[Mark Suszko]

You could interview all the people there one at a time and ask them a few leading questions about their predictions about the baby’s future, then montage that. Face it, the baby is not going to be much of an interview:-)

unless…

You want to do something like “Look Who’s Talking”, and have a voiceover narrator pretend to be saying what the baby might be thinking of all this. That takes some talented writing and performing, probably not in the budget or time line for this job. It can also backfire pretty bad if not performed with considerable skill.

If you want to play it safer, just keep it real, shoot the ceremony and the party afterwards, (don’t forget to document the gifts) and have people speak “to” the baby on-camea, introducing themselves and saying a little something about themselves, to be played back ten years later or so. If someone passes away befoer then, the tape becomes quite precious.

Depending on the religion, the ceremony can be pretty short or over an hour, say for example if it’s a Roman Catholic mass with a baptism as part of it. The key sections to get there would be the readings and the priest’s homily, then the entire ceremony, which can usually be shot from one angle, as they stage the action so the entire congregation can see it…

If it’s a more personal ceremony done without a mass, or after one, you will likely be able to get up close to within a few feet and shoot everything. In the Catholic service, there are formal oaths declared by the parents and godparents, (who hold the child) annointing the child’s head with holy oil, blessing the water, the baptism itsef, lighting of a symbolic candle to pass on the light of Christ, and dressing the new-baptized baby in a symbolic white garment.

As far as audio, in a full service you will need a mic, stand-alone mic/minidisk recorder or a system tap into the lectern for the readings, a tap into the priest’s wireless, if he’s using one, or alternately a wireless lav of your own on the godfather or dad, since they will be standing all within arms length of each other. It’s actually less difficult to shoot than a wedding, IMO.

[Mark Suszko]

I really like the concept of Roger Ebert’s “the Heist” training tapes. If you’re not familiar with this, it’s multicam footage of a staged robbery scenario. Multiple takes, multiple angles, on various formats with window burns on it, so you can cut it with any linear or nonlinear technology you care to. Has good and bad takes that need doctoring to make them work. The idea is to have each member of the class cut their own version and then compare. You can take a whole semseter cutting and re-cutting this stuff, once everyone’s done it once, assign them to do the scene in a certain signature style or even to impose genres on it like comedy, etc.

If you can’t find or afford the Ebert tapes, you could create your own footage based on your own scenario, and do something similar.

I am a great believer in deconstructing the award-winning work of others: renting good movies and TV shows, turning off the sound, and logging the cuts and transitions in detail, talking about why the editor made the specific choices, the timing/rythm, the juxtapositions, which actor he or she favors, etc.

Of course, unless you were at the shoots and the logging sessions, you probably lack a lot of data about why certain scenes *had* to be cut a particular way, such as, there is no coverage for a certain scene due to a gear failure, so you’re constrained to a single closeup….

Murch said something about this: (paraphrasing) that once you’re in the bay, you have to forget all the shennanigans on the set and concentrate only on what a “blank slate” moviegoer is going to see on the screen. You can’t fret about leaving out a scene because you know how hard the director and crew worked to shoot it. It may not work out to be the best choice once the edit happens.

I just today read about something like that in the cutting of “Silence Of The Lambs”. The scene where Lecter is teasing out from Clarise the story of a childhood trauma she experienced. She describes how she was adopted into a farm family as a small girl, and one night in spring wakes to a noise in the barn; she sneaks over to see new spring lambs being slaughtered. The book and script originally broke this into a number of flashbacks intercut with the present-time conversation. They shot everything to make that happen, and were just waiting for spring to come so they could shoot actual spring lammbs to finish the sequence. But the editor called the director in and discussed an alternate cut. The director agreed the flashbacks were redundant to the cut the editor showed, and would actually have taken dramatic energy away from the storytelling and oscar-winning performances.

I like some theory in my schooling, but practical, hands-on demonstrations of technique and explorations of actual material, trying to shape it, is for me the best teacher. So I would like a class heavy on these anecdotals and practical examples and exercises. Soemthng I have seen a lot of tis year is people re-cutting older movies into trailers that are a different genre’ than the original. Go to ifilm.com and see a bunch of these. Two very good ones are a re-cut of West Side Story into a Romero-like horror pic promo, and The Shining, turned into a feel-good family comedy. There are also a mountain of brokeback-ized trailers for everything from top gun to… well, you’ll just have to see it.:-)

These are excellent exercises.

[Mark Suszko]

Well if only Tektronics had a better sense of the right price to gain wide acceptance, I would have said throw in a Profile DDR into your rack to replace a deck, and instantly turn the existing tools you know into a full-blown nonlinear system.

