[Mark Suszko]

[Timothy J. Allen] “These days, if a department isn’t happy with their “officially sanctioned” in-house video production team, they tend to buy a camera and some cheap editing software and regulate those duties to someone in their own department “who understands them”.

Yes, they video that was done by the guy in accounting might not be as pretty, the script may not be as clear, but there are reasons a department might choose to go that route. (It could be speed, quality, politics, etc.)”

I think the underlying issue I see from that section of your post is that clients turn to such alternatives when they feel disconnected and under-served, that they are not communicating effectively with you. It’s not always your fault, but you have to dig from time to time to find out how and if what you’re making for the client is really meeting their needs or just meeting them “on paper”. One of those “it’s exactly what we asked for, but not what we wanted” things.

Too often, perhaps, the in house team just takes what clients give them and they don’t challenge assumptions or ask deep questions. If they ask you to tape a bland speaker reading powerpoints on camera to an audience that can damn well read for themselves, then everybody says the video is boring and ineffective, whose fault is that, really? After all, YOU are supposed to be the communications expert. Why did you go along with making crap just because that’s what they brought you? Did that serve anyone’s interests in the end? Or did it hurt your unit’s image, as well as not serve the company’s real need?

I realize this is a dangerous area to deal with if your clients are not used to give-and-take or challenges to bad ideas. You have to walk a tightrope and be good at interpersonal relationships to not insult them. But play up how much MORE effective this project would be if they let you do X and Y to it. Play up that you’ll take on the extra work it takes to translate the crummy powerpoint torture into effective communication, and that they’ll still have approval control over everything all the way. You have to seduce them into trying it your way, the better way, knowing that when it comes out kicking butt, they are going to look like geniuses, and your team will be seen in a new, better light. You have to get involved in the project at an earlier stage, you have to get involved in the writing and in the outline and treatment stages. Be the creative partner, not just the mechanical fulfilment service. Mechanical services by themselves easily become commoditized, then underbid and finally outsourced.

Some clients just want more attention paid to them, even if it doesn’t translate to more work getting done. It can depend on their communication style. I sometimes find that this kind of “needy” client presents a great opportunity to upsell them on new projects leveraged off the initial project. If they started with a TV PSA, they don’t always realize I can often export nice stills and graphics for printed ancillary materials like newspaper ads or brochures that keep a unified theme and look. Or vice-versa, bringing the brochure to life as video. What about making a looping DVD they can use at their next trade show kiosk, showing the spot plus some extra text screens? Plus, I can often turn that spot around for the radio market at little or no extra cost, as well as post the spots on the net for them, which gives them another story to put out a press release about… and their message gets a wider distribution. They also get the impression that I’m actively working on their “team”, looking to their best interests.

Because I am.

I guess my point is that even when you serve a captive, internal constituency, you have to keep selling the unit’s abilities and promoting what you do, or they tend to “forget” you’re around. That’s when they start pricing cameras of their own.

The more informed your clients are about what it costs to do what you do, and do it RIGHT, the less likely they are to try to run off and try it themselves. If they think a camcorder and windows moviemaker is all you need to make the training “film”, then there will be the temptation for Bob in Accounting to try and promote himself into a more entertaining job making videos instead of adding up numbers. You fight back with numbers of your own. You fight back with making them understand good video doesn’t appear by magic when you push a button.

Finally, something inexpensive you can do is pick a client or project every year and submit the thing for one of those awards. I know, not everybody here believes in or approves of anything less than an Emmy or Golden Lion, but you’ll find it remarkable how winning your client a Telly or similar award they can put up in their office will change their attitude.

It also gives the shop’s creative team a little boost from time to time, to get this kind of recognition. Often, that’s enough to generate a new creative spark, as they start actively looking for ways to add production value to otherwise humdrum material. It’s an inexpensive thing to do and it works to reassure your internal clients that you know what you’re doing, and they are making the right choices in coming to you for the creative and execution. The award is external validation that your unit is competent and your opinions carry weight.

After all, Bob in Accounting only has a bowling trophy, not a Golden Video Excellence award.

[Mark Suszko]

Thanks, Mom! 😉

I would rather just cut than do much zooming or cross-dissolves. People “get it” just fine. But follow your bliss.

