[Mark Suszko]

We used DeWolfe for a long time, then Music Bakery. Liked them both. Nowadays we’re just as likely to use sonicfire or garageband to compose something made from loops.

[Mark Suszko]

Referrals from still photgs and event arrangers/planners.
All my business was referrals from former clients ans stills guys for about 4 years, I never had to advertise, ever, and was turning business away.

[Mark Suszko]

I have seen them in many sizes and levels of completion, from scribbles on a napkin to animatics with actual CGI and motion in them, and I have seen boards in tiny boxes running down a third column of a 2-column script, to poster-board size with from three to nine to 20 frames on them, with and without captions under. You didn’t say if this was for a movie, a music video, an effects sequernce, a TV spot, or what.

So I’d say I’d be surprised to know of a “standard”, though if I was going to use them myself, I’d tend to go with the posterboard size with six to nine individual frames about the size of my hand, and up to 3 lines of captioning under each of the frames, which is what we used to use when composing 30-second TV ad pitches in school. At work I used 8&1/2 by 11 inch standard pages with a 3-column arrangement (Picture, audio, video description) or 2-column (Pics downthe left, copy down the right). If you’re doing something longer and more elaborate, you’ll have more frames to show, obviously, and then the individual frame sizes will have to get smaller to fit on one or two boards. Or you get way more boards:-)

Premade storyboard tablets are available thru better art supply stores and places like Markertek.

[Mark Suszko]

Depends if its a work for hire arrangement.

The issue at hand is, are they paying for your creative design work or are they “leasing” your designs that you retain ownership of for their use?

If the latter, they technically owe you for each iteration based on the template you designed (as if it was a song you copyrighted). If the former, you get paid once and they own it to use however they like, and they own the copyrights (like an advertising jingle).

I don’t think you have a strong case to hold out for payments every time they use the template without you, you’ll chase away most clients with that, so probably the practical thing to do is to charge a bit more up front for the one-time, use-it-any-way-you-want fee, and let them own it all after they pay you once. Be sure to retain the right to reference the original template work in your portfolio, and on web pages, so you can get more work.

Then, as the guy who knows the template best, offer them a discounted rate to adapt the existing work the same way they were going to do themselves, for a lower fee since the hard part is done and you’re just dropping in and tweaking new text and pictures. Suggest a “retainer fee” to “maintain” the project for them for some flat price for three alternate versions, for one year. They might like being able to just forget about it and know that the guy that created the thing will take good care of the changes for them. In any case they are not going to go for paying full-price for each iteration, but may go for a lower rate to, as I said, “service” the template for multiple uses.

Reimagining your situation as a video project, say, a 30-second spot, my clients normally own the whole thing once done and paid for. If they want to do alternate versions, they can take it anywhere or do it themselves, but hopefully they’ll bring it back to me because I already am deeply intimate with the material and their needs. And I’ll bill them each time they bring it back, based on what the project needs. I think this actually brings in more business than holding onto the rights ourselves, which we can’t really do in our situation anyhow. Pretty much everything we do is on a work for hire basis.

It is common, I know, to feel very proprietary and nostalgic about your creative work; your art or your script or jingle or whatever is “your baby”. Let it go. Let me suggest that your creativity is not a finite resource, that you will come up with more good ideas as long as you live, and you should get people to hire you for that, as someone who generates new things of value all the time, rather than trying to squeeze every drop out of your individual old projects done for one-shot products, living off past glories.

This is the difference between a commercial art mentality and a fine arts mentality. Commercial artists give up the stuff for a onetime fee and share it with the world, albeit usually in anonymity or at least, obscurity (except within the trade)… fine artists keep it all close to the vest and use galleries and such to sell it, and may not get paid or recognized until after death. Both can become immortalized, just by different routes.

Not to say you should not get paid fairly and well in any case. But not every job is the Sistine Chapel Ceiling, you know? And if you made something really that good, don’t you think people are going to come looking for you to make more good stuff like what they saw anyway? Are you giving the art away or is it advertising that brings you yet more work? probably both.

[Mark Suszko]

The stuff you would put on the web without clearances is illegal, and you getting paid to put it on the web is illegal. You are making money in exchange for facilitating the unlawful act.

Will the U.S. Marshals be breaking down your door? Unlikely. Will some guy from the record company, using automatic webcrawling spiders that never sleep, eventually find your web site with the uncleared usage, and have the company lawyers send you a Cease-And-Desist? Quite possibly. Ignore the Cease-And-Desist, and you can expect a lawsuit asking for damages. Many Star Trek Nerds have shut down hugely popular as well as tiny and insignificant fan sites, because Paramount did pretty much exactly this.

