[Mark Suszko]

I’d need a better idea of what you were trying to accomplish. Do you mean a 3-d animated composite with HDRI? What are the parameters? Can you just describe what the spot is supposed to look like?

[Mark Suszko]

What I know of this is second and third-hand, but because of the tremendous pace of production, they try to live-switch every scene as much as possible.

Editing would consist of stiching together the live-switched scenes and adding appropriate transitions, fixing bad performances or bad live take decisions by going back thru synch rolled iso shots and doing replacements.

Also you’d be trimming things down to make a certain running time, and occasionally, for things like specialized dream or memory sequences, or music-backed montages, editing from existing tapes of previous episodes. Also there would be promo and bumper editing, using bits and pieces of a week’s worth of episodes to make 30 and 60-second promos and the like. That particular task might be the easiest for someone to start on.

This telenovella/soap opera stuff is very specialized work with a BRUTAL pace and deadlines that are not flexible. If you can do it, it should pay pretty well and prepare you for similar work on talk shows and sports magazine programs. I would recommend you NOT try to “fake it” and learn-on-the-job for this one: the stakes are too high.

[Mark Suszko]

Whatever you decide, don’t forget this entire conversation is public record and might be admissible in court.

[Mark Suszko]

If you were a mean, bitter, spiteful person, you might tip off the actors and music rights holders that they were being gypped out of royalties, and to contact Miss Marketing Person to get their checks. If you were an evil person, that is…:-)

Or, this could be another way to distinguish your niceness by politely warning the boss over there that they might be unwittingly exposing themselves to legal issues regarding those rights, and that (for a fee) you could handle re-negotiating them as their representative…

[Mark Suszko]

Ouch, Greg, this is bad.

If you really want to stay with this client, why not suggest that since you are so familiar with all the material, being the original editor, it would make sense to hire you to do the re-edits which would save money by saving time.

But I would say do NOT significantly lower your rate. This would weaken your position. It will be argued by your new nemesis that this only proves you were shafting the company with a too-high rate all along. And, that she’s worth her salary because she was the one that negotiated you down on the rate. You must hold to the truth of the matter that you are worth your rate, always. It is very hard to do when the kids are going hungry at home, but one of the rules of negotiation is you HAVE to be able to walk away if it comes down to it, or you have no leverage at all. And you will lose every time.

If you want to offer some kind of deal-sweetener, it has to come out of some other part of the service, maybe finding some economies in the shooting package, or offering to one-up the lady and her DVD’s by setting up streaming versions of the programs that would mean NO DVD replication costs ever again. You would bill for the encoding, (of course!) but you can push the idea that this results in zero physical inventory to have to manage and store and pay for, and workers can get the information on-demand. Plus, updating the programming no longer results in throwing away old versions.

Well, it’s a thought, and even if it proved impractical for this particular case, I would throw the idea out to her boss just to show you are on the company’s side in looking for ways to do more with less. You want to always come across as classy, loyal, and supportive. Because you are. This puts you in the best possible position to be the “white knight” that comes to the rescue when they suddenly find they need you. Send out occasional notes, newsletters, and other mailers to keep you “on the radar”. I think this is about the best one can do in such a case. Time to drum up new clients. Perhaps check into the old client’s rivals.

[Mark Suszko]

Nestor is technically right, but if it comes to a court battle, you’ve lost this client forever. Add this case study to the long line of examples where a written agreement IN ADVANCE would have saved a lot of money and drama.

But since we can’t undo what’s done, the question is now: what’s the best way to proceed from here?

It sounds to me like they are requesting the entire back-catalog of everything you’ve done for them. This could be nothing, but the paranoid in me says it could mean the marketing person is going to kick you loose and establish her territory by bringing in a new provider that will be associated with her. She’s trying to show she’s earning her pay, and at your expense.

I don’t think there is much you can do about that, except to go out with class. If you play this right, the boss will want to know what motivated all this, and you can make your case for your loyalty to the client

I would bring the masters direct to the biggest boss of the company you can reach, tell them how much you’ve enjoyed working with them, and that while you think you have the legal rights to these masters, it’s worth more to you to keep this client’s trust and good working relationship. Tell them you hope to do more for them in the future. And leave on a very positive note. With luck, the next gig that comes up for approval, they will ask how come you aren’t the one doing this.