[Mark Suszko]

And here I thought I was the only one still using that:-) Being good at Crystal 3D Impact Pro is kinda like being good at programming Fortran via punchcards these days… but what casual users of it may not recognize is that you can get pretty complex by grouping the various canned moves within each other. Also, that you can build up more complex things than you’d first expect from somethng marketed only for flying type around.

I had a show open that needed some super close-up fly-by shots of prescription pill bottles. These were very easy to make in Crystal 3D Impact Pro, using nothing but geometric primitives.

I made a circle, extruded it, applied an edge treatment and stone texture to make a pill. I duplicated the pill a bunch of times, rotating it in xyz space, then grouping and moving numbers of the duplicates to build up a column of the pills. In top view I made a circle just bigger than the stack of pills and extruded a cylinder around the pills and applied a brown tinted translucent plastic/glass material to that. The cap was again just extruded groupings of circles. I made an RX label in photoshop and imported it as a sort of decal, mapped to the pill bottle. Duplicated the entire bottle a few times, stretching the sizes here and there and positioning them in z-space for the camera pass. Then I set them up on a flat white square with a white gradient background and used the canned zoom move to imitate a snorkel camera pass. The whole thing took an hour to make including the render to avi.

Another time I made rectangular slabs and just mapped bitmaps to them to make a virtual “gallery” set for a quick greenscreen job. Looked like I spent a lot of time, took 15 minutes.

When my boys visit me at work thay like to use this program to quickly generate massive space cruisers and robots using the drawing tools, grouping, and extrusion.

I also use it as a sort of 3-d sketch pad to create virtual sets, simple set extensions and play with lighting schemes. It is not as limited an app as some folks thing, it depends on how you apply your imagination to it. This is a much less intimidating program than Lightwave, though it’s certainly no competition. But it is a lot of fun in a cheap package.

[Mark Suszko]

Besides my ego, the giant part of me might be my shoe size 13-&-a-half. Probably not something I’d mention in an interview, though.:-)

I’d say rule number one for someone in your bracket is never over-promise. We were most of us the same as you at some time back in antiquity, when puppies were the oldest animal on Earth. So we know applicants fresh out of school are about 20 percent talent, 30 percent whatever was poured into their heads by their teachers, and 50 percent bluster and bravado. That’s okay. We’ve all been you.

Be honest about what you know and what you don’t know, and realize within yourself you don’t likely know what else you don’t yet know, ya know? You come freshly forged from school with book larnin’, a vocabulary of industry jargon and hopefully some base level of experience in a general set of skills and recent or semi-recent equipment. That’s not the end of your industry education, it is the very smallest BEGINNING. If you applied yourself in school, you probably found an area of specialty you enjoy most where you spent extra time and effort and pushed yourself to something like a commercially useable competence level. You are only going to get better at that over time. Lead with that.

Explore in your mind what it is about that talent area that energizes and inspires you so much, and try to apply to jobs that need that skill. Stress to employers that this is an area where you think you can particularly shine, but that you’re also not too proud to work wherever you’re most needed at any particular time, and that you like to learn about all the aspects of production and how they fit into or work with your area of specialty. If a producer or PA job is what your after, a major factor is being detail oriented, obsessing about getting everything letter-perfect, no mistakes, backups upon backups, no contingency left unanticipated. If your C.V. and cover letter have typos or bad grammar, you are already toast. If you can’t be bothered to get that simple task right, you are not ready to work for anyone.

And now a pause from our sponsor…

Here I want to mention something you face that my generation didn’t always. Loyalty and length of working relationship. My dad came from a generation where the Social Contract was very much the norm: you hire me, I work for you basically until I retire, I give you my best, you pay me well and give me great benefits, and we both profit. People your age just coming out of school face a completely different dynamic. Even if you want to work at one place forever, they often don’t want you that long. They may not admit it but you are a meat-based component in a machine and will only remain with them as long s they perceive you are generating value beyond the cost of keeping you. If you are the best editor they ever had, they may STILL fire you after five great years and replace you with 2 guys not as skilled that work for less money and have not racked up enough years to cost a lot in benefits.

