[Mark Suszko]

You didn’t say what kind of cloth it was, might make a difference between a spandex and a muslin. Steam will help, as will putting it under tension with a weight like a piece of metal pipe. Some wrinkling will happen if you can’t keep humidity stable as well.

For getting it onto the floor and having a seamless sweep,assuming the fabric is long enough you can just hang it lower so gravity will make it curve naturally, then tack the farthest-forward end to the floor with gaffer tape or sandbags. The problem you get there is, shoes will get it dirty and tend to tear it up.

Alternatives on the floor part include painting the floor or painting cheap 10-cent foot-square linoelum tiles that you can throw down unglued and take up again when done. The individual tiles are sturdy and easy to clean or touch-up or replace. You can paint the back sides white or black for another 3 floor alternatives.

When I had to do this earlier in the past year, I used a large roll of white photog’s background paper (about $50 and good for 2 or 3 useable sections) and painted that with a matched shade of green flat custom-mixed from Ace Hardware. Taped that to the studio’s concrete floor and it allowed people to walk on it and stand on it with few consequences. Where the paper met the green muslin hanging part, I used the existing curling tendency of the paper to make a little hummock or bump or cove that hid the joint from the camera’s POV. Once everything is lit flat and even, it all blends remarkably well. I’d planned to just throw the floor paper away after the single shoot day, but it stood up well enough that I instead rolled it up for storage and have re-used it twice more for these gigs. Scraps of it are handy to keep around to shoot props and things with.

I feel about 4 uses like this is the lifetime for a sheet of the paper, if all people do is stand on it. So one fifyt-dollar roll of the photog’s paper is good for maybe 12 shoots. If the women wear spike heels, good luck.

The more the actors walk or move, the more they’ll tear it up or dirty it. It helps to have a good thick doormat or carpet sample nearby for people to use first, also, you can throw black gaffer tape on the bottoms of shoes that are too “grippy” to avoid making lots of tears in the paper. I repair minor tears by just backing the tear with gaffer tape and pressing it back together. Or take a scrap from off- camera or a spare section and lay it over the hole, done.

Please don’t forget that in many cases, you don’t need as much green screen as you think. If there’s enough to make a clean inch around the talent, you’ve got enough, thanks to garbage mattes and masking. But if you really, really NEED a LOT of green, RoseBrand in New York sells a super-wide, flame-proofed cloth that’s a very good value for this, say, for shooting entire cars on a set. You can get key cloth sample cards thru the mail by going to their web site and browsing.

[Mark Suszko]

“Hot Pock-ets”…..

Oh yeah, the zazz is back in jingle creation… well, maybe not:-)

[Mark Suszko]

I wonder how you are positioning yourself when you make these pitches and to what kinds of businesses. The smaller the business you’re pitching to, the more they expect you to do and fulfill all the producer functions, essentially a one man ad agency, with all that implies from creative to deliverables… so if you are just pitching yourself as a great editor, that’s probably not really connecting with them at a level that will lead to a buy-in decision. They need an end-to end “total solutions” guy that can take their doodles on a napkin and turn that into everything including the time buys and ancillary media. You’ll have to talk their language, as a businessman, not as a video guy. I find it rare that people in our business are equally good at both at the same time, those are the guys that tend to make huge bank. Most of us see sales and marketing and business areas as necessary evils that enable us to make the cool videos we want. And I’m no different. But I’m not self-employed right now, so I have the luxury. You’ll just have to get over your distaste for sales if you want to get work.

If these are heavyweight businesses, you’ll have to beat out their current agencies or internal departments to get any play. That’s hard for a rich guy with a large staff, harder for a one man band shop on a shoestring. My opinion regarding this type of client is not to compete directly with whatever they use now, but instead seek to join up with that established team. I.E. pitch to their internal communications manager that you are a freelancer “hired gun” that can be brought in to temporarily bulk-up the team for any bigger projects that come up. Or as a temp to fill in for a missing person, or to provide a specific skillset they don’t have, say AE compositing, or CGI.

Working like that, you have to charge more because you’re carrying more costs of business like your owen benfits and insurance, etc. but on the upside for them they only have to pay you for the time you worked and not carry you all year. The best part of the temping may be that you maintain a close inside contact so that you’re already in their heads when they suddenly get a full-time opening.

