[Mark Suszko]

Let me ask you this: why worry about the aspect ratio or your camera at all? If the client wants it wide screen, say “yes of course we can do that”, then go rent the apropriate camera and lens and pass on those costs in your billing. What, you were going to buy the camera to own and NOT charge more for the better features and lens? No, you’re smarter than the average bear. So on paper, to the client, his costs would be the same, right?

I sound like a stuck record, I know (hm, time to update that metaphor)but I strongly feel producers obsess too much about physical ownership of the camera. Airline pilots don’t own their jets. Guys with “ASC” behind their names don’t usually own a couple Panavisions. Maybe a Bolex or some smaller camera, from earlier in their careers, but not usually a main production camera. They tend to lease or rent, depending on the length of time they use it. If the amount of use means it’s cheaper to own than continue renting, then it makes sense to buy the camera instead. Otherwise, the money is put to better use invested in other things, like light kits, good tripods, good mics, etc. Things that don’t get obsoleted after one NAB show.:-)

Not sinking your working capital in the camera is a GOOD thing! By renting, you always can select the apropriate tool for the specific job, instead of having to make do with something you chose a year or two back and are “stuck” with. If you own the camera, how many days per year is it actually working, versus sitting in storage, not earning money, but costing you depreciation, maintenance, insurance, etc.? My wife and I were talking to the owner of a Chinese Restaurant one day. Wife remarked the owner worked long hours and never closed on Sundays or holidays. Owner said: “They charge me building rent seven days a week, so I work to pay it seven days a week. Otherwise I will never get ahead.”

There is something to be said for owning a camera if you’re using it daily, and the more hands-on experience you get on a camera, the beter you handle it. But after a couple (okay two decades) years of shooting, they all pretty much seem the same to me: pictures go in this end, electrons go out that end, the only things that change are some switchology and menu settings, and they thankfully get smaller and lighter as I get older and frailer. How you line up and frame shots doesn’t change. So, I have never had that fetish type love for the camera where I need to have it physically present to feel or prove to someone that I’m a videographer. I am not defined by my tools. If anything, I am defined by the results, the product of the tools I use.

So far in my career, all my work for every client has been 3×4 and that looks to remain the same for 95% of my work for the next five years. I have no client mandate for widescreen. If they ask for it, and are willing to pay for it, I can make some calls and deliver it, using rentals. They don’t have to know it’s rented; their bill is going to be the same either way.

Doing that next week in fact; renting a Sony HD rig for a day, for a 30-second spot project for one client that wants a wide-screen spot. We’re still talking with the clients about the fact that while we will produce it in HD wide screen for them to order, as they ask, the actual stations that will be running the finished spot will be airing dubs made in SD analog, and may well ask for center-punched 4×3 versions in analog as well. We could easily fake the widescreen look by framing to protect for that ratio while shooting in 3×4 then matting it in post. In SD resolution it would seem the same to the target market.

So why even shoot it in HD if it is never going to be broadcast or watched in HD? Meh, (shrugs) personally, I will enjoy learning to do something new, and it will give us some flexibility and longevity with the original elements for some as yet unforseen future uses. That’s nice. But if the major issue was saving money, for sure I’d be shooting it with the non-HD assets I already have.

[Mark Suszko]

Um, John, the FCC says nothing of the kind regarding making 16:9 OR High-Def mandatory.

What is happening after the deadline is all analog stations are supposed to stop transmitting analog TV and switch to digital transmission. There is a lot of confusion about this, but basically, the aspect ratio of the screen need not change just because the transmissions are now in digital.

Not all digital will be high-def in two years, indeed, I’d say the likeliest thing we’ll see is more 4 by 3 programming than ever, because the digital format’s compression allows the stations (if they choose) to divide up the bandwidth of their signal into one high-def wide-screen transmission or between 4 and 6 STANDARD-def “sub-channels”. So if you live in a small town with one TV station, they could, after the switch, act like a mini version of a cable TV company, and give you 6 sub-channels in regular def 4×3: an all-kids subchannel, a news sub, a weather loop sub, a repeating loop sub of the day’s Oprah or soap so you’re never more than 30 minutes away from the start of the show, and with scrambling and subscription systems, even “adult” subs would be possible.

The big question this brings up is how do the guys with the white belts and shoes charge advertisers for these subchannels, when except for scrambled subscriptions, there’s no good way to measure viewership? In the case of the looped Oprah channel, do you offer new ad buys and slots for each repetition, or sell the slots one time for multiple plays? The rates will no doubt plummet to the level of whatlocal radio spots cost now, maybe less.
We are, as the Chinese curse suggests, about to “live in intersting times”.

