[Mark Suszko]

When I joined the COW, I made a conscious choice to post my name “in the clear” from the beginning, but I also belong to other sites that allow psuedonyms and such as well, and at those I can maintain a “secret identity”, perhaps more than one.

I think there is room for both; sometimes you can open up and share more if you’re anonymous and not afraid of what your bosses or clients might see you saying. That is of course a double-edged sword; some forum sites are practically unuseable because of exceptionally rude and obnoxius posters hiding behind a fake name that chase others away like thugs around a shop door. You can still make a site work with fake names but it certainly increases the overhead for administration, spending much more time and work moderating. I know several moderators (not here) that would say it’s not worth the hassles, their poor forums resemble USENET on a bad day.

I know for a fact it is more polite here and more self-regulating than other forums, most likely because of the peer pressure and use of real names.

I can see where it would sometimes be handy for a famous pro to post under a fake name so as to be able to share ideas and opinions without a lot of annoying fanboy chatter coming back at them, or people bugging them off-topic for jobs, etc. Whatever your choice, each site sets a policy and you can like it or lump it. Unless it’s a paid membership, it’s kind of hard to complain about this one little detail considering all the free benefits you get. Like being invited to a friend’s house then complaining the free drinks are not cold enough.

[Mark Suszko]

“I’m Sally Struthers, and for just pennies a day, you can keep Nick and many like him off the mean streets…”

But seriously, I did one of those tributes for a transportation agency administrator who “died in harness” as it were. He was a super popular guy that had worked his way up from when Romans were first laying roads, I mean been there forever. So we we had a lot of interview material to choose from and as Nick says, co-conspirators in friends and family who came up with good pictures.

Some of the stuff just couldn’t be illustrated, so I did a couple of deliberately cheesy “Home Improvement” styled dve-based animations to help illustrate the stories. There was one about the guy dumping a whole mess of turtles in the parking lot one time and holding turtle races, plus he was a NASCAR fan, so I photoshopped a number 8 on a turtle and animated it scooting thru the screen as a bookend to the story.

Another segment was all about how this guy was always super even tempered and mild mannered, never swore, etc. but one time when the rental car broke down on the way to see a big race, and he and his friends were missing it, the person talks about how the late friend finally let his anger go as he hurled a hub cap out into the Florida swamps. I did some simple but well timed DVE moves on a posed photo of the guy and his friends that really “showed” it without ever actually *showing* it. Finished the thing off with a quote about pioneers and building roads, and got a lot of the audience people coming up afterwards asking if I knew the man because I’d captured his essence so well. I didn’t know the guy, and had just picked the obscure quotation at random off a google search, but it was all just a serendipitous synergy of the music, shot choices, and pacing of the cuts and other transitions. But you know you’re cooking when another person who doesn’t know the guy watches the thing and gets shiny eyes afterwards. I spent about two days on image captures, logging cuts and prepping/precomposing DVE’s and art and picking music, then four days on the edit.

I could see doing more of these if the money was good, but they also take a bit of an emotional toll after a while, I think. Even if you don’t know the guy.

[Mark Suszko]

More people read vidpro than post to it, I’m sure plenty sent emails direct to the magazine offices, and others signed your petition, as I did.

You know, If it wasn’t to help my friend and colleague Mr.R., I would never have signed that petition thing; I’m leery of such things on the net and consider them mostly traps to harvest people’s names and personal data for spam and direct sales work.

I actually doubt it will sway those magazine people, unless the notes came from advertisers. From a content perspective, they have every reason to keep him. But like others have implied, a lot of the trades have slimmed down to just being a big brochure for direct-marketing hardware and to a lesser extent, software products. The people that want and need Reisner’s stuff most are now hanging out here, in cyberspace.

[Mark Suszko]

Are there rich families around that would pay well to have docs made? No doubt. What would they pay? Based on what I see on MTV’s “My Super Sweet 16”, I would say there is no upper limit. You could probably hire Gondry to direct it, if they had the cash. How hard would you have to work on it, what would your expenses be like? The greatest expense there might not be technical, but in cracking the social network to get the shot at the job in the first place.

Such work comes mostly thru referrals, IMO, and not from cold-call salesmanship. You get picked because they ask their circle of other providers like caterers and event planners and private club secretaries and friends who’ve done it already. I think you’d also want to know, going in, how “hands-on” these folks want to be in controlling what you’re doing. If they are really fussy micro-managers, you’re going to lose a lot of time, and you want to budget for that. No way I’d work with people like that on a flat fee basis, it would be hourly. It usually should be, anyhow.