That’s what we wanted to do to our 1-inch/umatic-fed room, but the prices were just ridiculous. These days that room is a DVCPro to beta or beta to beta ABC roll linear suite, with a loop from the switcher into a Video Toaster, which gives us paint, CG, DVE’s DDR’s, an NLE, and a DVD authoring station. Kind of the best of both world there, I feel, but maybe not as slick as dropping in the Profile into a slot where the one-inch used to be.

You might look to see if they brought the prices of those down into the regular atmosphere yet…

[Mark Suszko]

Use “grab” from your dock?

[Mark Suszko]

Enough of the Brokeback jokes already. 😉

I’m kiding, but really, there’s many similarities between a good marriage and a good business partnership. Also some bad ones.

I could tell you stories, but only under a psuedonym….

[Mark Suszko]

I suppose one could advertise in craigslist and other social networks. It would cenceptually be like trying to form a band. You meet and audition a bunch of guys, see who has what skills and how your personalities mesh, then take it from there.

I personally would only do a co-op setup with people I already know and get along with really well, and I would take a lot of time to set up the legal paperwork and accounting so there are no grey areas about the money and the responsibility.

Each facet of the boutique, cooperative, whatever you want to call it, needs to be able to stand alone for purposes of the business, what you are sharing is the space rental and some utilities, things like that. Maybe you hire a single shared reception person/office manager/scheduler. Your Marsha Wallace for your Bob Newhart building:-)

You don’t want to get yourself into a situation where you suddenly get socked with legal reponsibilities or fiduciary obligations for a job one of the other members did individually and screwed up, especially if you really had nothing to do with the job. You need agreements in place to cover what is done when only one member gets an outside offer on a production; does he keep it all or must he kick in a taste to the combine, even though they didn’t contribute to the particular job?. What will you do if one guy did a major share of a group job, put in three times the hours? How do you settle schedule conflicts? Do three of you have to vote to buy anything one person wants? All those issues need to be worked out in advance.

You also don’t want to have to carry one or more deadbeat members for too long, so there should be pooled funds for certain functions and a financial firewall in your association or partnership to keep the other parts separate. You want your stuff protected in case the partnership dissolves, so you’re not arguing over who owns a piece of gear owned before the group, and who owns what part of stuff bought by the collective. If you’ve ever been in a garage band that broke up, or a roommate or divorce situation, you might be able to imagine some rough scenarios along these lines.

Even with all those caveats, I still think a couple or three people with the right skill sets, some good marketing, and fiscal discipline could make such an operation a success. The upside is your capitalization could be lower if you pool resources, and there is the creative synergy you get if you can up-sell one guys client to the additional services provided by the other members. My guess is a client would prefer to get one itemized bill for all services performed, rather than three individual ones, so you’ll need somebody to have some accounting skills.

You could get very very detailed in your partnership, or it could be a very casual free-form thing, where you come together to jam for one gig only, then separate until the team is needed again. The more clear, consistent, and comprehensive the rules are, the less chance there is of a problem situation occurring, and hard feelings all around.

My take is I would probably look to set the business up with a sunset period, and have the members renew the contract with each other along with the space rental yearly, with updates reflecting their experience. If it just doesn’t take off, then less harm done. Meanwhile, you had a chance to cut costs and try to build something satifying on a personal as well as business level.

[Mark Suszko]

If you’re not avery big operation, try looking into one of those “business incubators” run by the Small Business Assn. or similar deals. You share office space and clerical help with a number of other operations, and you get to use some small but more professional looking space for the mini-studio thing, plus you have a non-residential address for mail and to bring clients to.

If it were me, I’d look to share a common studio space with a couple of partners in a co-op situation. Ideally, the other partners would be strong in areas I’m weak, so if one of us gets a client, there’s a chance to cross-market ourselves and all get a piece of the business. One guy shoots and posts, another does the music and sound sweetening, a third specializes in motion graphics, that sort of thing.

[Mark Suszko]

I recently read the very entertaining and instructive biography of one of the most successful and prolific producer/directors in Hollywood: Roger Corman. He hadn’t had a lick of training in anything to do with the business, he was an engineer by training. His break came when he saw he could employ principles of efficiency he learned thru his particular education to the film making process and achieve great economic efficieny gains over the existing studio production system. He feels he’s been vindicated by the industry’s universal aceptance of his methods over the years. He wasn’t a great cameraman, but he brought a new perspective to the job and became good at getting a lot of useable shots in a short time. He wasn’t a great editor, but had an innate understanding of what he needed in the field to satisfy the storytelling needs in post, and what were frills he could avoid the time to shoot. He wasn’t a great writer, but could and did direct a lot of some of the best scriptwriters in the business, shaping their work significantly. He was masterful at the art of the deal and scheduling, often shooting as many a three pictures at a time on the same sets or locations, using the money for the next deal to finish the current one. He very rarely lost money, and many more famous directors and actors learned under his tutelage. IMDB says he’s going strong still, with new projects in production or release this year, and over 200 productions behind him.

