[Mark Suszko]

https://www.dennymfg.com/

[Mark Suszko]

As you say, it’s on the cusp of needing a near complete overhaul to go HD, then this is the inflection point; you should either enjoy the payoff now, or ride the tiger for the next decade. Since you seem to have plenty of options open, I’d say cashing out now sounds good.

I would be curious to know if the deal also included the use of your name on their new business. Call me cynical or paranoid, but what if they plan to turn your studios into, say a production house for adult oriented entertainment? With your good name still on it?

I’m probably off base on that one, more likely they see an easy entre to a new Digital broadcast license for when the analogs all go dark in 2 years, and thy figure to multicast SD signals like a miniature version of a cable provider. That could mean a lot of revenue, but I’m not so shure I want to be the pioneer in that venture. Definition of Pioneer: the guy with all the arrows in his chest. or to put it another way: the early bird gets the worm, but the *second* mouse is the one that gets away with the cheese.

Anyway, sounds like you have plenty to do with the other ventures, if this feels like the right place to make a new chapter in the book of your life, do it.

[Mark Suszko]

Mailing it to yourself rtes very low with judges, but it’s better than nothing. You cna register the script for free or very little money with the Writers Guild East or West.

Understand, while you don’t have permission to use their brand, they don’t have permission to use your idea, if it’s registered first, but you are in a legal gray area that usually favors the guy with the most money to blow on lawyers. They can still steal your concept by just not copying it word for word. Movies of the week do this all the time; they rip an idea from the headlines, to paraphrase one current New York based crime show who will not be named but it rhymes with Awe and Odor. All they have to do is change a few details to make it an “independant creation” and they don’t have to pay the person who “inspired” the story a thing.

You can only (perhaps, if at all) copyright the parts of your ad idea that don’t actually mention the product.

I suggest you try to register the script with WGA, this at least sets a good benchmark for asserting who did it first. Then just call them up at the company and ask to see someone to pitch an idea.

Likely, you will have to sign a release just to get the meeting, saying you won’t sue if they come up with something similar. Don’t fret about that, becuse one spot idea, no matter who awesome, is not going to make you set for life.

What you’re marketing is the brain in your skull that came up with that idea and which perhaps has many more inside. Go in with the attitude that this idea is a “give-away”, so you can get in te door and sell YOU. Not the spot idea, which, cool or not, may already have been thought of and rejected for reasons you don;t know about.

Go for the long money; sell yourself, not the idea.

[Mark Suszko]

If you ever want to play this in the U.S. for money or for a festival, you’ll have to show you got a clearance for it. I don’t know what the rules are in the Netherlands.

[Mark Suszko]

For me one of the set in stone principles of comedy is a sense of narrative circularity. The “Who’s on first” bit is only funny because it continually loops, and more and more improbably, no matter what Costello tries to do to Abbott’s setup. We always wind up “at I dunno – third base!”

Stand-up comics always seem to try to bring the routine back to where it started in this same way, and the more unlikely that is to be accomplished, the more we love it when they DO connect it back, and feel somehow incomplete if it doesn’t happen. I think it must satisfy some inherent need in our minds for closure. I know for certain it makes things funnier. Seinfeld’s show/jokes and even more so, Larry David’s absurdist “Curb Your Enthusiasm”, work almost exclusively in this manner. The big revelation/punchline is when this improbable series of unrelated single, non-funny events loops back onto itself and closes the circle. This is a solid narrative trope, long proven successful in sitcoms since before Uncle Miltie.

This is not the only thing that makes something funny, it’s just one thing.

The purely absurd/incongruous is funny, standing on it’s own, but I feel that’s rather more hit-and-miss. Like slapstick. I think Slapstick doesn’t work until the audience identifies with someone in the situation. Otherwise, it’s just witnessing an accident. I will say, I have seen people whoop and guffaw at accidents too, like when a real waiter drops and breaks some glasses in a restaurant, but usually only the really coarse or stupid ones laugh at that. maybe that’s because they are releasing the tension of fear , being glad it wasn’t them, and so identifying with themselves, not the pratfaller. I dunno, perhaps it’s all a lot of overanalyzing at this point.

Timing is really important, and can make all the difference between two identical situations, one funny and one not. I think timing is a skill that can be learned by anyone, can be trained by imitating to find and repeat rhythms, but that comes naturally only to the gifted.

Timing can help bring about the “narrative circularity” I talked about earlier: say, a scene where some stuff falls on the head of a guy, and he’s reacted to it, along the line of “at least That’s over with”. You get the extra laugh out of the scene when he and the audience, thru the passage of enough rhythmic beats, anticipate the stuff is done falling, but the setup line suggests a new thing to anticipate, and when one more piece then DOES fall, that suspended time is closed.

Oh well, they say you can kill any joke by trying too hard to explain it, so I’ll stop here.

