[Mark Suszko]

I think we should run a pool to guess the day they fix it.:-)
I remember a time when folks would run print ads with deliberate mistakes in them, and if you called them to report it, you won some little prize or something. The theory being any customer that takes the time to call you about this sort of thing may be a PITA but also a valuable customer to retain, because they really are interested in having a dialog with you, end up being evangelizers and free salesmen for you.

So one of the times I wrote to this company, pointing out the mistake and joking “what do I win?” what I got back was an automated form reply telling me they had opened up a trouble ticket for me. No follow-up message ever came back.

Gee, thanks.

Here’s another example. We have a local chain of gas station/convenience stores called Hucks, with a logo of a Huck Finn character on them. One day as I’m going in to pay for my gas, I mention to the counter kid that the big sign out front has misspelled the word “cheeseburgers”.

He looks me in the eye and, smiling, shrugs with a fatalistic expression, and replies: “Welcome to Hucks!”

So I tell him, him with the ponytail, fishook in the eyebrow and smirky attitude to old farts;

“I know you think I’m making too big a deal about such a small thing. But let me tell you something. If you can’t be bothered to take the time to spell it right, or fix it promptly when it’s pointed out to you, then I have to wonder just how careful you are about making that cheeseburger in the first place. Do you maybe drop it on the floor and still serve it? Do you wash your hands while you make it, or keep the meat refrigerated properly so I don’t spend the next three days home sick? Do you really seem to care if the gas I just bought from you has water mixed in the holding tanks and will leave my wife stranded on some back road a day from now? Is the milk I’m buying for my kid’s breakfast going to expire in only a day because somebody here left it on the loading dock unrefrigerated for an hour or two? Little things matter, young man, because EVERYTHING matters. If I can’t trust your business to get a piddling little easy-to-fix detail right, or to even express that you CARE about making it right, why should I believe you about anything, or trust anything I buy here? Why, with that kind of attitude, would I ever come back here? All I was looking for was for you to say thanks for pointing it out, and we’ll take care of it as soon as we can. It’s about pride in yourself.”

Two days later, the sign is still wrong.
And you know, I really don’t use that store anymore. Ever.

(sigh) I guess I just wasn’t made for these times, got to go change the onion on my belt now…

[Mark Suszko]

Charles (GRHS) would have proofread it first, but for sure he wouldn’t have let it stay bad this long. It’s an OCD thing for me, and maybe for others in our biz; I figure many detail-oriented folks gravitate towards our kind of work.

You gotta wonder though; if they can’t be bothered to do their own ad right, and won’t respond to a month’s worth of emails from readers telling them they have a mistake, what kind of customer service can one expect? Their in-house communication must be poor.

[Mark Suszko]

To quote garth Algar: “We fear change”. I like the previous layout just fine.

It’s a tad busy. If they add any more animated flash loops I might get a seizure.:-) I’m going mto look for some settings in my browser to disable looping of the flash because after seeing it loop twice, okay, I GET IT already.

I’d prefer the whites tamped down a level or two: the contrast is fairly strong. And the choice of browser certainly makes a difference: I saw this remodeled site earlier today on a version of Netscape and it was like a car accident. Here, it looks better. I know you can’t ever make it appear perfect and identical on every browser, though.

The ads on the left side got bigger, I think. Which pays the bills, so it’s hard to complain, except for the ProMax Fibremax ad that has had “simultaneously” spelled wrong for over a month; that makes me nuts. 😉

[Mark Suszko]

Do you have to shoot the real film developing? Or can this shot be faked with pre-developed negative and paper? In which case, you can light any way you want. Instead of using just a red bulb, you could shoot in normal light and then play with the color channels in post, to get a “more real than real” look.

[Mark Suszko]

Do you have to shoot the real film developing? Or can this shot be faked with pre-developed negative and paper? In which case, you can light any way you want. Instead of using just a red bulb, you could shoot in normal light and then play with the color channels in post, to get a “more real than real” look.

[Mark Suszko]

Because TV’s don’t look or work the same anymore. The classic shrink to a dot effect happens because in the old CRT’s when you turned a set off the residual heat of the electron guns made them continue to spit a weak, slowly decaying stream of electrons for a second or two after power was cut. This, combined with the decaying magnetic field of the driver coils leaking their charge, paints a very distinctive, shrinking pattern of illuminated screen phosphors that is very evocative of period CRT technology. More modern transistorized sets had active suppression of this phenomenon. You just don’t see this kind of effect in modern CRTS and never in plasmas or LCD’s. Unless you have a working antique TV more than 20 years old hanging around, there is no practical way to shoot the real effect witha camera now; you have to fake it one way or another.

[Mark Suszko]

Automatic Dialog Replacement, aka “looping”. Though when I do it there’s nothing much “automatic” about it:-) The name comes from the way they used to do it: the actor that had to re-say the line was in a booth looking at a spliced repeating loop of film for the scene in question. They’d watch the mouth and body movements, often listening to the original sound thru headphones, then on cue, would try to speak the new lines as well as possible to match the old. The recording from that was laid back in the place of the original and since the tiings were the same, it automatically fell into place.

When I have to do something like this, such as when dubbing a Spanish track alongside existing English footage, I find some people “get it” and can do it by watching the monitor and listening, and some are just too thrown by the picture and can only do it by listening and speaking along. Still others are too thrown by the process, which is a little like patting your head and rubbing your tummy at the same time, and the only thing that works there is to time the segment and then get them to do alternate reads against a stop watch until you get enough takes that are at or under the time limit to edit together and do the final re-alignment in post.

