[Mark Suszko]

The lack of cutaways is bad, and you have every right to complain about it.

But getting close-ups by moving the camera closer is the DEFINITION of a “close-up”. And this is how the Big Boys tend to do it.

Tightening your shot with the zoom is actually a cheat, we all do it from time to time, but the more “cinematic” way to go about that shot is to treat your lens not like a zoom, but a variable Prime lens. Meaning, set the lens to one agle, then if you want the next shot tighter, you move the camera IN. The difference between a camera moving in and a fixed camera zooming in is sometimes subtle, but has everything to do with changing the perspectives and proportions in the shot.

Have you considered making a printed shot sheet that gets passed to the camera ops? A laundry list of shots you need?

[Mark Suszko]

I think you need to delegate more:-)

[Mark Suszko]

You are not doing this all by yourself, are you? What kind of staffing will you have?

[Mark Suszko]

Heh, Todd, I think everybody’s got at least ONE story like that. Didn’t happen to me, but I heard of two separate instances where the clients liked the animatic so much, they just said to run that.

And they did!

Well, at least it was *distinctive*! 🙂

[Mark Suszko]

I think for the 7-minute quick-turn bits, individual DVD recorings will get you tied up with excessive times spent loading, spinning-up, and finalizing afterwards. Maybe what I’d explore for those is to record those right to a hard drive, perhaps right to a laptop, then do a quickie authoring/export/burn to make individual 7-minute masters.

But what you’re covering in these sessions isn’t all that clear, nor is how the final product(s) are to look and how fast they have to be ready. Do they need to be handed out to people before they leave for the day? Or can you do them overnight?

[Mark Suszko]

Well you CAN make it that simple, he’s just saying you trade off quality if you don’t budget time for clean-up editing because nothing runs clean at most of these kinds of events. Your situation however may just not allow it, so you may have to put up with dead times on the disks. If it was me, what I’d do is have the cameraman use a remote on the recorder and pause the recording when that junk happens. They could also use the start/top and/or chapter commands to break their sessions up for you, on the fly, in advance. That could help shorten up the dead times.

Six hours on a DVD… well, we use Panasonic brand stand-alone DVD recorders here and I tried them in 4-hour mode and was not at all impressed by the quality. Most I would record on one is in 2-hour mode. Then you can use a dubbing tower to churn out mass copies while you wait. We have a 10-drive tower here that I’ve clocked at 6 minutes per run doing ten 2-hour DVD’s at a time. Pre-print the blank disks and you are good to go.

[Mark Suszko]

I agree totally. Proper lighting and sound is a major part of it. The other is, shooting with 12-year-old S-VHS cameras with a single simple imaging chip is not going to look as good as network product.

Probably the most common problem would be multigeneration dubbing and transcoding between the format you aquired on, the format you edited in, the format you distributed the master back to that cable company on, and the format the head end eventually plays out to the viewers. Start with older analog shooting, then take it thru as many as five generations of analog dubs and A/D conversions, and then play it out of a server hard drive at 25 megs or less, and that’s why it looks like it does.

It doesn’t help that some Access operations still are using retired analog gear or prosumer gear for that service, or using formats like VHS for play-out. And if you give them a DVCAM tape, you have no assurance it won’t be played out as composite, direct, or worse, composite out into another encoder that finally puts it on the server that plays out to the viewers.

(/rant mode on) The exclusive franchise to serve a community is a license for the cable company to print money. Providing good access facilities is prt of their bargain. Access should never be considered something to dispense with as a “bare minimum” effort. Communities and their governments need to hold the cable company’s feet to the fire to provide decent gear and facilites and training to the community members that participate in access programming. If nothing else, for legal reasons. (/end rant mode)

If you do some snooping around on the engineering tour, find out exactly what the signal chain is like, and see if you can provide something as close to their final output format/standards as possible, so your show doesn’t need to run that gauntlet of conversions and transcodings.

[Mark Suszko]

And clients either don’t admit it or don’t realize it, but often they don’t have the ability to really visualize the concepts, how they will execute, and how they interact. So you go ahead and do a lot of work and then some client guy looks at the rough cut and shoots it down because “it’s not like I pictured it”. Boards up front put everybody on the same page, and so if they don’t like it at the boards stage, you can fix it much easier and cheaper than after it’s been shot and posted. The more time or money you’re going to spend, the more sense it makes to board things out, even if just stick figure sketches.

I board out many things for myself, for my own use, even if it’s just stick figures on the back of envelopes. It is just a good organizational tool. You can buy or make script sheets with 2-column TV style for A/V and a third column of boxes for sketches, they are useful for trying different ideas. MArkertek I think also sells pads of larger panels for traditional boards.

Antics is a very nice 3d program for creating boards and animatics, but I stick to simpler, cheaper things like a free older copy of Poser and maybe google sketch-up if I want to draw out something for pre-viz without having art drawing skills.

