[Mark Suszko]

There was a guy some years back, in the late 70’s I think, had a plane called “the Amazing Lady”, a customized prop-driven Lockheed Electra airliner, with a complete one-inch broadcast TV operation inside it, cameras inside and out, a studio, and control room, along with a microwave link to the ground.

His idea was to fly to the closest airport to a big event and do post work there, but also to be able to orbit over a location with a long loiter time and get live aerials to send down to a station that hired him to cover some special happening, like a natural disaster or the like. His main market would have been wire services and then-new all-news networks like CNN.

He may have been inspired by watching a really bad Dennis Hopper movie called “Riders On The Storm”,(IMDB.COM) or more likely by a program the government had even earlier, in the 50’s and 60’s, where they put TV transmitters on converted bombers and cargo planes that would fly a racetrack orbit over backwoods areas of the country, broadcasting educational TV to local one-room schools with battery-powered TV recievers. That stuff was all eventually replaced by cheap microwave-carrying news choppers and by satellite downlinks, cable TV antennas and microwave repeater stations put in on the ground. But the thinking is sure creative.

An outfit in St. Louis called Angel as recently as ten years back contracted with Burt Rutan of Scaled Composites to build them a private, long-duration, high-altitude platform called Proteus, for a mission they called HALO (High Altitude, Long Operation). Proteus was built, and looks very cool, you can GIS an image. It can fly very high over a major city for something like 2-3 days at a time, carrying a modular cargo pod that normally holds a complete cell phone node and advanced coms and TV relay.

The idea behind that was to use it like a private low-altitude satellite to offer a disrupted location city-wide wireless internet, coms and cell phone after a large natural or man-made disaster, like New Orleans or New York after 9/11. The planes could be fully automated, but were slated to have a crew of two sleeping in shifts and replaced every 2-3 days by a second relay, switching as often as the service was needed.

The business model never gained any traction, probably due to advances in satcom as well as internet, fiber and cel technology, as well as a shortage of venture capital, and the project AFAIK was shelved, but Rutan further developed the Proteus plane, which can also be used for air-launching mini satellites, Earth sensing and aerial mapping jobs like a private U-2.

A big brother of Proteus became the White Knight that launched Rutan’s x-prize-winning private commercial rocket. He’s building an even bigger version to carry the multi-passenger version of that rocket for Virgin Space.

You never know where a good idea might lead. From sending educational TV to backwoods Tenessee, to launching rich people into sub-orbital joyrides.

[Mark Suszko]

All of them: use a dimmable light, and one with plenty of diffusion on it. I’m not a big fan of the on-camera light for anything except ENG work. Bad-looking on-camera light is always too much, too close to the lens axis, so people are squinting and overexposed, and the mood of the location is destroyed and people put on their guard.

If you are always one-man-banding it, at least use a long an extension arm to the side as you can manage, to put the light off to the side. Better yet, have an assistant work the light independently from you.

[Mark Suszko]

Well I think it’s possibly a great plan for covering events staged at hotels and conference centers where they want fast turn-around like dubs available before the last day is over. Same for marketing videos for vacation spots, sports events and the like. Keep a core of your own gear and rent the rest as and where needed. If you can edit in their building using their utilities, that means you can either make more profit for the same billing as before, or you can make the same profit while charging a little less. I hope you’re young, single, and fit, as this sounds like quite a gypsy existence.

Without a fixed home base, how will you market, to whom and where? This part needs more development, I think. One possible strategy is to service businesses on a “circuit”, visiting the same ones on a regular basis as you loop thru a region. I could see this maybe working for sales and marketing video projects, as well as possibly training projects.

But you have a lot of logistics and strategy to work out. Not to mention how you market the service on something like a regional level.

[Mark Suszko]

BTW, forgot to mention, we’re a small shop so I direct, TD, and run the graphics by myself, with an engineer running the audio board and pre-rolling tape playbacks. Two and sometimes one camera ops run the studio, one of them doubles as floor director.