But see, here is the little game of lies played in the open; they’ll ask you how long you want to work for them, because they don’t want to waste time training a guy who flits from job to job every 1-2 years, taking that expensive training effort to a competitor. “Where do you see yourself in five years?” is a common question. Like an inkblot test, there is no perfect one answer to this, it’s more a way to ascertain what your motivations and attitude are, and where your loyalty lies. An altruistic sounding response is safest, if you can sound sincere about it.

If you are being honest with yourself, the answer in your head is “As long as I can make good money off of you and nothing better comes along, this is a game of who will screw whom first, and I’ll walk over your bleeding body to get a better gig somewhere else without a second thought”. To an extent, for self-preservation in this world you have to think in mercenary terms like that because nobody but your mom cares if you live or die. However. It’s a remarkably small business, one that revolves around the strength of one’s character and reputation among peers, and one where you don’t want to burn bridges. So the answer you say out loud is more along the lines of: “As long as I feel I can make a meaningful contribution here, as long as I can grow in my responsibilities and improve myself, while doing work I’m proud of”. The subtext there is “I’m with you as long as you hold up your end and I don’t feel exploited”.

The employment stats today are that people DO flit from job to job several times in any one career, that they may have as many as four different careers in a lifetime, and this is now more the rule than not in the video business. While you’re young and unencumbered is a great time to live this way; traveling and seeing and doing a lot of things and meeting all kinds of people. It’s a time to get a lot of experience and try to build up savings, so you live rather bohemian, like when you were in college. The older you get, though, the less appealing and sustainable this life becomes and you’ll want to transition to something steady where you can put down roots, especially if you marry and have kids. In this new era, I feel that is really going to be hard unless you create the job for yourself by going into your own business. So your long-term life plan might benefit from thinking ahead to that time and building assets to get you there.

But back to the interview.

An air of entitlement for someone your age is deadly; all the more so, the older the person interviewing you is. So being humble is the best strategy, particularly if you have a strong reel or portfolio that can speak for you. Describe thru concrete examples that you are a problem-solver and team player, but that you are also able to work alone when you have to, and you’re not embarrassed to say when you don’t know something and need guidance. Every boss would much rather have someone with the courage to admit they don’t know how to do a particular thing, than someone who bluffs thru it and screws up a project for the whole team. They also appreciate the attitude of “I don’t know much about that, but I’ll study up on it and be better briefed on it by the next time we talk.” It shows the right kind of initiative.

The other guys are right in saying that your personality and ability to work with all types of people is a key ingredient. You can refer to dorm living and group project experiences in production classes as preparing you for such challenges.

How active, engaged, and confident you act in the interview shows how ready you are for this responsibility. The employer is going to invest time and money on you and you are there to contribute your best to the team effort in return. When I interviewed for the job I currently have, I was only a year or two out of school. I felt I had a strong reel, and I was always anxious to show it, but the bosses that hired me never cared to see it, didn’t look at it until a year or two later. ( I found that old demo reel a year ago and looked at it, I am SO lucky they never asked to see it, much of what I thought was the bomb-diggety in it then, I now see as horrible. You’ll probably feel that way every 1-2 years looking back at your work if you have a drive to improve yourself. I see things I did just last year that I hate now because I now know better ways to do the task. )

They picked me, not because my reel was strong, but because I came across well: personable, ebullient, full of gung-ho optimism and drive, I demonstrated verbally that I had a good grasp of the skills by having intelligent questions to ask about their place and hardware. I showed interest beyond the immediate job, asked about how they approached certain problems, what their standards were, how they assign single and team work, who their clients were and how they interacted. My bearing and attitude was that I had come to help in any way I could, that I was an applicant, not a supplicant.

When they’d quiz me about something like how to fix a particular problem in lighting (mixed color temps on sources and window), I gave complete and well-considered answers. If I felt I could be a little humorous in those answers, I added it, my way of “keeping it real”. In the lighting example, While I told them the textbook answers about the options of gelling the windows or gelling the tungstens or using HMI lights, I followed up with: “If you can’t afford the very large gels or the HMI, then it’s time to re-write the script so you don’t have the window in the shot: pencil’s are ten cents.” They appreciated that underlying understanding that the organization has limitations and we sometimes have to find creative ways around them instead of throwing money at problems.