My gut tells me you also want to get a meaningful advance on the project to cover your out of pocket production expenses and time spent on the job, because you’re going to be working without completing the project for some time. Should the patron decide they don’t like how the doc is going, you can easily get yourself into a grinder situation unless you contracted for regular progress payments.

Personal story:
At a wedding anniversary party for my inlaws, my sis-in-law had paid a local guy a lot of money to make a video slideshow. It was really horrible. Very much like the infamous “Star Wipe” sequence from The Simpson’s episode with the Ned Flanders Dating video edited by little Lisa Simpson, where Homer insists every transition be a star wipe, because “why have hamburger when you can have steak?”.

The guy just randomly threw down photos in no kind of sequence, each up for the same 7 seconds, regardless of content, theme, chronology, or context, then applied random DVE moves and transitions, and for a sound track, just played the first 18 seconds a piece out of thirty songs, again, with no consideration for context or anything. This magnum dopus cost sis in law over a grand for sure. If you were watching me watching this, I looked like I was Malcom McDowell undergoing the Ludovico Technique from “A Clockwork Orange”. My wife’s arm was sore later from where I was unconsiously gripping it, the reverse of when she was in labor with our first kid. Yeah, it was that traumatic of a viewing experience for me.

The inlaws thought it was awesome.

They turned to me at the end, knowing I do some kind of television for a living, and said: “That was GREAT! Did YOU make that?”

I startled myself and everyone around me with how fast and loud I said NO! (more normally then)”…um, that is, um, no, I had nothing to do with that, someone else has to take the, um, credit for that. Well, look at the time, gotta go…”

I guess I was a little put out that nobody had asked me to help make this for them, I would have done it for free and it would have told a story. Guess what I’m saying is there are people with money that don’t really know what quality looks like. They don’t see a thing as valuable unless it has a price tag on it though. They are the low-hanging fruit.

Perhaps I was even more appalled at how people in the audience were perceiving the business I was in, what low standards or lack of critical viewing skills they had, that they would consider this dreck watchable. After I cooled down a bit I decided, you know, my in-laws come from a time before TV was even invented, and to them, just seeing their faces on a TV is still something of a miracle of science.

I don’t think in good conscience I could charge the same rate if you are throwing things up at the screen versus doing a real creative job, making montages or actual documentaries. Maybe I’m not really a businessman at heart.

I saw how the guy that made my inlaws’ video does what he does. Took a tour. He had high school girl interns at minimum wage throwing stills down under an overhead camera, not even a scanner, just a camera, about seven seconds per still, doing a fast grab into an NLE or even just Powerpoint and throwing it down onto a timeline. Picture choice was just whatever was on top of the pile in the shoebox at the time. This guy was high volume, churning the stuff out like a factory, I’d be surprised if his entire cost of production on this job was over $50, and all that only for the kid’s time spent scanning the shots. Nowadays if you have a mac, the free bundled iLife suite in it can do the exact same kind of product almost automatically, though maybe with a little more polish. Someone taking their time and approaching the subject with some personal care could do a very capable and watchable job using just iLife (iPhoto, iTunes, iMovie, iDVD).

So you want to make these? Good ones, I mean.

What do you charge for the hours of careful manual photo selection, touch-up, color correction, creative cropping, pacing, synching to deliberately chosen tracks, of creating a narrative flow, telling a story? What do you want to charge for the hours of setting up and shooting live interview footage, writing and recording narration, then tweaking and editing it into something meaningful and moving?

If you’re going to spend the effort to do quality, you have to charge more. A lot more, or you are going to be losing money on the deal. I think if I had been picked to do the video for my inlaws, doing it for love, I’d have spent a solid week on it, maybe more, just on montages. Just for my time, had I been billing my typical rates, taking the week off from work to do this at home in imovie, the montages would have run around fourteen hundred, had I wanted to charge.

This really blows my mind, because it is probably pretty close to what the other guy charged my sis-in-law, only his profit after expenses was perhaps thirteen hundred and fifty bucks. But at least I could sleep at night, knowing I’d given it my best.