[Mark Suszko]

Yes, the best way is to roll both cameras nonstop. If you can set the time code generators to time of day and free-run, that method would let you keep them consistent and easy to match via timecode even if they did start and stop, and someone sitting anywhere in earshot of the action can log the key events in real time using just their wristwatch and a notepad.

… but I have always just run all the cams nonstop. One thing you will want to do is start one camera 2-3 minutes before the other, so that when the first one runs out of tape or battery, the second camera is still recording a cover shot while you switch out fresh ones on the first camera. Then the fresh camera 1 is covering while you do the same switch-out to camera 2 and etc.

If possible, once all cameras are rolling and before the actual event begins, have somebody up front set off a still camera flash strobe where all your cameras can see it. Or, have them make big alligator jaws of their arms and clap them together once or twice. These give you a visual synch point common to all the cameras. When you line all these tracks up in your NLE system, make sure they all start on the same frame of the flash and you are in good shape.

[Mark Suszko]

OK, no offnese, it sounds crazy to me now. Is this testimonial supposed to happen live for some reason? I may have misunderstood.

Considering the stakes for the sales piece, and the fact the rest is hi-def, it makes no sense to me getting such a vital piece of your program as a low-rez stream like this. Whatever the product or service is, the guest speaker would have to be amazingly important to overcome the limitations of the format, and if that was the case, he or she is worth shooting properly in the first place.

If this is not supposed to be live, but to be edited into the high-def program layer, then it should look better and not be much more expensive to hire a guy in the town where they are to shoot them on location. This might be done, depending on the place and the guy, for maybe a half-day rate around 200-500 dollars. You put a speakerphone in the room and direct the cameraman and talent over the phone, audio-only. He then overnights the tape to you or FTP’s it to you over the internet during the night. If you send the shooter a list of shots you want and diagrams of the framing, all should be well. This is competitive price-wise with anything you can set up via video-phone from the local Kinkos or etc.

Locating an affordable shooter with an HD or HDV camcorder close by the talent is not insurmountable. Companies like Crews Control and others do just this sort of thing for you, and pre-qualify the quality of the shooter so you don’t get an incompetent wannabee for your money.

Seriously, if it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing well, and you shouldn’t dismiss the notion until you really have explored the options available.

We do satellite shoots like this all the time to feed interviews to remote sites around the country and 15 minutes SD with an audio IFB link to the talent is really very reasonable if you can get them to the local studio or truck.

[Mark Suszko]

Could you expand upon how you plan to use this testimonial interview? Details are important.

[Mark Suszko]

Depending on what aspect you want to push, you have many creative possibilities. I liked the 50’s film theme because it’s amusing if well-executed, being in B&W, oddly matted on the screen like a projector, or weirdly saturated colors will make it stand apart. Be sure to fake a couple splice “bumps” by deliberately throwing in a jump cut here or there and bumping the audio a second or two later, along with a momentary wow in the music track. This can be very funny, done right.

But whatever you’re going to do, it has to serve telling your copy points FIRST. Funny or artistic is useless unless it connects the customer to a need for the particular product and motivates a response in the customer. Fortune 50 companies with millions to spend on superbowl spots still make this beginner’s error: it may be memorable, it may be entertaining, but if it doesn’t move merchandise as well, it’s a flop.

That’s where you have to start: with a needs analysis. Ask some of those good questions listed earlier. The creative treatment should follow from the needs analysis and a study of the target market and what they like and don’t like. Very short example: If you are marketing to harried parents with no time to cook, you’re going to do a different spot than if you market to partying college kids. If your client says they want to hit all markets with one spot, they are crazy, this is a near impossible task, even with a big budget.

Your 50’s idea makes me think of a variation. If you wanted to say the other guy’s pizzas are not as fresh as yours, you could bring out the concept of “Pizza years”… like dog years… a pizza has only a short time where it’s optimal. You could use the old 50’s thing to make the competitor’s pizza look “old” compared to the piping hot and fresh hero pizza. You could do this kind of spot without even showing the pizzas… use two actors side by side representing the pizzas, one ages rapidly with every cutaway shot, the other remains young and “fresh”. The “old and cold” (TM)guy can rave like an overly-nostalgic cantankerous old cuss like Grampa Simpson, while the hero pizza person is all sweetness and friendliness, etc. It would be something like the current Apple vs. PC commercials. It’s an old technique that comes back into vogue every few years.