdoors in the sun, preferably on an overcast day where the light is very even and casts little shadow. You still need a backdrop, and need to angle it so the sun shines on it evenly. Cheap home made reflectors can be used to bounce additional light on your talent. But now I’m skeptical that you have the bare minimum to make this work right at all. Perhaps you can get together with a couple friends to pool resources and make this more practical to achieve? I don’t want you getting your hopes up by using inadequate means and expecting great results…

[Mark Suszko]

Agreed. I think Murch will also tell you, if you cut primarily to the music, best be darn sure that music choice really is locked-in first. Nothing worse than slavishly cutting to one beat, only to have the music you cut to, suddenly replaced at the last minute.

[Mark Suszko]

Think about using high rez stills from a stock house or shot yourself for free at a farm, and doing 2.5D compositing of the flat images in 3-d space. You get to tweak their relative depth and perspective and scale this way, and move them globally to simulate tracking shots later, without as much 3D cgi rendering drama. Could be photorealistic or abstract, up to you and how many layers deep you go.

If you look at Rodriguez’ chromakey work and shots for Sky Captain or whatever that recent retro SF movie was, and the recent French SF “Renaissance” one done all in B&W, the actual green walls are small generally, just big enough to be seen around the actor’s bodies,the rest is masked in post, and the neat thing about it is, you may not need three large walls worth of screen, just use a rotating platform or have the actors turn their bodies, and you get the same effect as if you had the camera on a long curved dolly track. You also save a lot of tiome changing and movong lights for more setups. Use one setup in multiple angles, with subtle light shifts to sell the change in angles. The oldsters will remember Fankie and Annette on that slow treadmill against the rear projected beach scenes…:-)

[Mark Suszko]

Here’s a nice low budget example.

https://videopia.org/content/view/103/231/

I’m not sure if Eric is using that white wall background setup to do a luminance key over fake white, or if that’s really the real white. I’m guessing the former, because the set is tiny but he moves aound in the frame a lot.

When I do this I tend to use greenscreen. If you go with white paper,
you NEED manual control of the camera functions, no exception. You also need to give the set enough depth so that the lighting of the talent can be completely separate from the lighting of the backdrop.
Something else to consider: if everything is peaking at or right under 100 IRE on the scope, you don’t leave a lot of room for adjustments.

My favorite technique for a white limbo set is to buy a piece of the cheapest vinyl kitchen/bathroom flooring you can find. Paint the reverse side, the side that takes the glue. First prime it with Kilz brand LATEX (not oil) based primer. Then your flat white or flat latex chromakey blue or green paint. Trap one edge between 2×4 boards and hang that so it naturally drapes down in a curve, let enough run down to walk on for full-body shots. Works awesome, cheap to do, very durable, somewhat portable (heavy, but rolls up).

[Mark Suszko]

Slam it shut, and direct all further correspondence to the company ceo/owner, certified mail, with signature.

When the phone starts ringing, stay dead calm. Respond to nothing they say, except to say: “we’re glad to work out a paymanet plan for you to get your outstanding bills paid, but until we’ve cleared this huge debt, we can’t do any more work, and we can’t release any materials. Its just business. In fact, we’re needing to erase some drives to make space for a paying customer. We’ll take a certified bank check for x amount to settle the immediate past-due balance.”

Any/All new work for them is done on a cash in advance/cash on delivery basis. The checks must clear FIRST.

Archive all project files and source materials and box them up for storage.

Surrender no tapes or dubs unless they are watermarked “approval copies” with a time code window burn across the middle or upper third. Get a receipt for each one handed over.

Notify fedex you no longer accept charges from this client, insist on all future shipping being prepaid by them. Refuse to accept deliveries billed to you.

Assume the money is gone. Assume this client is burned and will never come back. Assume a small claims fight for the tapes at least. Assume you are not the only one they have been doing this to, and that you will not be first in line to collect anything if they go broke.

Now you are free. Free of guilt or remorse. Free to do whatever must be done. Be firm, never falter; grinders prey on weakness, guilt, and second chances. All the leverage you have is in that footage. If they really need it to make their money, they will find a way to pay you. If too much time goes by, the footage becomes worthless to everyone. You just have to wait them out now.

[Mark Suszko]

I would say the more important question is, what is YOUR rate? Unless and until you know what your bottom-line rate is, going into a salary negotiation is a total crapshoot.

Compute your own minimum rate ahead of time, based on your expenses and what you need for a profit margin. Now you know if what they offer is too low or enough to go. Remember, first man to name a figure loses.

[Mark Suszko]

Because it was too much time/money/work to keep doing it at the level you saw in the first season. The timing is hard to pull off and it adds too much time to the post. It was really the main thing to distinguish the show in the first place, but you’re right, it got progressively weaker over seasons and is pretty much irrelevant now. In season one, if something like a timer was supposed to run fifteen seconds, it pretty closely took the final comp shots 15 seconds to happen on screen. In later seasons, they went back into “movie time” where the seconds are very flexible and can drag on into minutes as rewuired. I hate that. I think it’s much more fun and exciting to try and keep within actual time limits wherever practical and the scene calls for it. Obviously, if all events on 24 occurred in real time, most of the US would be dead because NOBODY cuts thru LA traffic like Jack Baur can in that show:p

[Mark Suszko]

heh, I still call every kind of screen move a “DVE” because I come from the time before AfterEffects existed, when if you wanted the picture to rotate or translate in xyz space, you used an Abekas Digital Video Effects box or similar gadget to make those moves. We actually couldn’t afford one of those, we used (still do!) a Pinnacle Alladin (last good thing they ever made, IMO). But you can do it all with AfterEffects, you just set some keyframes and move the shot around to your heart’s content. The easiest thing for a crop circle shot might be if you could get an overhead aerial view to start with, but when I did mine, I had an aerial shot from 45 degrees or so, and it still worked fine. I just keyframed in some rotation around a point along with a gradual, eased-in zoom, to make it look like a slow helocopter shot.

Now I don’t really know or work specifically with AfterEffects, so I don’t know how well the particle system for it works, ask one of the experts here. I am a little familiar with one of the better particle systems (ParticleIllusion) and I know it has some built-in grass-like effects that can likely be tweaked. I believe it will also work with AE. Trapcode has a plug-in that generates 3-d strokes, and if there is a way to generate enough little ones, say, using a cloud of dots generated in photoshop, or an expression, that could make you some swaying, corn-like stalks that could be made to move around a bit. Another thing to try would be card dance type effect from AE applied to an alpha’d layer of stalks cloned in photoshop, to create a subtle non-uniform wave move, like from wind… This is Eran Stern / Shaun Mullen territory I’m talking about now, not necessarily something a rank beginner should attempt…. but in my head, I think I can see how it could work… only if I tried it, it might take me a month or more to work it out…

In a 3-d CG environment, this would in some ways be much simpler to create, and then maybe composite into the real scene. Typically I think it would start with a “hair” generator, settings of the “hairs” tweaked to emulate the plants.

I’m thinking if you really are very new at this, keep it simple, do as much of it in photoshop as you can. Maybe break it into multiple near-identical layers, then while th eentire comp can have the fly-around move applied to it, you can independently keyframe the corn row layers in AE to create just a little waving action, enough to maybe blur the fake stalks in the front of the cut area so the effect is less noticeable. Best of luck, let us know how it works out.