[Mark Suszko]

What’s the secret of comedy?

[Mark Suszko]

A lot depends on how tight you can shoot the scenes, and how many reverse angles you need. Two 4×8 sheets of cheap paneling from the home center, and single sheets of wall paper, was all I needed to fake four different locations in one phone-booth-sized working area. I started with two pieces of the fake brick wallboard. The naked back sides got one five-dollar sheet of wallpaper each. Since I framed all my shots no wider than from the beltline-up, the backs of those panels got one pattern on each end, you flipped them vertically to change rooms. Adding a VERY simple and monor prop tot he wall like a photo frame, a wall clock, etc. brought from home, was all we needed. Those sheets can be carried in a pickup or van, or car-topped if desperate. You can bring them into a hotel room using the Stairs. Use a couple c-clamps or gaffer tape on the back side to book-match them into a corner-looking free-standing backdrop. Using C-stands, run them sideways (lengthwise) and there is room for a tight 2-shot in fron tof them. To simulate an office, pick single panel sheets with an office look, or use acoustic ceiling panels with geometric panel textures and super-glue them to the plywood for a more industrial office look. These can be painted or stainedd with wood stain to look like a corporate CEO’s wall or a boardroom thing. Running cheap burlap fabric over them from a sewing store, you can simulate office cubes. None of these should cost you over $30 to execute, mine cost less than that. The really important thing is to remember: the audience doesn’t know your set reality ends one inch outside the frame. Don’t fret about what the frame never sees, and don’t waste time filling up areas not visible to the camera. You can use the shots leading into the scene and sound effects to suggest much that is never really there. Creative use of high and low angles, plus using depth of field to blur what’s behind people, also make the most of what you have. See them use these tricks a LOT on the “Commander In Chief” TV show with Geena Davis: lots of low and high angles that only show ceilings and floors.

The next quick answer is to green screen them, suitable fabric can be found at most Walmarts for twenty-thirty bucks in a pinch, but you’ll have to have it ironed or steamed to take out the folding wrinkles, and light it VERY carefully and evenly. the room needs to be deep enough so you can get the people about 6-7 feet away from the screen cloth, and the cloth at Walmart is not wide enough without you seaming it together with gaffer tape, glue, whatever. Pro camera stores can sell you wide paper rolls in chroma green for upwards of 50 bucks, or Denney’s will ship one anywhere for you. Denney also sells photographic backdrops of actual offices and library type book shelves. We have two of these with Alabamaa law books on them, and about half the satelite remote shots you see on CNN and the like use these. Very realstic if lit right. Anyhow, back to greenland: The benefit of greenscreening is that you need literally only an inch of clearance around the person’s body to work, garbage mattes and the DVE in post take care of all the scaling and placement issues later… and you can change the view by changing the way the characters face, leaving the camera and the lighting setup the same for each shot. You thus only need one setup to shoot all the reversals, etc. When you green screen on the fly in an emergency, you’re basically throwing a Hail Mary pass and hoping you can get the key to work Ok in post. Only you know if your software and skills are up to the work, or if you’ll need to do lots of tedious roto work to fix it later.

A third idea may be simplest: call some area realtors, tell them you want to rent an empty house or business location near the hotel for the day. Many times they will jump at this idea, for a modest fee, especially on a dead day of the week. Considering the cost of a re-shoot with these people later, two hundred for an hour or two in a real office may be a bargain. Also call office furniture sellers: they often have beautiful showroom displays you could walk in and use, for some small consideration. Also try public libraries which often have business-like meeting rooms you can borrow.

Really, if you put your imagination to work, you can come up with a number of workable alternatives that don’t cost much.

Best of luck: let us know what you wound up doing on this, as it could be instructive for others later.

[Mark Suszko]

I would talk to my pastor/minister/rabbi, and let them know you are available if they know of any upcoming weddings where the couple is short on cash and would appreciate a freebie for your demo purposes. This also is the perfect time to consult with them on what the rules of that particular place of worship are, since you’re not going anywhere without their consent anyhow.