[Mark Suszko]

Everybody on Vidpro has already emailed the editors and publishers about this, and signed the online petitions. Being a Chicagoan, I signed it three times along with my dead relatives. 🙂

If you get a chance to see one of Dick’s mixed bag of tricks seminars, do it. Some of the tricks are so old, they are new again, you will smack your forehead that you forgot this… others are simple new things people have shared with him over the years that help make your work more efficient or organized. He’s published a tip or two from me over the years, so maybe I’m biased.

Why the magazine doesn’t “get” the value beats me. I only define that magazine as “the one with Reizner’s tips in it”. Sans that distinction, that magazine could be completely interchangeable with several others, and I probably won’t bother reading it anymore. Two things I always used to take time to clip or photocopy were Reizner and the “Power of Lighting” articles by Bill Holshevnikov (sp?) Maybe the magazine editors think they know all these tips and they are old news, but we have a constant turnover of new people coming up all the time to whom these are brand new. Maybe they are too cheap to pay him what he’s worth. Another issue is that many specialty magazines may not actually have staff that know or care anything about the specialty, they are just selling ads and plugging things together like legos from a pattern. (For more about this, see the humor forum for my piece called “my moment of clarity”) And Dick doesn’t fit the franchised pattern.

I’ve told Dick before that I think he should go solo and publish an RSS feed or weekly 5 minute tips video podcast, he’s got enough material for a year’s worth of shows. it could even just be stills and voiceover, published from imovie, I wouldn’t care. If the petition fails to make a change, maybe we can get him to mooove to a greener pasture over on this web site? Throw a 10-second ad on the front to pay the bills? I’d watch it.

[Mark Suszko]

If you want to use the fact of being students in your communications, market it not as cheap inexperienced low-risk labor, but as innovative, creative, avant-garde’, the next generation. When a bunch of California film students got together and called themselves Zoetrope, they were all still very raw talents, only one or two small projects in their portfolios. But they had energy and a fresh outlook, they wanted to express ideas thru film in new ways. They marketed themselves as the up-and-comers, the people with an insight to the youth culture, just as that culture was becoming more important to business.

But youth by itself is not enough to sell what you do. More powerful to sell ORGANIZATION: That you have a collective, a TEAM, that brings all these various cutting-edge skills to the table. From where I sit, that’s your group’s greatest strength, and you need to play to it. That there’s a whole crew of you, each an expert in one facet, not just one or two guys, trying to fake equal skill in every department. When you buy into the pitch, you’re getting the whole team working for you. This also should make clients feel more secure in that you’ll have enough resources between all of you to execute what you’ve promised. So you have to make visible this “team-ness” of your organization in your marketing materials, IMO. When I hear “students”, the next thing I think of is “unreliable”- they are like mayflies, temps: if you love what they do, it hardly matters because they’re gone soon, replaced by new unknowns that may be geniuses or flakes. The sense of an overall ORGANIZATION brings with it the promise of some CONTINUITY in service level that lasts more than a semester. This is a very powerful concept when linked to the advantages of youth because it mitigates the downside of that youth.

Breaking down the website into sub-sites is a very important early step. Your customers self-select thru this initial filtering mechanism. You want the grinders and tire-kickers to lose interest and filter out, and only the actual prospects with money to move ahead to contact. So don’t be afraid to price yourselves above the bottom-feeders, because you’re right that you can’t survive there anyhow. Keep a distinct Event video presence and keep it separate visually and mentally from the business/advertising and documentary/theatrical arms. Even if all the phones really ring to the same desk in mom’s basement.

Something else you might want to work on is to gather in a public spot monthly to showcase your projects and make contacts. Regular screening parties somewhere at a bar or whatever, run a monthly contest or theme for short demo projects, enter any and all local competitions. Make a public presence in the local culture scene. This is good team-building stuff for the group’s morale and lets you build additional contacts by word of mouth. Contacts that can lead to sales leads or at least to more human resources for future projects. Each individual of the team also needs to try and make at least one new contact a week out in the community, to tell about the group and their services. Active real-world Networking.

[Mark Suszko]

Line I read the other day:

“Commercials are like your kids. Some turn out great, some may turn out bad, but it’s always fun making ’em”.

As to the BK spot, there’s nothing wrong with using old techniques if they still work on a new audience. Hopefully, you bring something new to the execution, but come on, in the 60 or so years of modern media advertising, most everything has to have been done at least once before, right?. The trick is to find a new spin on it to make it your own. And to never forget what you’re selling.

[Mark Suszko]

Two things you can do at the source are: use flatter more diffuse lighting more from in front, and turn down the detail level in the camera.