I mostly punch shots direct on the program bus, leaving the wide shot on preview and often not bothering to set each shot on the preview bus before we take it, unless it’s a dissolve or fade. The conversations we’re taping run so fast, I would miss too many reactions if I preset every shot before taking it.

My old TV teacher would probably cringe at that, but the pace of live switched shows has picked up tempo in the modern world. Go watch some old Ed Murrow interview clips on YouTube to see what I mean. The pace of the cuts seems positively glacial, compared to today.

[Mark Suszko]

What I tell people is, I don’t listen very hard to the actual dialog, just enough not to get caught short or miss a cue for a super or a commercial break or things like that, but really, what you want to do is watch the preview image of the reaction shot, and listen to the meter and pace and pitch of what’s being said, while watching for the facial cues of the guy that’s not on program, for the moment he is about to respond.

Then is when I cut in the reaction, a beat ahead of the speaking. Seems like mindreading, but it’s just face-reading, watching for the intake of breath and partially-open mouth and slight nod of the head that signals a person is about to reply.

If you count on a shot list, you’re always going to be behind on the switch. It’s all about the anticipation. The really bad-looking talk shows on student-run access always feel like they are switched using an egg timer, in that the choice of when to cut seems regularly timed but randomly applied. Or they always wait until one party completely finishes talking before cutting to the next shot. Good practice trick is to watch any of the evening talk shows with the sound off and try to call the camera cuts out loud just by watching faces. Soon, you discover the rythm.

We do 3-camera live-to-tape public affairs talk shows weekly here so I keep in practice. I open, close, and bump in and out of breaks with a wide establishing shot to orient the viewers, then cut to a tight shot of the host as he or she sets up the conversation. While they are introducing the guest or guests, I’ll often cut to a silent single shot of the guest for just a beat or two, but that’s optional, as the wide shot works for this too. My choice there depends on how dynamic the guest looks. If he’s alert and active, I’ll use the tight shot to show him nodding for a beat.

What I also like to do is use shot choice as nonverbal punctuation.

What I mean is, people on talk shows generally talk in paragraphs, with an opening statement, then more detail, and a sort of summation or conclusion statement for that thought. I like to pop to the wide shot as that “paragraph” is finishing, then the host starts a new question.

If the question is involved and sounds like it will be several sentences by itself, I’ll pop into a tighter shot for the second half of that question, on the beat of a verbal comma or breath, then I’ll have the guest’s matching medium or tight reaction shot ready on one camera and the covering wide 2-shot as backup.

If it looks like the dialog is going to ping-pong rapidly for a bit and thus be too kinetic, I’ll take it to the 2-shot, with a tighter single of the guest I can go to as punctuation or emphasis for a particular point if he takes a breath. Again, the key to that is to watch the faces and body language more than listening to the dialog. When you can’t tell if the dialog is about to wind down, the 2-shot is safe cover.

I save OTS shots as a spice, best used sparingly, and used when one side is monopolizing the conversation and I want my other guy to get soem more screen time. The other time I use OTS is when the guest is talking at length about something very emotional or dramatic; then I’ll use it for the sense of “evesdropping” it gives the audience. The OTS has a particular kind of conspiratorial and confessional emotional subtext to it, and I pick shots for reasons of semiotics as much as anything.

Of course it really helps to have experienced camera operators, because they anticipate what I want and how the show is going, and they know innately when to change up a shot or suggest or “sell” me a shot like an OTS when they are not online. A good director takes such suggestions gratefully. Sometimes I say “yes, 2, good call, steady that up and we’ll take it next, leave room for a lower third” or “Sorry one, two already has a similar shot, I need you to stay tighter on so-and-so until the bumper”.

It’s funny, sometimes the host and guests will ask us after the show how we liked it, and sometimes our honest answer is:

“Frankly, I was too busy watching it to pay attention to it, but it seemd really great”. That’s how I know we did a pretty good show. If I can remember every word said on camera, the show was too boring and I switched it in my sleep.