[Mark Suszko]

I forgot now because I only watched it one time, but if it doesn’t have a few seconds of scientific/medical-looking animation in it showing how it relieves pressure points and keeps the neck straight, it should.

I think that would help sell it. Making that animation could cost between $500 and $1500 depending on the artist and level of detail you needed, and if it was 2-d or CGI.

Instead of saying what this spot should be billed at, I’m just going to say a figure that sounds “reasonable” from the standpoint of if I was contracting to have this done for me.

Including the newly proposed animations and the lovely compositing work already done, I would not flinch at a bill for eight to ten grand. However, I think an identical such spot *could* be done, shooting, post, all done, for a cost as low as three grand before markup.

Is that a wise amount to charge, I hesitate to say yes, because I don’t know the kind of hours put into the shooting and compositing or the new animation. I would assume three days for the post work, all-inclusive, and a day for the shooting, so on a strict time basis, multiply 4 days times your day rate to get into the ballpark before adding any markup and materials/expenses.

Tha magic of the day rate, and it’s curse, is that it doesn’t reflect or care how hard or not you worked in those ten hours, how brilliant you were, what dragons you had to slay, what problems you innovated a way around, how much of your Wa and chi you invested in this. Some would say time is time and all else is irrelevant. There are biblical and ethical as well as economic arguments in favor of this idea.

Others would say you should add something to the markup if you had to make a super-hard effort or if some part was especially unpleasant or painful. That decision has to be up to the individual.

If someone is a super pain, you might very well decide to add on a “jerk charge” to your markup, (under some other name of course) to either make you feel better, discourage the pest/ grinder from coming back, or both.

If you are going to set such extra charges however, think about the other side: would you give the client a discount for making your job easier or more pleasant or fun? Have you ever?
Seems to me that you can’t do one without the other and sleep well at night.

It is not all just a numbers game, there are intangibles and opportunity costs galore to deal with. Think these thru and try to be consistent with whatever rules you cook up for your billing.

[Mark Suszko]

If you spend a little time online, you can find free high-quality image maps from public domain sources like NASA and USGS. This effect is possible in AfterEffects or any compositor. So if you have a compositor, you could do this for “free”, and whatever you bill is almost pure profit. It’s not something exclusive to 3d cgi.

[Mark Suszko]

Will all gear be on the same phase?

[Mark Suszko]

Just a small correction… I have a “cheapie” consumer DV camcorder from JVC in the $300 or less range, it will do stop-motion as well as time lapse, to a digital card in the camera, duration is only limited by the card size.

I used to do stop-motion 2 ways, by speeding-up conventional footage in multiple passes thru the decks using dynamic tracking, or by setting up an edit controller as an intervalometer. Hard on the tapes and record heads, but the nice thing about taping in real time is you preserve an archive you can go back to.

Early versions of Premiere had a built-in intervalometer capture function as part of their digitizing window; you could set a tape source or camera feed running in full manual, tell Premiere how often to grab a bite of two frames, and walk away, and come back to a bin with essentially a finished time lapse already on it. I don’t know if the latest Premiere has that, but there may be such a capture utility in the new software Adobe bought from Serious Magic and renamed OnLocation. Worth checking. There is a similar mac based program out now too.

Nowadays, if you can spare the storage space for it, and skip tape for a Firestore or Citidisk, you could digitize eight hours into the drives and then just apply a speed increase to the timeline, record the output, done. However, I can’t remember an automated NLE capture session that went more than three hours unattended without a hiccup of some kind…. I believe Firestore may now include intervalometer settings in it’s menu choices.

A digital stills cam with a built-in or clip-on rented Intervalometer can grab higher-quality stills, which, as has been said, allows you to later zoom in and pan around on the stream of images on your timeline. This is usually the best way to go IMO for overall quality at least cost, you are essentially shooting hi def if the still cam is more than what, five MP?.

For conventional video cameras with a firewire port, you can hook them to a laptop running scenalyzer or another shareware/freeware stop-motion/time lapse software, and set the grab rate you want. To get the camera to not do it’s auto-off powersave function, sometimes leaving the loading door open defeats that function, other times you need a menu setting.