Twenty-odd years later, the question I get asked most often on a daily basis is “How would you go about doing so-and-so”? Every project you work on makes you better able to answer that question. Sometimes you apply a particular skill or technique. Sometimes you throw money at it. More often, you use the pencil.

Whatever it says on our business card, what it boils down to in the business is that we’re problem-solvers.

[Mark Suszko]

Well, Shake could let you fake 3-d using 2-d, but in a hurry? On the PC side for things that are cheap I would suggest Crystal 3-D Impact pro, it came bundled with my Discreet Edit system, but is available as an internet download, free version to try. pay for it and they unlock the watermarking for you. It’s a stripped down version of TOPAS with canned moves and textures that automate a lot of the work, it can auto-import B&W line art from a jpeg or Bmp and let you extrude and texture that in two minutes… looks good and not much over $50 and dirt simple to use for typical 3-D logo work. I could talk you thru using it over the phone in ten minutes. It would render out an AVI, a still, or stream of stills for your timeline.

But I don’t have a strong choice to suggest on the mac side for this.

Zaxwerks really is the king of the niche you describe there. There is a similar thing used in combination with Lightwave that works something like the Zax product, but it’s not clear to me at this hour of the night if you need to aleady own a full copy of LW to use that thing as an interface ( I kinda think you might) or if it costs much less than Zaxwerks.

In the freeware/shareware regime for macs, Sketch-Up from Google may be a possibility, as is Blender. Sketch-up free version seems pretty easy to use, Blender ‘s interface was a puzzle to me when I tried it a few years back. It might be better now. HASH Animation Master is supposed to be easy to use, but may be over your budget limit.

Another way you might go to avoid a learning curve too long for deadline is to try a site like Turbosquid or ifreelance.com to get someone else to animate it for you affordably and you just composite it in using alpha channels. Or offer the task here on the COW in the low pay section, to someone who has Zax and knows how to use it to make up the elements you specify for a price you can afford.

You can fake some 3d with just Photoshop, layering multiple, offset copies and using free transform to warp and distort appropriately, then adding gradients to the “sides” to sell the depth illusion. Keep the layers and bring that into Apple Motion with a simple “throw” and you can add subtle motions or warps to the layers at different speeds. A 360 spin might be asking too much though.

Good luck, tell us what you wound up doing.

[Mark Suszko]

Just my 2 cents on the pro bono thing because I strongly believe in it myself. There is definitely an art to converting pro bono to billable hours. You are teasing them, giving away enough to make them want more, then asking they pay for the extra mile.

When you do the free work, keep good records as if you were going to bill for real. Because you will give them a statement when you’re done. When the job is done, you present a standard bill, showing hours and rate and expendables but with the total marked as comped for pro bono purposes. You say something along the lines of “this is for your tax records” when you hand it over, “To show what we would have billed on this if it was for anybody but you”.

I call this a “virtual bill”. I can’t swear that everyone can write off the costs in this way, ask an accountant, but the real point of the exercise is not financial monkeyshines but to impress upon the client that you did x thousand dollars worth of work for nothing. Every time that program is shown to someone, the person from the client agency showing it is going to brag what a great deal that job was, what value they got from (your name mentioned here). And if you give them a product without a price tag on it, it is never going to seem as valuable or reputable as something they paid for. This is the equivalent of how the simple blue box from Tiffany’s transforms a 10-dollar piece of ordinary junk jewelry into a night of passion with your lady love. It’s all in the packaging:-)

Secondly, and perhaps more important, if you get into a situation where a client is always coming around rattling the tin cup for another freebie, you can explain that you have only a certain number of hours budgeted each month and per client for pro bono, (which has to be true, you are not a charity operation and must bill a certain amount monthly to survive).

So you say every client gets budgeted a certain amount of pro bono and unfortunately you’re over the limit this month, and have to concentrate on billable jobs to make monthly targets… so if they can wait a few weeks, you certainly can revisit doing the job for free, or (close the deal here) they can jump to the front of the line right away if they want to put cash on the table for a billable job.

