[Mark Suszko]

Naw Andy, I think we’re on the same side here. You want to convince them that you are the perfect guy or gal to pull this off because you obviously have the best grasp of it. The more depth of prep and understanding you can show, the better you can communicate the concepts of the spot in the pitch to the client. If it comes down to you with all your storyboards and location stills and color swatches and pre-vis demos versus a guy that says “uh, yeah, we can do something”, the smart money is on the over-prepared guy. Of course, if the other guy promises to bring it in for half what you’re charging, you might lose the first round, but you tend to get the business back when the lowball guy turns out not to be able to deliver. At a markup for the extra “repair work”, of course. Also, you leave those clients with an indelible perception of how good you are, how professional. Does this lead to you being considered first the next time they think about a project? I would imagine so.

[Mark Suszko]

I think you should turn it down and volunteer ME for it:-)

Seriously, I think it’s a great offer for someone with such a short amount of experience; you must command some pretty impressive skills to be considered for this gig. I don’t see a down side, particularly if your weekends remain your own to work on “outside” projects if you like. I think you should go for it, the credits and resume material will be good, the pay sounds reasonable to me when coupled with the benefits and the fact you don’t have to beat the bushes for work for at least as long as these shows are running. If it feels too “constrained” for you somehow, being 9-5 and regular eating and all, well, you could always go “commando” on casual fridays and not tell anyone, let your independent freak flag fly that way:-)

Take the offer, ask for something in writing regarding your rights to use excerpts of the work in your demo reel and promo materials.

Another negotiation tactic is to not ask for more money but rather, if they will pay for additional training or materials when you need it. This demonstrates a few things: commitment and team spirit among them. It can also be a write-off for them while it builds your skills and keeps you marketable.

[Mark Suszko]

You can’t prevent someone stealing the idea unless they sign a form in advance. This is not practical for what you want to do. The best defense against having your idea stolen or given to a cheaper competitor is to overwhelm the client with your preparation and advance work on it. “Own” it by virtue of how much detail you have already worked out, stuff somebody else would have to do from scratch. Make it seem like you are so far ahead of anybody else in the ability to immediately execute this idea, that they’d be fools to give it to anyone else.

[Mark Suszko]

Read up on “permission marketing” for some more tips.

These days any unbidden, unsolicited email coming in my inbox gets treated with great suspicion, if the spam filter doesn’t get it first. I’m more likely to be annoyed than intrigued by blind pitches. If I find the same info posted at a site I already visit, that’s a very different issue, I might very well be interested in that product or service that day, or at least in seeing how someone else applied it to their business.

Google Adwords takes advantage of that, though it’s not perfect. I remember linking to a story about uranium in the Valerie Plame case and Adwords created some hysterical sidebar instant-ads suggesting I click on an Amazon link to buy or compare prices for weapons grade uranium, with next-day shipping. My, how helpful, Alehu Ackbar!! Thanks Amazon!

See, so it can be done wrong, or it can be done right.

When your message is presented in that fashion, the people reading it are pre-qualifying themselves to respond with requests for more info. That’s why I think the news stories and tutorials here on the COW are pretty good marketing tool, better than Adsense, because they use and appeal to human COMMON sense.

My take is, if you send something to people out of the blue, it better by heaven reflect a sound knowledge of who they are and what they want or need, or you’ve just told those prospects what a fake and idiot you are, not to mention a wasteful spender and poor businessman. Not the best first impression.

Give-aways or premiums need to be tightly focused and appropriate to the market as well as what’s being marketed. Newsletters need to be timely as well as relevant, with some actual added value content the reader can put to immediate use. You must reward the reader’s attention if you ever want them to read you again. You can send out things like calendars or mousepads or desk toys, but they have to be targeted and appropriate.

Think about open-house type events you can stage, a live demo or free training session or special seminar day. Sponsor a local get-together perhaps. Figure out what your target market cares about and see if you can find a fit to what you’re selling. Create a news “stunt” designed around one of your specialties. For example, if your shop does high-end 3-d animation, create am animated 3-d model of your town that perhaps grows and evolves from early history to today and a projected tomorrow, then stage a showing and open discussion at a mini conference about architecture and urban planning. Leverage this to tell the story of what your company does and how it does it. Or maybe create an animated version of the town’s historic founder and present it to the local library or historical society. Do you do event video? Wedding shows, with the full runway treatment and live IMAG demonstration. What about corporate? Find a charity they all support and create a documentary and PSA’s in support of it. Ask them to be interviewed about their contributions to the cause. offer the DVD as a hand-out and post the best parts of it on YouTube.