[Mark Suszko]

There are many technical things to consider. I’ve only been in these once or twice, but

number ONE is you must stay out of the way of the doctors and nurses, and CANNOT violate the “surgical field”, that is, imagine an invisible column stretching vertically from the area they are cutting in, all the way to the roof. You cannot “fly” anything into that “airspace” that might let so much as a dust speck float down into the patient. thi makes lal the camera angles problematic, as you can never get the lens 90-degrees flat onto anything. You may have to shoot from a stepladder to see anything! And that makes it hard to shoot really tight closeups without shaking.

Often the OR requires all items be sterilized, and many cameras cannot be, so they must be swathed in plastic baggies and the like.

Purpose built medical TV cams have made allowances for most of these things, have the right lenses for getting the shot, and are easy to keep sterile. They may even have mounting booms built into the OR for them.

Sometimes oxygen and other explosive anaesthetic gasses are present, so nothing that can spark is allowed, your cables need to be sealed, lighting gear may be forbidden.

Powerful magnetic fields are sometimes present with the use of certain imagers/scanners. These can throw off your picture or sound.

Lighting is really tricky: not only white balance, but the intensity of surgical lights creates an effect where everything else is over-dark but the lit site when you iris down enough to see that site.

Audio may or may not be an issue; depends what the doc is trying to accomplish, and if legal regs disallow audio recordring as potential later evidence of malpractice.

That’s just off the top of MY head:-)

[Mark Suszko]

It’s really hard for creatives to have their skills and time appreciated by non-creatives. I have had scripts where I research and think about the thing for days, but clients look at the time It took to write out the script onto paper and say “but that only took you five minutes, how can it be any good?”.

There’s a story, perhaps apocryphal, about the commerial design artist that did the new logo when The Traveller’s insurance and Citibank merged into CiTi. She looked at the Traveller’s famous red umbrella, and the custom font of the Citibank logo, and quickly sketched out a freehand brush stroke arc of red paint that curved over the citi type to imply the traveller umbrella. It was a perfect visual fusion of two iconic identities – you “got it” instantly.

The clients balked, saying “that took you like five minutes to come up with, hardly deserves this huge fee”.

She answered back (supposedly): “No; it took fifteen years to come up with that.” Meaning all her years of studies, practice, and experience were brought to the task at hand. It took fifteen years to make the artist that could MAKE that litle perfect squiggly line, to think of and execute it that fast and perfectly.

Engineers HATE this story. Until you tell it in the version about the steam engineer who bills a big amount for knowing exactly where to make one little whack with a hammer to get the engine going again. “Took me years to learn and to know exactly WHERE to hit it”, goes that punchline.

To your client:

Sounds like they want to be billed straight-time instead of cost-plus. Cost-plus has a bad reputation for overruns in our business, often well earned, because it rewards waste. I wouldn’t go that way either.

Certainly you would be making a bad business move to quote up-front a fixed, lump-sum fee for any project. That locks you into a maximum billing amount even if they throw a lot of changes or other unanticipated events at you. That road leads to madness and bankruptcy.

From what you’ve written, I gather you are currently making a best-guess good-faith estimate, then billing for actual straight time spent, and they are asking you to not bother to make the estimate any more? That’s neither good business nor good engineering practice.

I would at least want you to run a clock on the project. Lawyers have software that runs in the background of their computers, so it’s very easy with one hotkey to log even short things like a phone call or looking up a chapter in the Uniform Code book. Or even just sitting and thinking while doodling out possible design ideas. Hit the total hotkey, you get a complete breakdown of hours spent per project and on what aspect of it. You have a metric there, a gauge.

My guess is there is some other issue going on we don’t know about, and it’s psychological, not financial. My intuition about it is, it has to do with that topic of how much they bring to the party versus what work you have to do on it, in those areas you mentioned, like, is a logo supplied or do you have to create it, etc. They perhaps don’t like the variables you bring in when you make subjective decisions about how hard it will be to execute a particular deliverable. Engineering types like the OBJECTIVE certainty and predictability of known quantities and few variables. “Gut feelings”, even if based on experience, make them nervous.

In this case, just increase your hourly rate to compensate for the times you get ugly surprises, and bill that flat hourly rate every time. That is way preferable to setting a fixed cost basis. That just make YOU hold the bag for the variables, instead of THEM.

I have a variation of this situation hit me every time my wife calls me when I’m working late on an edit at the shop. I tell her in all honesty I “feel”, based on 20 years of experience, like it “should” take another hour. It almost never takes so short a time however, because something else invariably comes up. A computer crashes, a last-minute typo is found and must be fixed, something needs another tweak… She has therefore come up with her own correction factor to my standard estimate.

“Honey, I just have to lay in the end credits and make a dub, should be home by six, easy”.

“Ok, then I’ll plan on seeing you at nine-thirty”.

Damn if she isn’t right most of the time. 🙂

[Mark Suszko]

Thanks, man, sorry about the typos; our pet budgie was riding on my typing hand while I was writing that.

[Mark Suszko]

TIMING!!!!

[Mark Suszko]

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