At which point you have to ask yourself; “Do I have two years and perhaps many thousands of dollars in lawyer fees and court costs to waste in defending against this suit by a huge company that has hot and cold running lawyers on retainer, and what do I stand to lose if the judge finds for the record company?

All for some cover band? They must be DARN good.

[Mark Suszko]

Why not use free public domain sources? USGS and NASA have aerials of the entire planet, a little digging and you can get what you want there for free.

[Mark Suszko]

It is pretty common for wedding type cover bands to show clips of themselves performing to get new bookings. They try to keep the clips short and incomplete, using just a few seconds of enough songs to establish that they can cover the songs well enough and look presentable. Their stated defense is that the song “samples” are not saleable since they are incomplete. They generally get away with this, but technically they don’t have the rights to do such a video. They *might* have paid for the rights to perform the cover songs live, but those are different rights from making a video with the covers.

For such a band to make a clip demo of covers in hopes of getting a label interested, they are dreaming. And my rule of thumb is; is money changing hands somewhere, i.e. are YOU getting paid to make this product, knowing they don’t have the permissions to use the elements?

If OTOH, the band is performing all their own original material, that is a different situation, and might be worth pursuing. Know what your day rate needs to be, then quote the job for time and materials.

[Mark Suszko]

Well, I found Roger Corman’s autobiography a fast, fun, and inspiring read. What a career and ovure’ that guy has had and he’s STILL making movies. Not usually very good ones, to be sure, however, almost all of them made a profit. Plus, he nurtured the careers of a LOT of industry giants thru the years.

[Mark Suszko]

There is nothing stopping you from shooting SD in wide screen now, and that is the easiest arrangement to work with the existing base of users. Easy to watch as letterbox in 4:3 sets now, and most wide screen sets can automatically scale it to fit, even as they uprez the playback. If you shoot on HD now, you’re going to be handing out SD DVD’s more than likely until the BluRay infrastructure catches up.

My own belief is that now that the HDDVD/BluRay war is over, a lot of broadcast and semi-broadcast/prosumer Blu tools are going to flood into our business in, oh, say a year. Some early adopters will spend huge to get into that earlier, but the great mass of us will probably be waiting about a year to 18 months for a few things to all align:

1: Apple has to put BluRay authoring and burning ability into FCP, STAT. Adobe will drink their milkshake, THEY’LL DRINK IT UP, if Apple does not get this together soon. It should be a crash program over there to get this into a free FCP/DVDSP update. Getting together with the drive makers to get the drivers and all that worked out has to be a crash priority. The drive maker that gets an affordable, stable working BluRay reader/burner unit in the marketplace first is going to gain a huge advantage. Unless their name is Iomega:-P

2: We are going to need some prosumer/broadcast BluRay recorders that work just like the stand-alone DVD recorders from Pioneer, Panasonic, etc. we use use like VCR’s now. Those already exist in Japan, I’ve seen pictures of several makes and models, but they have not made big inroads here just yet likely due to the format wars. Ergo, my 12-18 month prediction.

3: Duplicators and players: Players, the companies have already taken care of. Sony will be running the maquiladoras night and day from here on out. BluRay Duplicators are well in hand already, you can get a Bravo Primera Pro that dubs BluRay for about three grand. Look for the price on such units, and the cost of the media to drop as the suppliers gear up to flood the market in an attempt to get the most market share first.

I expect the next CES and NAB to be showing tons of this gear, as I think it will become the next archive/recording/interchange and distribution standard for physical media, for the low to mid-level parts of the market. Comparing the cost of BluRay burners, dubbers, and media to something like digibeta, its a slam-dunk business decision. This of course is just one person’s opinion, and what the high end market does may be totally different, but my gut tells me the “lingua franca” betacam-type standard for the next decade is going to be blueray everything for prosumer and corporate/industrial work.

I personally would find this a nervous and exciting time, waiting on my purchase decisions until all this falls into place. We have been making these plans ourselves for a couple months now. If we have to shelve them for a year due to imminent budget cuts, no big deal; things will be that much more worked out by the time we’re ready to buy.

But what should YOUR decision be? My opinion: If the programming is important or long-lived enough that it is worth re-authoring in a year, or if it is for broadcast, go ahead and shoot it HD tape or hard drive today, perhaps on rented gear so as not to commit to heavy purchases just yet. Distribute copies people can watch on existing legacy platforms TODAY as SD DVD. When everybody has a Bluray drive or player, re-release the HD content on that format from there onwards. If the shelf life for the content is not more than 24 months, I’d save time, grief, and money and just shoot it SD widescreen with what I have on hand, and wait for the big blu event horizon to burst forth with the products we need within 18 months or so.

[Mark Suszko]

Blume’s answer here is the most accurate IMO.