[Mark Suszko]

“So now we have a big decision to make IF we decide to do any radio spots at all: do we target only for the wedding side of our biz or make the commercial more of a “we do this and this and this” kind of thing? I would suspect it would end up as a modified wedding spot because of the station’s demographic. However, if the truth be known, we’re actually trying to tone down our wedding biz while increasing the corporate stuff. It’s to the point now where we have to decide to go big or stay home. “

You will only know grief, trying to advertise both at the same time, in the same place, in the same way.

This is really something you need to figure out before you take another step. Advertising Corporate video stuff for radio, I’m not seeing, except as low-key sponsorship during the business reports. Advertising the corporate services on TV, well, maybe on cable with placement in FNN and CNBC, but you’re fighting uphill there, I think: Unless you can already show clips from high end prestigious projects, you’re going to look too poor to bother with.

Instead of example clips, an all-motion-graphics “identity” piece may work better, because it lets the business viewer fill in the blanks with imagination. Throw a ton of Aftereffects and 3-d at it, mega eye-candy, but all tasteful and crisp and uncluttered-looking.

I would maybe pitch it like this: opening images are of a tired-looking, very pedestrian powerpoint. Then you blow it up, destroy it, yanking out elements one at a time and replacing them with upscale 2-d and 3-d graphics and animation, like renovating an old house into a mansion, or rebuilding a junk car into a hot rod.

All while a competent and confident-sounding voice-over intones some copy about professionalism starts from the ground-up. That your staff knows ( and by the graphics we’re watching we SEE they know) how to take your basic information and format it to attract new business, excite your customers, to tell your story.

In a down market, most people reduce their advertising; my opinion is, that’s the time to advertise more than ever. The ad guys are hungry , hurting, and ready to cut deals, your competition is hiding out, you have the floor all to yourself. You can grab market share and mindshare, and when the bulk of the customer base is ready to buy again, you are the one that’s top of mind.

[Mark Suszko]

Repetition alone is not the only way to build brand identity. That’s lazy, IMO. Pure repetition with a message that’s never refreshed gets tuned out.

You could instead sponsor related events, contests, charity fundraisers and themed remotes like fashion shows, battles of the cover bands, humorous cake-decorating and-carrying relay races, karaoke contests, best/funniest wedding toast contest, etc. The idea is if it is wedding-related even in just a tangential way, you want to attach your name to it by association. Like motorcar-related manufacturers sponsor race cars, trucks, etc. You could make something like the “best toast” or “best wedding joke”, or “How I knew she was the one” audio essays, sponsored and BRANDED with your name… a daily 2-minute feature on the morning radio show, and have people schedule their listening to hear your sponsored event, instead of passively absorbing “conventional” spots.

A truly hungry and creative sales director for the station should be very anxious to try some of these for you, as they also raise the station’s own profile.

Moreover, while these are radio remotes or promos, something like the cake races would also net you legitimate press coverage in print and TV, for free. Show me a local TV news director who WOULDN’T run funny video of ladies trying not to drop a huge, fragile, high-stacked wedding cake as they run, then falling into a pile of cake and frosting, with shrieking crowds cheering them on. You KNOW they would run that as a closing thirty seconds, and probably three minute packages on slow weekends. With your sponsoring name prominent in the shots. Heck, you may volunteer to shoot it yourselves and send it out as a VNR to more than one market!:-)

And don’t forget youtube! Have you SEEN the number of hits for clips where the wedding party’s first dance suddenly breaks into choreographed mass-dance scenes like “Thriller”? That seems to be a huge trend lately, kind of “Bollywoodizing” the reception. Thousands of hits. check it out yourself. Some of the above-mentioned events would be very clip-worthy. I am NOT saying you should throw away elegance and class and just do a lot of wacky-tacky promotions. But look over the ideas, generate some of your own, to find and tweak the ones that promote your image while still getting attention from your key demographics. What about a set of interview spots, called “One Year After”, where you hear a couple sound bites from a first anniversary couple? Then you hit them with the fact the video captured it all and brings those memories back time after time, one year or twenty years from now. See? Classy, romantic. Cheap to do. Sells you without making you sound like anything else the station sells, from funeral homes to used cars.

“Call to action” spots work better for heavily-repeatable bulk commodity purchases than your kind of unique, only-doing-it-once kind of service anyway.

Let’s be frank: nobody is going to change or set their wedding date based on YOUR schedule as the videographer, right? No, the key factor in setting a date is the availability of the church and the preferred reception hall. Everything else flows from that, backwards and forwards. The secondary influencer is weather, for travel, general guest comfort, and the honeymoon, which is a strong reason June is the real popular month.

So a radio spot saying you have a special deal going on NOW, even if it is just to encourage a deposit to reserve you for advance bookings six months off, is not IMO going to move a lot of booking decisions except for the brides that already have a date that coincides with the deal.

I think it just makes you sound desperate for bookings, whereas the sponsored events can also take you thru a year’s worth of coverage, but never make you seem like you’re dying for bookings, rather, that you’re just intimately associated with wedding-like stuff in your town at all times. Puts you top of mind in a completely different way than pure repetition. I would argue, a more useful way.