[Mark Suszko]

I remembered a few other things…

We used to get high school interns and grad student interns at my place of work. Both got academic credit, the grad students (unknown to me) also got a stipend, so they were getting paid to be taught by us in essence, plus they were getting academic credit and work experience for their resumes.

Generally speaking, the high schoolers had it all over the grad students in terms of motivation, dedication to duty no matter how menial the task, and general interest in the work. Of the grad students that came thru our program, only a handful were worth the oxygen they consumed.

Typically, they thought they already knew everything, could not be told anything, and found most of the jobs in the shop beneath their massive talents. Mind you, after evaluating them on gear like lighting, cameras, switchers, it became clear in short order their self-evaluation of their talents was a little premature. One such kept bitching about paying for metered parking (50 cents an hour), and at semester’s end, I found out he’d been paid a significant wage that more than covered his transportation costs. That guy was a disaster in the field productions, and sloppy in the studio. His final self-directed production under us was less of a “magnum opus” and more a mega-doofus.

The high schoolers in general had no such attitude problems, perhaps because they were so young they didn’t expect to know anything about anything, ego was not so much a factor. They tended to be slightly intimidated by the technology and the perception they were handling thousands of dollars worth of OPM in gear, but a little encouragement and they were soon off to the races. They also didn’t complain about their occasional scutwork, like making dubs and labeling them, or filing tape in the library for an hour. We took pains to make sure for each hour of scutwork, they got out in the field with us and worked a camera or the audio or whatever, and we spent hours training them on the editing controller and switcher, teaching them how to light, etc… We helped them build demo reels of their own work.

They weren’t all winners; we had two guys that personified “Goofus & Gallant”. Goofus was a frat boy that spent his every idle hour palying tetris on his cel, and never showed much self-direction – you had to tell him everything andpoint him at it to get it done. I think he’s a burger flipper now. Gallant spent his down time learning photoshop in depth and practicing with the editing controls, when not reading Kierkegard or something like that. He left us and toured three countries on a Fullbright, and probably makes more money than me already.

One of our highschoolers wound up in tech positions in a Chicago station, another one went to work for DC comics about the time they killed Superman. One of our grad students went to work for us for a while then went out on his own. I hear he’s pretty good now:-)

The fastest time to quit for an intern was about one hour. Some well-connected, over-entitled trust fund royal came in expecting to be catered to and put in charge of something, though they had zero experience, they wanted to Direct something. On their first day I asked them, like everyone else, to file a handful of tapes in the library before the afternoon’s shoot, to kind of learn how our filing system works. ( a five minute job) They quit after an hour, left and never reported back. It was a kindness, I guess; neither of us wasted much of the other’s time.

[Mark Suszko]

Good points made already. There have always been some folks in the business that considered interns to be cannon fodder: unpaid, no insurance, they should be grateful to be getting the free tutelage, etc. etc (damn, you gave ne Equal, I told you it was Sweet & LOW!).

It’s usually no fun working for these kind of people as a salaried person either: they are often abusive bosses, and inspire no loyalty. And even though the helper is “free”, the bosses are remarkably stingy with the actual teaching they do dispense. Remember the class-action by interns in LA a couple years back? there is a bible verse that goes something like: “don’t hold back payment for the worker is worth his wage”.

I interned in college for no money, but I DID get academic credit and a good solid demo reel and list of skills when I was done. When I was a graduate and between jobs, I volunteered a couple hours a week at a local Cox cable outlet’s studios just so I could put down career-related experience in my resume without leaving a summer-long gap, as I looked for paying gigs and produced some stuff on my own.

I think this first one, you pay him for his gas to get there and maybe buy him his lunch, see how things work out. Spend the day really evaluating how engaged and proactive he is, how many questions he asks. Give him something to do besides fetch and carry, if you can, even if it’s only field logging or holding a boom or reflector. See if he thinks this really is something he wants to pursue. If you really can’t afford to pay him, ask if you can trade-out some edit time to him so he can build a reel.

