[Mark Suszko]

Try the outwater plastics catalog. Fake etched/frosted glass decals and films among other things. The catalog is full of cool stuff for set builders and amateur architects.

[Mark Suszko]

If you had The Mill or Ardman on your CV, I’d say many folks would give you a shot. You are in a tricky area concerning tax liabilities as well as immigration status, and your best bet is to ask a solicitor there or a lawyer here to look up the statutes first. Maybe even a CPA.

What you do in the underground economy “off the books” is your own business, but the big bucks jobs, jobs that can be used for references for more jobs, are going to come with an audit trail for state and federal taxes and benefits and you don’t want to mess things up for you OR the business that wants your skills by getting them audited or you expelled for visa violations, so I’d pay the money for good legal advice first.

[Mark Suszko]

You can do this with a clear piece of lexan or similar and then apply a blurring stick-on film to this. Such film is available at home centers (for masking bathroom windows) or try the online catalog at Outwater Plastics, they are a huge source of stuff for set builders. They sell several versions of the film that can simulate frosted glass to various degrees. Try putting the film directly on the TV monitors, it should cling well using static electrcity. You can also chemically etch plastic youself using a solvent, but this takers some skill to do well and evenly. You could also use a diffusion gel material.

[Mark Suszko]

Doctors and lawyers and airline pilots definitely work hourly rates, nothing “Manual labor” about that. I’m not sure this is an applicable metaphor you’re bringing into this. Video production appeals to me for this reason, among many others; that it is a fusion of hands-on manual crafsmanship and cerebral head work. When I tire of the one side, I refresh myself with the other.

Back to billing and budgeting: I suppose you could do flat fees, but in discrete steps or sections, as in a flat fee for the pre-prod, a flat fee for the shoot, a flat fee for post up to the first rough cut, etc. and you don’t take on the next portion until paid up for all previous ones. The goal is to keep getting paid all along so you are not working “for free” while the guy with the money is making interest on it.

I think some folks wanting to do a doc are afraid that too much advance planning somehow taints the honesty of the doc by forcing it down certain paths. My opinion is that as long as you keep some ground rules for yourself regarding objectivity, and refer to them from time to time, the integrity of the doc will survive okay. But it’s foolish to think anyone can make a totally objective piece.

[Mark Suszko]

P.S. to the previous post that I accidentally dropped:

I have seen many demos played at trade shows that used stock house clips with large lower thirds showing the source of the clips. I don’t know what the stock house policy is about using the watermarked footage for “free”, but it may behoove you to go to their sites and see if they offer any such “freebie” use and under what terms. Could save you money and solve your demo problem.

*Plus, it shows prospective clients that you really CAN make a story out of almost anything, including their own repurposed footage, at a big savings. That’s marketing that works for YOU.

[Mark Suszko]

What does your conscience tell you?

Or, that question aside, what do you think a prospective employer
will think of a guy who “borrows” copyrighted materials? Might they wonder if once they hire you, you will “borrow” their own work product for your own purposes? I think I would.

I can understand an editor who doesn’t shoot anything himself, but is yet a good editor and needs material to work with.

If this was my situation, I think I would opt for buying cleared clips from a stock house like Artbeats or similar.

The other issue that can come up with clips from familiar sources is they bring a lot of baggage with them. Clips from movies or Tv shows come with their own context already, and with associations that may or may work as you intended when you borrowed the clip. You start with a handicap in having first to break the previous contextual linkages before you even start composing a new story with the clips. Now I have seen this done brilliantly with the re-cut versions of trailers for West Side Story and The Shining (see youtube for these) but I think those work precisely because the audience knows the original material and enjoys the dichotomy of expectations. If you are trying to do a serious example of your own editing style, using these clips just makes people watching expect you to ape the style of the original, and they are likely to feel disappointed if you don’t. Why paint yourself into such a creative corner?

Be yourself, obtain original material and put your definitive spin on it, show your talent without having to pick Cowart’s work out from Spielberg’s.

[Mark Suszko]

Set the zebras lower to avoid clipping. Zebras telling you you’re exceeding 100 is too late. Set at maybe 90 IRE is what I’d do. This will help with the LCD, but I would always use the eyepiece for critical focus work and monitoring exposure, or a dedicated viewfinder on a studio pedestal type setup.

[Mark Suszko]

Good point.

Don’t get overwhelmed by the thing, break it down to manageble steps. The following is just one method, not necessarily the best.

I would break the thing down to known elements you can get a handle on first. If this is an interview-heavy doc, count up the number of folks to be interviewed and figure a day rate package for shooting each one, and total those up. If you can schedule them so one gear rental covers everything, you’ve saved money. If you can get them to all show up in more or less one place to cut your travel costs, you’ve saved more money. Total up the interview shoots the production gear and expendables and per diem and etc. and get a figure. Are you going to buy any music? Do you need to get any insurance or clearances for some element? Calculate those. You are halfway to the estimate.

Now consider post.