[Mark Suszko]

Yes, Arnie; Synthetik Studio Artist is what I first tried it on, and the later versions than mine will also automate, working on a folder of stills or a chunk of video.

One of the recipes for the photoshop method I tried was called BIORUST 2, from the biorust web site.

Off the top of my head, some of the steps in the recipe were, gaussian blur, find edges, and colored paper effect filter. There was more to it than that, of course, but if you have Photoshop, just import a still and start trying these in various combinations until you get a result you like, then go back and turn on the recoder button in PS while you apply them to one representative shot, save the stack as an action, then use the automator, on a stack of targas or jpegs in a folder. It is darn fast that way.

I think Synthetik still has a forum on the COW, might ask over there too…

[Mark Suszko]

I tried to emulate this look in a spot this past year, using a macro in photoshop, which is the only way to go to avoid losing your mind, BTW. I had not planned to do the look when I made that spot originally, but decided I’d like to try it. One thing off the top: these always look better if you take the time to shoot in a way that reduces detail: blow out your whites, reduce skin detail, keep backgrounds minimalist, heck, greenscreen your talent if you can.

I first tried using a digital artist program for macs that turns stills into reasonable facsimilies of sketches and oil or watercolor portraits. Individual stills looked great from this, but, when played at motion speed, there was too much going on frame to frame that was distracting. Perhaps if the frame rate was reduced and morphs were used… but this will kill good lipsynch, so I would advise against shooting close-up dialog like the Shwab thing using this art program…

It also was a real pain because to make the effect look it’s best, I had to hand-stroke all the essential areas on each frame, took 2-3 days to do 30 seconds worth of frames.

Then a friend turned me on to recording actions in photoshop and being able to automate their application. I found a number of filters, applied in about seven steps, that also gave me a passable “Linklater Look”. By recording these steps, then applying the automation to a dedicated folder of stills generated from my NLE, the photoshop custom macro was able to process the same number of frames in about eight minutes, that took me two days the manual way. And that is including adding in a color-correction and levels control application to each frame to blow it out deliberately before applying the other filters.

This time savings allowed me to try a lot more variation on the filters and their subtle nuances to refine the look. It still wound up not being good enough for me to show the client, but I think that’s more because of the fact the original footage was never shot with this intention, than that it can’t be made to work. Some day I’ll find the perfect project to apply this look to and shoot it to support that from the start, and I think it will work great.

If I can find my notes from my experiments, I’ll try to post the “recipe” for the stack of filters to apply using automation, and you can try it on a folder of sequential targas for yourself. They can also be found with a google search.

[Mark Suszko]

Call me a nervous nelly, but I would at least think about putting a proc amp or DA on that line to boost the signal. 100 feet or less, probably not. 200 feet… I’d start to think about it….

[Mark Suszko]

Try asking in the broadcast designers forum. I have seen some web-based logo “foundries” that will throw something together for you, a google search will locate those. Sometimes they are okay for things like redesigning your business cards or the like, but I find their quality very uneven and a lot of them have a sort of cookie-cutter approach.

There are also some services out there where you can have artists bid to do the work for you, my wife likes one called ifreelance.com. You post the particulars of the job you want done, a price range, then the site gives some matches to artists willing to do the work for that price, with links to samples of their work. The site takes a cut of the job if you accept the terms, but also, every artist that belongs tot he site and bids on the job gets a little taste of the final fee, not just the one that wins the bid. This is a refinement to the process that helps prevent lowballing bids that wind up incomplete. Costs a slight bit more but the wife thinks it’s worth it. You might want to scope that place out.

[Mark Suszko]

Secrets of Brevity, An essay in 16 parts
by Mark Suszko

Chapter 1:

“The earth’s crust cools….”

(Don’t make me go there!) 🙂