It should be a two-way transaction, and each side should get some value.

[Mark Suszko]

Anything from mid-thirties up. In a perfect world, I’d expect around 55, based on your list, but then I give myself away cheap, I’m told.

The salary alone is never the whole story. My pay is lower than it should be, but a solid benefits plan, insurance, good vacation and sick leave/family leave policies, and a rocking deferred comp plan and pension plan make up for a lot. Look for sweeteners like: will they pay for you to take additional training on new software when you want? Will they pay to send you to seminars, or NAB? Will they pay entry fees when you want to enter some of your work in a competition like the Emmies or whatever? When negotiations hit a wall, side benefits like these may make a big difference.

[Mark Suszko]

The title sequence is credited at the end of the film in the end credits, but maybe you can look it up at IMDB.com?

[Mark Suszko]

I don’t trust plasmas due to the burn issue. If you use letterboxing, you will have a burn line evenually where the bars area will be clearer than the image area, if you go back to showing full-screen 7×9, the differnece in black level will be telling.

If you can’t reformat the 3×4 video, why not use the rest of the screen real estate to create a colorful matted BG with some related info on it? For your particular application, this seems to be a great feature, nit just a “fix”.

If it’s a sort of sales information video in a waiting room, the matted area around the image can have text information on where to call, bullet points about the product/services, etc. Think of it like a web page space with a playback window within it. You might even freshen it up by maiing multiple versions that swap image and text areas around every once in a while, to delay a burn-in and to refresh audience attention.

[Mark Suszko]

I answered thusly in the broadcast forum:

Did you say mac powerbook?

How about a switcher with CG, effects, and even streaming, all in software?

google Channel Storm liveChannel. There’s a review in the latest issue of one of the pro magazines. I’ve been following this product for a while now, it seems to actually work. Free demo download to try out. It is right around 900 bucks, BUT… you’re getting more than just the lower thirds.

on ebay, I would look for a used Pinnacle Alladin, which would do an awesome job for your needs, and it’s the simplest thing to operate i’ve ever worked with. We are still using ours daily, though it runs on win95. A version on a PC card, called the Genie Plus card, will also do the same thing. You will want to make sure you get a working dongle with the sale; no dongle, no workee program, and Pinnacle has EOL’d these units so they will be little help. But if you can find a working one, you have struck video gold, my friend. You can use the Alladin as a switcher not unlike the video toaster, it has powerful but easy to use single-channel DVE, Inscriber CG for your lower thirds, a simple but powerful video paint program, chromakeying, still stores… such a deal!

The world’s formost expert on the pinnacle Alladin is Paul Holtz, who runs a company out of Hoffman Estates Illinois, on the edge of Chicago. if you score an old alladin, he may still have leftover copies of his training materials for it to sell you.

[Mark Suszko]

Did you say mac powerbook?

How about a switcher with CG, effects, and even streaming, all in software?

google Channel Storm liveChannel. There’s a review in the latest issue of one of the pro magazines. I’ve been following this product for a while now, it seems to actually work. Free demo download to try out. It is right around 900 bucks, BUT… you’re getting more than just the lower thirds.

on ebay, I would look for a used Pinnacle Alladin, which would do an awesome job for your needs, and it’s the simplest thing to operate i’ve ever worked with. We are still using ours daily, though it runs on win95. A version on a PC card, called the Genie Plus card, will also do the same thing. You will want to make sure you get a working dongle with the sale; no dongle, no workee program, and Pinnacle has EOL’d these units so they will be little help. But if you can find a working one, you have struck video gold, my friend. You can use the Alladin as a switcher not unlike the video toaster, it has powerful but easy to use single-channel DVE, Inscriber CG for your lower thirds, a simple but powerful video paint program, chromakeying, still stores… such a deal!

The world’s formost expert on the pinnacle Alladin is Paul Holtz, who runs a company out of Hoffman Estates Illinois, on the edge of Chicago. if you score an old alladin, he may still have leftover copies of his training materials for it to sell you.