At my work, we have had great luck on remote time lapse jobs using Axis brand web cams which automatically take and transfer nice jpegs to a remote location via a built-in server in the camera. You just need power and a phone line. Transfer the stills to storage on a regular basis, because if the camera server’s power gets interrupted, it will lose the cached images in it’s memory and re-start with a new picture number 0001.jpg, etc. We shoot the creation of the State Fair Butter Cow in time lapse every year this way, and it’s a big hit with viewers, I would go so far as to say a “moooving experience”.

And if the location is really remote, a Colorado outfit sells webcams with a cell phone modem and solar panel that can get you a stream of stills at most any rate down to about one every ten seconds, long as you’re within reach of a cell tower’s coverage.

You will want to practice before you commit to the actual job. Most of your camera settings will have to be set manually, you’ll need security for the gear, reliable AC power and a very well damped tripod that won’t be jostled by wind, etc. If you want to do really huge panoramas, like 360 degrees over a full day, consider using the tripod and clockdrive of an astronomy telecope, hooked to a lipstick camera or the digital stills cam.

[Mark Suszko]

Let’s not get too esoteric here: It is, after all, just a travel pillow. A technology that’s hundreds of years old. And one that historically makes you look goofy using it, no matter what. This one particularly does because it makes you look like you were in a whiplash accident. But maybe it *IS* an improvement. That’s what he has to sell.

That thing is never going to be a fashion accessory. I’m not sure how you’re going to make an item like that much more “sexy”. You actually become a parody of yourself if you push that slickness too far on such a prosaic item. So you don’t.

You fight goofy-looking with “practical”, or “saves money”, and “but it works”. For example, the Flo-Bee vacuum hair cutting device. Our family wore out two in twelve years and is on our third one, they’ve all more than paid for themselves, and the thing looks stupid but actually WORKS. We don’t take the flowbee out on public walks, or show it to houseguests. We just use it at home and nobody can tell we’re saving huge amounts of money on kid’s trims alone. Back to the issue…

So you concentrate, not on fashion appeal, but on function and benefit. And testimonials are an obvious, direct way to do that. You could go another way and concentrate on end-result benefit, for example comparing two people on the same trip: one used the pillow, the other didn’t, and the non-user is either tired, sore, or both. However, this takes longer to tell well on screen.

You can argue that the testimonials are not as sincere or effective as you might want. In a spot like this, I think you want as many different examples as possible so everybody in the target market sees a person they might identify with. You try to show as many possible situations and users as you can, to get consumers to picture themselves using it.

The one other testimonial you HAVE to have in there somewhere is a scientific or medical expert saying yes, this really works. The quality of that particular testimonial endorsement is specially important. The more prestigious list of endorsements you can amass, the better. Typically you would see a a sports-related celebrity used for this.

I wouldn’t ride the guy too hard on what he’s done. It’s technically very well executed for what it is, particularly the fake airline seat compositing. They can’t all be Chanel no. 5 spots with swimming pool montages.

[Mark Suszko]

I’m jealous of how well the compositing came out, would like to know more about how you put that together. The spot compares favorably in appearance to the many others we see on the tube. That is, it looks very much like the rest of them. Which could be good, because it’s familiar, or bad, because it’s not distinct and memorable from the rest.

I don’t think anybody runs 60’s anymore unless they are part of a longer infomercial. And you get more separate chances to make an impression running two thirties for the same money as for one sixty, IMO.

When figuring out the costs, are you factoring in fulfilment? Because an outfit like Bamzu not only makes the spot and arranges the time buys, but also handles taking the orders, processing the credit cards, and shipping out the product.

What you charge for the spot alone is based on time and materials, plus your markup. To handle all thsoe other things I mentioned would obviously add much more to the package.

[Mark Suszko]

What do you watch for fun, and can you turn off your editing sensibilities long enough to enjoy it on it’s own terms? That is, are you a fun or annoying person to see a movie with?

Name a film you would love to have the chance to re-cut, give some sense of what you’d try to do differently and why.

What kinds of things inspire you. Do you have any personal rituals, or maybe a creative exercise you do to get your head in the right mood before you start?

Without naming names, what was the worst editing experience you ever had, and why? What did you learn from that?

What are the three most common mistakes you see beginning editors make?