[Mark Suszko]

Dale, chances are it has been thought of before, perhaps in a different context, or you’re putting a different spin on it. The execution of the old idea in a new way is everything.

I have a good laugh with my wife every Friday. I had what I thought was a can’t-miss idea for a documentary show. I described it to the wife, in loving detail. Over weeks I had worked out a lot of it in my head as recreation during the duller bits of everyday living and whatnot.

She heard out my pitch, said: “that’s the STUPIDEST idea for a show I’ve ever heard of, NOBODY is going to watch that except for a handful of nerds like you. You mean to say there’s an audience willing to hear doddering old nearly-dead ex-pilots blather on thirty-forty years later about a 2-minute combat they had, while you fill-in around them with computer animation of planes shooting each other? Rubbish!”

“Dogfights” airs on History Channel in the U.S. every friday night, around 9 PM Central time. It’s everything I imagined my own version was going to be, except they recap too often and too much after breaks, and are a little too Jerry Bruckheimer-like with the excessive head-on-into-the camera and close-passes-that-shake-the-flying-virtual-camera shots. But otherwise, it’s the same show I would have pitched to Discovery Networks, had I an inkling of how to go about it. I was afraid to share it for a long time in case someone else would “steal” it. Obviously, the guys that do the show had the same idea, and likely before I did.

Had I actually got up the stones to DO something with my show idea, I would have had to start raising some operating money to shoot a demo or pilot program, done some test animations of the dogfights and some final renders at show-quality, and gotten enough pre-production planning and interviews and the like going that I would have a great advantage over anybody else that wanted to “steal” the idea and get it out in the marketplace first. Then I’d start trying to get heard by the development people at those networks, to pitch them the idea and see if they’d let me put a package together with them. I’d have needed a good entertainment lawyer as well as maybe an agent for that. many times you do all that and find out their in-house team is already in developmenton something like it. Other times they want to buy out your idea and run it themselves, and there’s not a lot you can do about it, if they change it sufficiently to be able to call it “original”. NDA’s are good to try, but might just as often kill a deal before it’s even born, if they refuse to sign.

I chickened out, I’m too poor and tied-down with responsibility to get started on any of that, so I gave up on the risks and heavy burdens of pursuing that idea, then started sharing it with a friend or two here and there. They all said it was a HELL of an idea, THEY’d watch it. But the wife never liked it, and I set great store by her everyday every-person sensibilities. She was absolutely right in terms of a mass audience in the traditional sense, but we both had no idea how many history/military/aviation nerds there were for our potential audience. Obviously with narrowcasting on cable networks that cater to them, there are plenty enough to base a show or two on! 🙂

And there’s your difference, Dale. Are you willing to put it all on red and give the wheel a spin? Put your family’s life savings into hock and take a year off a full-time bill-paying job you may not get back, to bankroll the beginnings of an idea that has every chance of getting shot down at every place you pitch it?

Still, we watch the show every Friday, she’s very good-natured about it, it’s become just a running gag between us… and I make her repeat her line at the start of each episode:

“That’s the STUPIDEST idea for a show EVER! NOBODY is going to watch THAT!”

I’m thinking of making that my new sig file.

[Mark Suszko]

If you just lay all the Show/ Tell/ Expert things into three sequential chapters, I think that’s excessively linear and dull.

What you could do though is ask some leading questions then let the variety of answers from those categories fill in the responses. In each case, perhaps a different aspect of the triad would lead the exploration.

For purposes of illustraton, let’s say this was going to be about Steve Irwin. No reason, just go with it.

Example topic: “Kids”.

Some b-roll “show” with voice-over from “tell”, cutting to and from on-camera interview sources from Tell section, describing the couple’s ideas about their own childhoods, child-rearing, setting limits and laying out examples and giving inspiration, then a confirming opinion and anecdote from the outside “expert”. In Steve’s case, (and this had to be dealt with in an actual documentary on the subject) there was a lot of agonizing, introspection, and re-assessment going on after the “holding your baby too close to crocs during a public performance” affair.

The doc used b-roll of Steve interacting with the kids, his own and others, intercut with the controversial footage, then up-close interview footage of a discussion of the affair afterwards, sort of a post-game analysis. The doc did much to rehabilitate the late Irwin’s career after massive negative world press from the baby-croc affair, and Irwin’s star was again in ascendency when he unfortunately met the stingray.

It’s the hopping between past/present, and subject/evaluator perspectives that fills out the idea of what happened and how people thought about it then and now, how it changed them. I liken this mode to how the cubists like Picasso sought to try and show multiple perspectives in one 2-d image, to make, not anything photo-representational, but something that really evoked the inner nature or character of the subject. Done poorly, it’s a jumble; done artfully, it’s more than it was before.