If you are lucky you have a separate ‘skin detail’ level control in some of the newer cameras, use that so the rest of the image looks focused. I’m of the opinion all the modern cameras are way too sharp as they come from the factory, and simple experimenting with the detail level control gives you live, interactive results. When you get values that work, record them or otherwise lock them into a memory setting to save time the next time you need them.

When I have older ladies come to the set, and they freak out seeing themselves in the monitor while someone sets focus with an XCU, I can talk them off the ledge by showing them what I can do with a simple flick of the detail switch: then they treat me like GOD.:-)

Use a big softbox: the light will wrap around the face and fill in the wrinkles. Very flattering for interviews.

[Mark Suszko]

Get an early model TIVO unit off Ebay for like $50 and use it for the hard-disk-based time-shifting features, while still recording to a second DVD Recorder.

[Mark Suszko]

I like Ron ‘s idea regarding you doing more worship related video. What if you could do this on a “co-op” basis the same way local car dealers get pre-made packages of spots from a central source, with the costs shared between several churches? Structure a meeting with three or four ministers and see if you can find enough common demand where you can make the same or very similar packages for each of them, and they can split the costs. Imagine making some very nice pieces for Easter and Christmas as a start, Illustrating a scene out of scripture, but perhaps acted-out in modern dress and language, to show that these precepts remain universal. Bring one of their previous sermons “to life” for them. If you are clever in how you structure these, you can make them modular enough that each one can still be “customized” to an extent, without raising production costs. These would be to play on local access cable as well as to show in the church. Retain some rights and maybe you can re-sell them in other regions with an exclusive for each region or parish.

It is hard to beat the local cable production rates on price, but, the other side of that is, you can afford to buy some time yourself. Think about making an infomercial on leased access time, but something really trendy and eye-grabbing. You sell local merchants on the concept and they pay you to run this on local cable. I’ll give you a freebie as a sort of guide to what I’m talking about.

“Tales from the Hardware Store”
A three-minute vignette set in two adjacent back yards. Two guys are mowing, and wave at each other as they pass, calmly going back and forth, nothing special. We jump to their internal monologues and find out they act all normal and neighborly, but in fact yard care is a personal gladiatorial arena for these guys, it turns out they are in a constant state of one-upmanship and the grass is their battlefield. In their heads they are having all these Walter Mitty type competitions, they could be pretending they are NASCAR racers, top-gun jet jockeys, WW II desert tank commanders, etc. – In search of a competitive edge, one or both (you probably alternate one each week) wind up at the hardware store in a 5-minute segment where they get tips on how to make their current mower work better, plus accessories for the yard… you get the idea. You can take something as pedestrian as putting fresh oil and a new $2 spark plug in, (BTW, need a spark plug wrench? On sale this week, $4! Blade sharpening service special this week, makes the cut lawn not look brown!) …and make it like an homage to the engine-starting scene from “Flight of the Phoenix”. Dramatic angles, stirring , tension-building music…. WILL he start on the first pull???? It sputters, catches, but will it clear a winter’s worth of soot out and keep turning over??? Bob next door is WATCHING!!!!!!

You play this on the leased-access sales channel but you also make a kiosk in the hardware store itself, and you make a big deal out of sneak-previews and “premieres” to be held at the hardware store before the things go on air or you-tube. You also take out print ads locally to promote the premieres.

It’s an informercial that attracts and rewards the viewer with some actual entertainment, while working as a springboard to sales and building a local brand. This is something few producers actually take the trouble to provide any more.

This will probably work best with a local mom-and pop type business, because chain stores typically have too many restrictions set by the head office… but you never know. Locally, an Ace hardware used to do live remotes on broadcast TV every Saturday morning for 30 minutes, with some sales talks and how-to’s. The results were not great but that was due to execution and lack of quality talent at the store Plus lack of a script or producer… And live is hard work. You can do it cheaper yet better with the tricks you can supply in post, some tight writing/editing, and well-directed local talent willing to work for cheap. Keep it to ten minutes or less and when you get enough made, rotate them in a half-hour format.

If you don’t want to do weddings, making your own opportunities like this and learning to finance them is a way to get your merry band moving in a more commercial direction. You will need some real selling skills to pull this off, but on the technical or creative side, there’s nothing in the way of huge obstacles as long as you don’t step on copyrights. Clever writing will let you skate close in parodies and homages without going over the line.