They came back for the freebie because they sensed it was a great value they were getting, that your work was good, and the price made them put you top of the list. Chances are good the client is on a tight deadline and didn’t forsee being faced with a 3-4 week delay when they decided to hit you up again, so they’ll have to look elsewhere, starting from scratch, or pull the trigger on a for-pay deal, or risk telling their boss (who they may already have promised a “great deal”) they didn’t plan ahead well enough.

Once they take the bait, immediately offer them some kind of discount or added-value component to the work that’s comped because of your “well-established working relationship”. This will give them confidence and help reduce buyer’s remorse and the tendency to back out of the deal right away. Maybe it’s a break on the replication costs, a comp on the voiceover work you do, or some payment plan… anything that they can sell as a bargain they obtained that will lessen the sting when they take it to their boss. Something you can afford to give away once in a while for goodwill.

In the car business, it may be the “free” undercoating, an upgrade to better tires, floor mats, that sort of thing. You are bartering perceived value.

Back to the original question about how to be in two places at once if you’re not anywhere at all. You can’t clone yourself. You could decide to give up one of the things you do to free up the time and resources. or you can increase your rates and make more from fewer but better-paying clients. You could delegate more to hired help. I know back in the 80’s a lot of directors but also some good editors used a rep to drum up biz for them while they worked. It’s a little like getting a talent agent. Frankly, I don’t know how well this idea would work in the internet age where people use Mandy and Craigs and everything in between.

I do get the sense you’re going to have to make a choice. In a management seminar I once took, the guy told this long story about working in a company that made meters. Like VU meters, little coiled wire assemblies designed to indicate, well, whatever needed indicating via a fluctuation of voltage. Medical ger. Broadcast and industrial process meters. Military meters. This guy in the company was one of the best wire-winders there, the fastest, the neatest, with the best QC scores. But eventually he was promoted up the chain, in charge of all the other people that used to do what he’d done so well.

When he moved up, he had to train himself to resist going back down to his previous area of mastery all the time to keep showing the rest of the team how to do it to his award-winning standards. You have to understand the other people’s coil assemblies were already just fine, passing all the QC tests, they were just not at the Olympian standard of perfection thig guy had obtained. And it bugged him.

It also bugged the hell out of the staff, having a manager coming down to mess with them all the time, it was bad for morale and made it hard for the manager to be a manager, he was losing efficiency as well as respect. The hrder he tried to hold on to his old area of competency, the worse he was making everything. he had to choose going back to working the line like the others or moving up and taking the new resonisibilites and trusting his people under him to do their best so he could do something else that was also important.

I guess when you’re a broadcast renaissance man or auteur type, used to wearing ALL the hats and keeping a hand in all the aspect of production, it is hard to relinquish any of that to others, to trust in them to get their part done so the entire team gets the work done. But to manage a larger project or organization, that’s exactly what you have to do. You step out of your comfy area of mastery into a bigger job. You train your replacement as well as you can, and when they pass the test you just have to trust that they have your back. Just as they trust you are keeping the rest of the enterprise organized and heading in the right direction, so everybody can make more money.

So if your really want to grow the business, either give up some creative/field work to others you hire or or partner with and manage those people, “flying a desk” the pilot types call it……. or hire a business and marketing/ management team and stick to what makes you happy, the production side. Or keep the business small but more profitable by raising the rates to increase profit while cutting down the client list. You will love and miss many of the clients that can’t make the jump with you. That was your comfort zone. At some point you have to make a choice and not every aspect of that choice will be pleasurable. As long as the general direction of the choice is to the good, that’s the course to set.

[Mark Suszko]

Welcome to hell; the temperature is always a climate-controlled 72 degrees with 15% humidity. 🙂 Got a poster like that in our tape library.

You can use whatever system you like as long as it’s consistent and easy to maintain. Some folks use simple excel spreadsheets and databases.

Key data would include an overall master reference number or serial number. (Master number is often the 6-digit date plus a few user-specific alphanumeric characters that can ID the client or subject, like 110807BPOL would be something on Beta format regarding police from today’s date).

Other items needed are format, date, title, locations, make/model of camera used, (lets you track down which camera is making problems and when it started going bad) running times, and keywords about the content and who worked on it. For when you get that David Mamet-type retrieval request: “remember that thing that one time with that guy? I need that tape”.