[Mark Suszko]

Not only will the extra screen room be welcome, as far as your drive question, at least for photoshop, it wil be nice to have lots of “scratch disk” room. Not everything is done in ram, even if you have a lot of it.

[Mark Suszko]

I would define it as 2-d elements arranged and moved thru 3-d space, in a 3-d perspective, but usually with the conceit that they are deliberatly revealing that the elements are not themselves 3-dimensional but flat, 2-d representations. You don’t necessarily have to give away that the elements are actually flat; indeed, much of modern digtal matte painting and set extension work for movies is done this way to reduce modeling and image processing overhead.

Personally, I have always loved this technique, it is as old as stop-motion itself but has a new freshness in CGI form. One of the first times I ever really began to notice it was for the music video for “Don’t Answer Me”, by one of those late 70’s/early 80’s supergroups, can’t recall the name off the top of my head, but I want to say it was Alan Parsons. The tune had echoes of old Phil Spector percussion riffs, the video was 2.5 d animation with a cartoony, 40’s gumshoe/film noir crime thriller theme.

Jackson’s “Leave Me Alone” and prior to that, much of the 80’s work out of the Charlex edit suites in NYC was another high-water mark for the technique, which I believe only really became practical in video once d-1 and pre-read were invented, and guys like Zbigneiw Rzepchinski (I probably mangled that spelling) started experimenting with how far layering could go in D-1 and D-2.

In modern times, I think you have to look at obviously Ken Burns’ motion work but more specifically “The Kid Stays In The Picture” and “Riding Giants” as the two films using this kind of compositing that really broke it out, made it well known, and got it so popular that it’s now almost a cliche’.

[Mark Suszko]

In this world of virus scares and whatnot, I’m not sure anything sent unsolicited would just get stuck in a computer. A DvD perhaps. But like Tom alluded to, I think you have to have something to offer like a free calculator program or something.

[Mark Suszko]

The relatively few times I forward someone a URL link to a You-tube video, it has either been over the top hysterically funny or clever, or of something directly related to some particular narrow interest of my friends.co-workers and myself, or it shows some exemplary kind of masterful execution. Anything less is not worth it.

So, what is it about your web site?

[Mark Suszko]

I forgot to mention this episode. Went to my In-Law’s anniversary party at a nice private club. My sis in-law had money to burn, and instead of even asking me about doing one, she went ahead and hired the most expensive events video guy in town to make a music montage tape and project it at the party. Before you go and say I’m contradicitng my earlier post, let me point out this is an edit job and I had no problem making this then coming to the party as a guest to view it along with everyone else.

She and other relatives had kicked in a shoebox full of photos and slides and memorabilia weeks ahead and a list of tunes from the couple’s lives, and what this guy charged them hundreds for was, he just threw the slides in in no discernable sequence, just totally random order, pre-set duration of six seconds per slide, RANDOM TRANSITIONS between each slide, no consideration of landscape versus portrait framing of the pics, and then he played each clip of music in random order with no obvious connection to the slides shown, each song just cut off after a minute and the next one dropped in. Total run time maybe fifteen minutes. Charged a premium for the video projection on-site too.

I thought I was going to puke.

The inlaws of course LOVED IT.

You have to understand, they are from a time before the invention of TV, and seeing themselves on a screen is still a miraculous thing to them.

My mother-in-law, who knows I write, produce, shoot and edit broadcast television for a living, turns to me and asks: “oh, Mark, did YOU do that?”

“NO!!!!!!!” I forcefully assert, “I swear I had nothing to do with that… production.”

Had I even been aware this was being contemplated, I could have, would have, done an awesome montage for them with all the care and attention to detail of someone who was a pro at this job and also a relative. People would have wept. As it was, I wept when I found out what sis-in-law had paid for the thing. I knew the guy who does this, toured his shop. He has high schoolers throwing random stills down on a copy stand and tripping a digital stills camera, then throwing everything into an editing app very much like powerpoint. The results are what you’d expect.

But civilians just often have no concept of taste or quality, what we do has been commoditized to the point it’s no longer recognized as a craft, though along with the stills it’s about the only part of the day that remains after all else is gone and forgotten.

[Mark Suszko]

Well I usually say “I was looking forward to being there as one of your invited guests, and not hired help”. I then offer to find them someone i know who is good but inexpensive. I did do my sister’s first wedding video early in my career as my wedding gift, and I used to use samples from it as my sales demo, so I definitely got my money’s worth out of that. But I probably would have drawn the line at suddenly becoming the default “freebie” guy for every event for every relative. My bottom line would be if I shoot them for free as a gift and they have a complaint, they’re entitled to a refund of everything they paid.