[Mark Suszko]

I have always seen disclaimers used for these, very very tiny ones but they have always been there somewhere along the bottom. So my guess is yes it is a requirement, at least in the U.S.

[Mark Suszko]

Keep the windows behind you, for one thing. If you balance for daylight, tungsten sources will be red or ruddy, but this “warm” look is more pleasurable than nalancing for tungsten where there’s a lot of blue daylight coming in and making people look pale and sickly. And flourescent makes everybody look green. The compromise is to balance to the dominant light in the shot, whatever that is, and make the best of the off-color sources by shooting around them. Sometimes you can override a blue or green room if you bounce a big enough halogen light off the ceiling or a big white wall nearby. But in many situations you may not be able to do that. Some folks like to use a white card to fool the camea by reflecting part of the daylight and part of the incadescent. This works sometimes but I don’t do it too often.

I continue to be astounded by the improvements in “shockless” automatically-adjusting white balance in modern cameras, but they do best when presented with one choice of temp at a time, so don’t put the windows and the practicals in the same shot and you will do better.

[Mark Suszko]

While a jib overhead is steady, the views may get obscured and the angles may not be optimal. The lipstick cam on his head may not point correctly: one attached to the earpieces of his eyeglasses or goggles might work better, since it aims where he looks, but I’m thinking the best way to go is a lipstick cam hand-held by his dental assistant during the procedure. Might make a handle or grip stick to make it easier to hand-hold. The assistant already knows what to aim at that’s most important, and this frees the dentist to do things undisturbed. So give the assistant the lipstick and a tiny monitor they can refer to. I have used a Sony LS-1 with good results: it can be fitted with a macro lens for the close-in work, and matched well with our PVV-1 Betacams when we used it. Elmo is another good brand. Units specifically made for medical/dental work are ideal but expensive and I have never heard of a place that rented them out. if this shoot is performed at a dental school, perhaps you can borrow their camera, as I’m sure they would have one as a teaching tool.

[Mark Suszko]

I have a mac and if you have a scanner and a printer, you also already have a free fax. I use a very inexpensive but nice USB Canon LIDE scanner, I think it was 50 bucks or so, it has three buttons on the front that, in concert with the bundled software, can be pre-set to act like a standard copy machine, a scanner, and a fax. The free bundled software from Apple and Canon includes a faxing program that sends and recieves, as well as an OCR program that will convert scans into text files for emailing or whatever.

The software can be configured to use a shared phone line with your dial-up internet, or it can sit on a voice line and wait several rings before picking up, in order to let voice calls go thru first. The software bundle includes drivers for PC versions of all this as well as a photo-stitching program and a paint/photoshop-like program. Pretty good deal for about fifty bucks!

On macs, the fax program is in one of the utilities folders, or just try a finder command to dig it up and activate it. With the Canon scanner and assignable buttons, it really is a one-touch thing, it prompts me for the number to send to, adds a cover sheet you pre-set if you want, and off it goes. For light duty occasional faxing, this may be all you ever need.

I hate the all-in one fax/print/copy/scan machines because if one part breaks down, you pretty much have lost everything else when it has to go get serviced. But that’s me. They certainly save space. But they may compromise one feature you want most, like the quality of the scanning or the printing. The LIDE scanner and a Canon color i850 set me back under a hundred IIRC, and they have worked brilliantly for everything I need. The printer is very thrifty on ink, 12 dollar refills with the OEM Canon ink last a very long while, and pictures on the glossy photo paper are impressive. B&W text thruput is also fast, quiet, and thrifty. The faxing ability was icing on the cake.

I don’t much use the fax here myself, before we had this functionality on the computer, we’d fax out of a nearby pharmacy that charged a buck for the service to send or recieve, or we used Kinkos. Again, a fair way to go if your needs are temporary or modest.

[Mark Suszko]

What some theater folks I know of have done is, they’ll tape one performance, usually the full dress rehearsal, (without paid attendance), so the cast and crew can watch and evaluate themselves in the show, but they DON’T make any copies and either lock up the original tape or erase it. If somebody from the cast wants to see it, the cast has a party at some member’s home and watches it at the party. But the director of the play keeps the one tape.

I still think this is not proof against a sue-happy adversary, but seems a reasonable compromise considering everything else. I used to shoot these for free, just for such “evaluation” purposes, as a friend of the cast.

I wish the laws made more sense and didn’t require this craziness. If you don’t like it, you need to send a letter or email to your senator and representative saying you want more reasonable and practical laws regarding such situations. If you don’t speak out, he only voice your congressmen will ever hear is the RIAA and Disney, asking to extend the lock on Mickey another 100 years and to heck with the little guy taping weddings, school recitals and plays.

[Mark Suszko]

Is the birthday boy or girl able to participate in making this, or are they supposed to be surprised by this and not see it until that day of the party?

If they can play along with you in advance, you could have some fun doing a Zelig/Forrest Gump thing: shoot the geezer in various poses with different outfits on and cleverly composite him into existing scenes from movies or history or whatever to make a fake documentary. One time we made this going-away video for an office person, like “this is your life”, only it was done as a gag, so all the “rememberances” were made-up and satirical. We used everything from puppets to stock footage to re-create his “story”.

[Mark Suszko]

Watch THIS!

https://www.zappinternet.com/index.php?video=fodCyoDmiV

This guy should work for Gondry! That’s an insane amount of work if truly done the old-school, two frames at a time by hand. Even on an NLE.

[Mark Suszko]

Fictional. Not just for possible legal reasons, but if you really mean this to be a creative exercise, letting them ape or leverage exisiting brands and their marketing strategies and identities is not as creative or educational as it could be. There’s more work in defining something all-new from scratch than re-defining an existing item. Plus, if the work is good, it becomes useful portfolio material for them later.

[Mark Suszko]

Sometimes the best thing is not to cut on the exact beat, but cut so the ACTION in the SHOT “hits” on the beat. In your case, say it’s footage of two trainees in boot camp duking it out with those padded sticks. You want the visually exciting impact of the blow to coincide with a beat or better, a stronger part of the track like a cymbal crash, a drum fill, something like that. Set up a payoff visually and audibly.

Cutting everything on the beat all the way thru makes it metronomic and overly predictable.

[Mark Suszko]

We just discussed this in another forum and apparently a solution that is growing in popularity due to economics of long S-video runs or firewire is to use cat-5 ethernet cable, splitting out pairs and using baluns to run an s-video or even component (beta)signal back. If you are happy using composite video, you have even more runs in an ethernet “snake”. Alternately, the spare pairs can be used to run tally lights or intercoms, with proper adptors/connectors. Markertek is one source for the baluns, there are others.