Yes, all of this costs money up front. Only you can decide what is appropriate and a logical investment to make, based on your specifics. What I can say is, in my opinion any of these kinds of projects are more likely to result in building public awareness of your company and building contacts and business leads, than a simple email spam blast.

[Mark Suszko]

I’d love to get the podcasts, but I’m on dial-up at home and can’t really do the podcasts at the day job either. Maybe if I could get them on CD’s or a dataDVD… in some kind of compilation… Data DVD’s are pretty fat, yet cheap; I bet a lot of podcasts and several issues of the magazine and tutorials would fit on them. Might make for nice giveaways at trade shows or premiums for subscribers…

[Mark Suszko]

Weather within 24 hours of the shoot: you’re going to pay something no matter what, because the crew and gear are already committed. If you try to shoot and then get stopped by lightning, that’s not the crew’s fault, and they should get full pay for the hours, at least a half day’s pay if you send them packing. If you can cancel inside of 24 hours, but before they have to travel, that could reduce your outlay by some amount, maybe fifty percent or more.

I don’t know that there is a universal standard for these things, wish there was. Should look at what a union camer operator’s contract says. I would put it in writing when booking the crew, something like: Cancel/re-schedule within 48 hours or more of contracted time for shoot, no charge. Cancel within 24 or fewer hours, pay one-half day rate plus any travel used before the cancellation. This might take the form of an additionl charge tacked onto the actual rescheduled shoot day’s numbers instead of a payment up front, if it adds up the same way but makes the paperwork more streamlined, I’d go for that, figuring most weather-related delays are rescheduled within the same week. Some other arrangement might be to add on extra meal break hours to even up the score.

When you get along with your crews, deals can be very flexible. I had a producer once that went out of his way to really REALLY feed us very well, real restaurants, food and drinks on him, order whatever you want, no special limits, real plates and silverware, etc. …This all with the understanding that when we get back to the job, if we have to go an extra hour or two past the normal break time to nail something important, nobody is gonna complain or stop work and leave the set for anything but the briefest bathroom break. We were all onboard for that.

My bottom line is always, what’s fair to both sides: if my gig means you had to pass up another job, and you didn’t have time to score another job to replace the rain-out, you need to get at least a partial payment out of that rain-out, since you committed to the work and gave up time to be there, particularly if you traveled. If there is enough cushion that you didn;t have to be put-out, then no charge, we’ll get the money when it’s rescheduled.

[Mark Suszko]

Check up on the other recent thread about internships, a lot of what was written there applies to your question.

Try as I might, when I look at my Lightwave control panels, there is no “make dinosaur” button on there:-)Meaning, learning the tool alone does not make one an artist, only a technician. You haev to develop the artistic side of your skills with just as much effort as the purely procedural button pushing tech background.

I have heard people who love FullSail and those who hate it. I think if you consider it a quick-start beginning and not an end to itself, it couldn’t hurt. But also consider taking other courses less directly connected to AfterEffects, in order to make you more well-rounded as a editor and artist.

[Mark Suszko]

LOL, Todd, reminds me of a promo I once did for the State Fair in the 80’s that used a model shot or two and lots of green screen skulduggery.

The copy talked about how expensive gas was at a DOLLAR SEVENTY a GALLON!) (the more things change…) and that you could waste a lot of time and gas traveling a long way to questionable “sights” for the family summer vacation, or, you could go to the nearby state fair and see (insert a panoply of spectacles here).

The questionable tourist destinations included a gigantic yarn ball ( standard yarn ball and macro lens) that we posed a guy in front of and made look like it was 50-feet high. Also I took some HO scale railroad decor, little plastic scale billboards, and made a quick passing highway scene out of it, shot with the macro setting. The sign read “Mall of Many Wonders, next seven exits”. A sight that would strike terror into most dads travelling by car with the family.

We also shot a location practical, where a guy rises out of a farm pond into frame with a swimming mask, shaking his head side to side violently and with a rubber fish in his mouth, and a t-shirt that said: “Fred’s You-Catch-‘Em Catfish Farm”.