ADR was very big in Europe for many years after the war (and seemingly remains so in India) because of a shortage of affordable and compact and good location audio gear, and the crowded nature of the country meant you just could not escape a lot of interrupting noise in the field.

It became almost a creative style to depend on for some Europeans instead of a repair tool. It was not seen the same way in the States, where it was mainly considered a repair technique. Orson Welles was a famous and frequent user of ADR in his movies; since he had lots of expertise in dramatic radio work, this came more naturally to him. He used it as an opportunity to tweak and tune all the actor’s vocal performances and line readings.

In fact, he first shot ” The Magnificent Ambersons” around a completely pre-recorded audio track, painstakingly edited together from many recordings of the cast in perfect booth conditions. The idea was to play the lines back on the actual set during filming, and have all the actors lip synch to it. The theory Orson had was, they could concentrate more on their acting and body language if the lines were already perfect, and the noisy dollies and cranes Orson wanted to use for dramatic angles, and the squeaky fans and what-not of the more primitive soundstages would no longer be a deciding factor.

It worked great on paper, but it proved too challenging to pull off in practice: the actors had a hard time acting this way, and the on-location playback technology and acoustics of the sets created challenges that could not be overcome in time. So after a few days of thrashing with this, they gave it up and shot the whole thing conventionally.

Ironically today, the technique is heavily used in the kinds of theatrical shows you see in theme parks and some museums, particularly anything that requires a lot of running around on the set, or that requires a lot of performers with varying skill levels to take shifts doing the same pre-timed acting to choreographed practical effects work, where the timing is everything, and the quality of the speaking needs to be super high and consistent.

[Mark Suszko]

You say you taped the mic down, that’s good, however, a lot of what people think is the mic rubbing is actually the CABLE rubbing and transmitting vibration thru conduction. So the first thing to look at from my view is to also tape down the cables in the clothing, and not just in a straight line, but add a small dime-sized loop somewhere just south of the mic head to absorb a little flexing of the body and clothing too.

You know those 99 cent eyeglass repair kits by the check-out counter at the drugstore? The little clear tubes with a micro screwdriver and assorted small repair parts? Buy one, on general principle. They’re handy. Secondly, try one of the self-adhesive nose pads from the repair kit as a foam cushion between the mic head and what it lays against.

Another way to hide a lav is over the top of an ear using medical tape like dermatape or similar brand. This is kind of common on the theatrical stage, and works great if there’s enough hair to obscure the wire in bangs, sideburns and the like. A side benefit is no matter what direction the face turns in a conversation, the mic distance and quality thus never varies.

I’ve done it a time or two when the clothing just wouldn’t work any other way with a lav. it DOES work!

[Mark Suszko]

I have found that having a daughter as well as sons has done wonders for my appreciation of and antagonism towards artificial limits on gender roles. My daughter is brilliant, talented and creative and whatever she wants to try her hand at, she better by heaven get an equal chance to try or mom and dad both are kicking the door down. She’s already been in various PSA’s and promo spots of mine, her current one is the girl in the pool at this site: http://www.ichooseinb.com. She wants me to win the camcorder so we can shoot more projects together:-)

We get school kids thru our studios on tours every once in a while. I have handled these for years, we have some greenscreen fun, and we let the kids try out and rotate thru various crew positions over and over until everybody’s tried everything once. I also do a little one on one with each kid, letting them try to shoulder a broadcast camera for one thing. I always made a point of telling the girls not to worry about the camera being heavy, because they keep getting smaller and lighter. I also tell them about the 2-3 female ENG shooters working in my market. I explain that air talent is ony one aspect of the job and there is a lot more to be done: that one of my early director-trainers was a woman, many of our interns went on to work behind the scenes as producers or editors or directors at O&O stations in major markets, or staffers for DC comics, or places like that. And so on.

It’s selfish, of course. I’m making sure my own daughter will have room if she wants to try this in the future.

[Mark Suszko]

I would say the more skills the better; except for a handful of one-topic specialists that work in the rarefied air of super-high-budgets, everybody further down the food chain in the middle levels of the market needs to be somewhat of a generalist these days. Even if you don’t learn it very deeply, it will enable you to talk intelligebty with clents and 3-d collabotators, and that’s a nice thing to have as well, even if you don’t progress further.

I have always been a Lightwave fan, and had worked at learning it for a few years, but it’s one of those things that’s like a muscle: the longer you stay away from it, the more skill atrophies. Still, I retain enough to be able to create a scene and fly around some 3-d type, that sort of thing. It’s my own fault mostly for not sticking with it harder, but you know how distractions can crop up in life. Also, it didn’t help that my workplace never saw any need or desire for developing the capability.

But back to the question, and a sort of logical leap: maybe 3-d is not your bag, but extended 2-d IS.

Look into Toon Boom Studio; imagine what kind of neat stuff you can do moving 2-d flat art around in a 3-d space with a traditional drawn and inked cel animation look. This kind of stuff is the shiznit in flash animations all over the web these days, and folks often come back to this kind of thing when they want to make spots and intros and promos for things that there is no footage for.

Yes, of course, you can do much the same in AE or Motion or another compositor, and every editor should be at least familiar/conversant with one of those, if not a master of one of them, but Toon Boom is a different enough app from AE to warrant your inspection. You could try a free demo version and see if it sparks something in you. If so, then pursue it.