I think much of your question depends on the quality of the student. If you sort of just show up and do minimum-effort work, expecting the diploma to be some kind of free ticket to success, then no, it won’t do any better for you than self-teaching in real-life production work. Either path you choose, it’s the driven, active pursuit of the knowledge and it’s application that makes a difference. If you skip school and go the hard-knocks method, eventually you wind up with a reel or portfolio to demonstrate you have the understanding. If you really apply yourself in a university program, you also can leave with not just a diploma but samples of work you did while pursuing the diploma. The farther along you get in your career, the less important the sheepskin gets and the more important your reel and list of credits gets.

On the other side of the hiring equation, you have to wonder about the guy or gal doing the interviewing; if they were self-taught, they will likely tend to favor people they have an understanding about thru the shared life experience. If they were school-taught, they might be more comfortable with a known quantity.

My personal take on the school/no school thing is, while I bear no grudges for tech school grads, I really believe in the utility of a liberal arts and sciences background, because it makes for a more well-rounded person in a multidisciplinary kind of business. They stress in Liberal arts curricula that we “learn how to learn”, so we can adapt to change. I know folks who skipped college and went straight into the business, and while many are successsful to some degree, they have often been stymied by little things that they missed in their formal education and never pursued on their own.

Because you can work with so many differernt disciplines in a TV project, it helps tremendously to be a jack of all trades and know a little about a lot of things. Art history, literature, design, music, math, physics, chemistry, languages, English, religion/philosophy/psychology/sociology… something from my university training comes in handy for me on almost every project I work on, if only so I can communicate more effectively with clients and people we interview, or gain a different perspective.

Part of the time my video projects involve teaching or describing a concept to people with no background in that area, and my generalist background often helps me create simplified and clear analogies and examples the clients and general audience can immediately grasp. So it’s worked great for me and the kind of work I do. By no means is mine the best and only path. I just think it has a lot of things going for it over a more narrow kind of learning.

If you are an auto-didact, I would encourage you to not just concentrate on a narrow field of learning: any monkey can be taught what switches to flip in what order to get a result – but the monkey doesn’t understand anything about why the switches are flipped in that order, what’s behind them. When the situation changes, the monkey cannot figure out the switches need a new order of flipping and what it should be. Don’t be the monkey. Don’t hyper-specialize to the point it costs you the ability to adapt.

[Mark Suszko]

Here’s a link to the canon 3dSOM and about seven others that do the same thing. Canoma is listed but has been out of print forever, it was one of the earliest ones, and works a little differently.

https://www.bakhter.com/html/3d/image_modelers.html

I got a free limited (watermarked) demo version of SOM in one of my Digit or Computer Arts magazines, those are great sources for this kind of stuff. If you go to the Digit or Computer Arts magazine web sites, you will no doubt also be able to find links to the demos and the full-price product. Memory is hazy, I want to say it was about $300, last I saw. Compared to what you’d pay a guy to model from scratch, it would pay for itself in one job….

[Mark Suszko]

Hey, hoopy frood;

For a long time our field prompter was a spare studio head assembly stuck onto a sturdy portable platform of it’s own, freestanding from the camera and lens. It meant you couldn’t prompt and do pans, tilts, or dolly moves, only small zooms, but we used the heck out of it. Nice thing about it was it would “fit” with whatever camera, large or small, you paired with it.

If you decide you want to save cash and build a head yourself, you can make one in this style without too much work. The main factor is what kind of cable you’d run to the LCD from the laptop, and will you reverse the LCD using hardware or the prompting software. I’m not up to date on the best mac side prompting software, but you will want one that can give you a choice of reversing the output and inverting it. LCD’s by themselves typically need to be driven by a VGA cable’s signals. Some of the extra cost comes from that hardware. VGA cables of a length practical for prompting are NOT cheap.

CRT’s can take regular old viddy-oh from a simple scan converter or direct out from some laptops with regular coax…

You can also make a tray that holds your laptop under the beamsplitter mirror and use *that* to prompt off of, but you’ll have trouble reading that and operating it. You can give the talent a ringmouse or wireless gyromouse to control the prompter themselves, and that works fine if the actor doesn’t need to show both hands. There’s always compromises to be made somewhere.