You know from the number of interviews roughly how many hours of raw tape you’ll shoot. You will spend at least that amount of time digitizing and logging. I am a believer that more time spent in quality logging and previewing footage leads to shorter and more effective time in the actual edit. This digitizing step is the modern day equivalent of the offline “paper edit” we used to do in the ’70s and ’80s. Think of it as the first very rough edit, in fact. If you are a very detail-oriented logger, probably double or even triple the shot footage time for this step. Decide if you’re paying/charging full edit bay rates for digitizing or some lower rate, and calculate that. Set the number aside for a grand total later.

The edit itself:

If you are shooting to a script, you could for example pick a ratio of raw stock to edit time and calculate a rough average of expected edit time from that. The more experienced you are the more accurate these guesses get. What I’m talking about is sort of like the ratio of shot film to finished projected product, only I’m talking hours spent trying out and applying edits versus the number of hours of material available, and not necessarily the running length of the finished show. Nobody I know of uses exactly every frame he shot in the final edit, and takes only that amount of real time to perform a master edit ( we would call such a thing dubbing it, not editing 🙂 )

OTOH, nobody I know has the shooting to final ratio of Coppola’s Apocalypse Now either, but something in-between those two extremes.

Say the editing is more or less uncomplicated cuts of a simple tale, told sequentially by just cutting down the subjects responses for time in a generally linear style. Maybe you would figure a 3:1 edit-to raw ratio based on your skills and what you know about the project. You shot three hours of interview, so maybe the rough cut will take nine hours, using this rule of thumb, plus say four hours to log and digitize. This is assuming short occasional breaks, not necessarilly lunches and dinners. You have 13 hours down on this job. 13 hours with only bathroom breaks and coffee is a heavy day, makes more sense to say a day and a half to two days to do a nice edit boiling down the three hours into a finished program. So your spreadsheet or back of the envelope could show that day rate and the cost.

This is just very loose speculation at this point, mind you. In my linear days doing training vids, my hours ratio for editing was just over 2 to 1 for a simple job, but that was under very tightly controlled conditions, without too much fancy FX work, for something very prosaic and not especially creatively challenging, more like “tab a goes into slot b” kinds of things. With NLE and all it brings to the party in terms of creative options and storytelling technique, plus the ability to work with multiple versions and mix between them, I would expect a documentary could be anywhere from a tightly-planned, logged, and scripted one at 5 edit hours to each 1 hour of raw tape, all the way past 15:1 or 20:1 for something so loose it is completely “discovered” in the post process. So much of that depends on what kind of preoducer/director you are, how much anarchy and exploration time you can afford in a place that charges by the hour, etc.

Anyway, that’s one way (my way) to guess the actual edit suite time. Will you need to do captioning or add other voice tracks? Lay off HD and SD versions? That’s easily going to double the time. And graphics is the wild card, as has been mentioned before. Animating still photos, the cost of stock footage, making maps with builds and moving arrows, compositing… this is all going to have to be a separate budgeting step because it is so variable from project to project.

If you have an hourly edit fee rate in mind, now throw it against the predicted hours for post from above, and total this with the hours for logging/digitizing. Throw in two or three hours for making dub masters, safety copies, or burning simple DVD’s without any menus, just for approvals and review.

Add it to the totals from the shoots.

Now you have a *rough* idea of the time and thus money to be spent to get to the first rough cut stage. And that’s all you can do becasue you can’t predict what changes they’ll throw at you after that step. If the client or sponsor can meet this bare minimum figure ( AND you have not begun to figure profits yet! Just costs!)
you will be in relatively good shape. If you’re already far in the red on paper, over-cost or over time, before you’ve even figured in the profits, then the project needs to be re-evaluated to see how it can be brought in line with the resources you have, or you need to go dig up more money somewhere.

And believe it or not, that’s the SHORT version!:-)

[Mark Suszko]

My first guesses are Nolo’s website and the FDA website, or any lawyer could look it up for you over the phone for maybe fifty bucks or so.

[Mark Suszko]

Situations like this are why we get paid those “big bucks” to ride the manual iris controls apropriately while shooting. I have shot numerous stage plays and the point is well made that they are not usually going to change a thing about the show just to make your life easier, it is you that has to accomodate them.

Balance on the white light only, let the colored lights do their coloring, that’s their reason for being there.

Manual iris control has been the way I deal with the contrast problems, and mostly it works. Remember that with digital tape formats you can bring up detail in slightly under-exposed shots in post but anything blown out to 100 percent white is gone forever and can never be recovered, so if anything, err on the side of slightly under-exposing. Some folks use a special net or grid type lens filter to spread out contrast a little, I have never had the cash for one of those and the stage situation is such an extreme one that this con or diffusion filter may hurt rather than help in that case.

One other consideration is that where exactly you place the cameras; high, low, close or far, will have a large influence on how good or bad the contrast situation is, as you gather in more or less of the scenes and include or exclude set walls or props that catch more or less light spilled from the beams of those spots. Go to as many rehearsals as you can and try different camera positions to see if one works best. Best of luck, do report back after the shoot and tell us what worked and what didn’t.