If you can search for “all tapes between Feb and April shot by Bob”, you have a better chance of quickly narrowing it down. It is also extremely handy to put the same master ID number for the tape on all the billing or accounting paperwork as soon as it is shot.

Remember too that the database and system have to be able to survive and be useable after you are gone and are no longer around to link this metadata using your recollections alone. The new person using the system will have no back-knowledge of any of it, so you have to keep it easy to use.

There’s a custom solution that’s very slick, Harpo and the BBC use it, called “Schedu-all”. It is much more than a library system, it handles the needs of an entire production and post system. It’s a series of a la carte modules you buy as you need, that tie every scheduling and archiving function together. For edit rooms, it schedules the clients, the editor and personnel schedules, storage assets, the engineering maintenance and upgrades, handles automatic billing, etc. For the tapes, it generates bar codes if you want to use a reader system. Then it keeps track of the title, where it is on the shelf, or who has it checked out and since when, what’s on it, what editing room it’s currently being used in, etc. Pricy, but hard to beat. You could start out with just the library module.

My own system classifies stuff by client, all client sections are alphabetized on the shelves, then tapes within the client sections are simply chronological. When you shoot something today, you just put it in the last open space onthe last shelf in the designated section for that client. In theory:-) If everybody honors the system and always puts things where they are supposed to go, (A HUGE “IF”) all you ever need are the client name and the date to find the tape, and you can also enter those in a database with some short descriptions for fast keyword searches.

That’s the real key: can your staff stay consistent with the system or will they slack off after a while. That way lies madness. My experience is that for any organization of more than three folks, you need a dedicated tape librarian, even if only part-time.

[Mark Suszko]

For billing, know your costs and establish your rate, one that not only covers your costs but also makes you a worthwhile profit. Do not bill a fixed price whatever you do, but make an estimate of the hours this will take you to do, add a small safety factor over that to get the stated estimated hours, and tell the the hourly rate you will charge, and set a number of hours on task, beyond which, you must stop and get an approval from them on.

Say that this protects the client as well as you if costs should escalate beyond a set point, or if they suddenly need to make additions or changes not previously budgeted. Insist on a partial advance payment to start the project, the rest payable upon successful completion and approval. You can sweeten the deal for a recalcitrant client by offering to rebate part of the cost if you do it in less time than the estimate. But don’t offer that unless pushed. Really, it works out the same way either way when you’re billing by the hour, that’s the beauty of it. Work longer, get paid more.

Don’t give the guy a useable master or final dub until you’re paid; if he insists on “review copies” to take somewhere and show somebody, make sure you burn your logo bug or at least a time code window into the approval dub which makes it useless to pirate or use for anything but screening for approval.

As to tech/production suggestions, you can use screen recorders like snapz pro (just revised btw) on the mac or Camtasia for the PC, or you can hook a scan converter up to the client’s box and digitize the output of that directly into your NLE or onto an intermediate step like to tape. I have seen good work done both ways, but I’m partial to using scan converters if they are good (“good” means at least a thousand bucks, which gets you great clean scaling and positioning as well as flicker removal and proc amp controls. You get what you pay for with scan converters, good news is can rent great ones for the day for a reasonable price). Capturing thru a software recorder can give great results but may interfere with the computer’s process you’re trying to document, plus, the movie files created are generally very large, so storage may be a consideration.

Things to watch out for while capturing include very thin lines on the screen that will seem to vibrate if you capture interlaced, and you want to watch the brightness and chroma saturation levels coming out of the client’s box, so that your levels are not blown out with loss of detail and subsequent ugliness during video projection.

[Mark Suszko]

Just a pet peeve of mine: All stations will switch from analog to digital, but not all digital will be HD. Some will be decidedly SD. Some may not even be 16 by 9.

“If there’s one thing I just cannot stand or put up with, it’s absolutes!”

[Mark Suszko]

Todd and I went around and around about this in another forum recently, but I’ll just say that I adore the software from DRS-Digitrax for prompting. Todd did not like his, but I got a CRT-based head from Stewart Instruments that I like very much, and it was very inexpensive. I looked at it again recently and I think I could convert it to an LCD model myself with little effort and an aftermarket screen from TigerDirect, but I kind of like it the way it is right now.