These all went by in a handful of quick-cut frames, just long enough to read and make you smile or scratch your head, but not see just how cheesy the shots were. Fred’s was based on a real place in town called the “You catch “em, You Eat ‘Em Trout farm”. The idea of catching catfish with those spiny fins in your mouth made the locals chuckle. One of my more expensive spots, the extra props, art, FX and actors set me back about $30, most of it for the t-shirt.

I like your idea of the model for the virtual set. It’s not original though: early experiments in the 60’s and 70’s used two cameras, mechanically linked via cables and servomotors, to make a camera with macro snorkel lens track a tabletop model in synch with a nearby camera shooting the actor against a backdrop wall. The actor was luma keyed into the “virtual” set. If the full scale cam trucked left to right or zoomed in or out, the model cam followed the model set in proportion. This never took off though because of the complexity and expense of the rigs which were very Rube Goldberg looking, and the linkage systems had just enough play in them that they were too sloppy to really make the effect pay off properly.

[Mark Suszko]

I think I just WROTE the tutorial in my last message:-)

Seriously, the photoshop part of this is just not that hard if you have even a FEW real elements around the shop to work with. Go try it for a goof, you’ve got nothing to lose.

I feel photoreal elements always look better than animated ones rendered with simple shaders, particularly for procedural objects and materials like wood, glass, metal, stone: those always seem to have a plastic, fake look to them unless rendered with a very sohisticated engine. The latest ones you showed were less heinous than most, then again, they did not dominate the frame.

To make a real tutorial out of this probably means asking Aaron the AE King to throw together a 2.5 or 3-d version in After Effects that would allow you to do some subtle pans, tilts and trucks around the set, plus have lighting interact with the set and talent, and expressions controlling displays. AE is not my area of expertise. Then again, I only need this effect once or twice a year and usually for a few minutes of simple locked-down medium and tight shots, so this simple method works well for me without the AE workload.

I can’t show you my finished fake set here, it would create an ethical problem involving sharing stuff from work that might be used commercially by someone. Sorry, have to make do with plain words. Use you imagination though, and you can set up your own set with almost any rack geometry and cosmetic details you can dream up.

[Mark Suszko]

I’ve seen all these, and don’t much care for any of them; they look like they are made by a guy who’s full-time job is mapping DOOM levels or other FPS game art. Okay for Space Ghost Coast To Coast, or some more frivolous kind of look, but hardly realistic looking. If you’re trying to do somethign serious, these are all too cartoony.

The most photo-realistic newsroom type sets I ever saw came bundled with toasters and globecasters. I liked theirs so much I used what they did as a pattern to make my own.

I went into our real control room with a cheap 60-dollar 2 MP still camera and shot monitors, decks, scopes, panels and rack sections, threw it all into photoshop and started cloning and duplicating and layering until I had a suitable mass of techno filling the frame. (Decks by the score, yeah, we can do A/B/C/D/E/F/G/H/I/J/K/L/M-roll edits!):-)

I added a layer with a vertical “glass” panel made using blur and extrude filters, which takes up the left hand third of the scene and looks like a glass shower curtain affair, you can still see motion and faint form “thru” it, but no detail. This is for keeping the background softer in support of any CG or PIP window I want to put up there.

The next step was the real key to selling the shot. I made two identical copies of the master shot, went into one, and did some subtle work on some of the visible video screens as well as the scopes. For some screens that were basically blank, they had a monochrome gradient on them: I flipped this gradient vertically on a few random monitors. I also displaced the image in the vector and waveform scopes a little bit, and picked a few red lights and LED’s on a few panels here and there and either erased or brightened/softened them. Don’t go overboard on that step!It’s a spice, not a main ingredient!

Then I put both layers into a DVE we have handy (you can also do this with any compositing software handy, from Boris to Motion to AE or whatever) and set the DVE/stillstore to cut between these two slightly different shots, looping nonstop about 2-3 times per second. Perfect flicker effect. Not too obtrusive, but it maeks the shot look live instead of like a still. Saved ths off to tape and hard drive as a loop. Greenscreened my actors in front of this doing standups as well as sit-downs behind a real desk. Free, and the client loved it. Took all of an hour to make.

The trick to selling this shot is that the background must also get bigger and possibly softer when you cut to a close-up of your talent. In my case, I can put the looping newsroom track on the old Alladin and preset a couple “focal lengths” with it that can pop to a close-up when I take the CU camera shot thru the switcher that’s doing the keys live. I do this stuff live to tape for the most part, then do minor clean-up in post.

You can do it in less time than I took to write it.