[Mark Suszko]

I want to begin by stating I have great respect for the self-made man or woman in this business, the auto-didacts who made a career without any degree. Certainly not everyone who goes thru university training comes out a competent instant pro. I strongly feel that just as you did with your “bootstrap method”, you have to work hard to make the most of a formal education’s opportunities as well. I know I could have coasted thru my courses in school, but I was driven to squeeze as much experience from the opportunities of the program as I could, so I did lots of extra stuff on my own, after hours, playing and learning, outside of structured class time. It gave me a practical, experiential edge I needed when I came out of school. I felt a Bachelor’s degree was plenty for me to get started with, and didn’t pursue further studies. I myself tend to poo-poo the postgrad/doctoral degreed folks, perhaps unfairly, as pursuing overly esoteric or frivolous areas that don’t see much day to day usefulness in production. But you can’t just make blanket generalizations about them, either. Engineering and design doctorates in particular lead to much of the innovation in our business. And there is always room for the far-seeing dreamers, imagining new ways of communication and perception.

Having said all that, I wonder how useful such an e-book as you propose is as a practical guide, specifically because all the self-made folks are each so unique and each one had particular circumstances and even sometimes plain good luck. How do you quantify that in a generalized book of advice?

It’s like selling a plan to become a rich millionaire by saying: “step one: go buy lottery tickets. Step two: Win the lottery. It worked for me.” Yes, that’s an over-simplification, I know. But do you get the problem I’m seeing with the concept?

I think if it was a collection of strategies and philosophies of successful people that made it on their own, one that found the common threads of experience in these people, you would have something that might inspire a newbie just starting out.

But a five-step systematized plan? I think you just can’t get too specific because every experience is unique, and people may not buy your book unless you can guarantee that 1,2,3 system. The longtime head of Paramount started his career, not by going to school or by buying a camera but by sitting by the pool at the Beverly Wilshire hotel one midweek afternoon and catching the eye of a recently widowed studio exec’s wife. He made pants for a living. She got him cast in a movie as an actor. He liked it and the rest is in the very entertaining movie “The Kid Stays In The Picture”, the story of Robert Evans.

How does one prepare or plan for THAT kind of serendipity? You can’t. The best you can do is perfect yourself and your craft by whatever means you decide, then try to place yourself in positions where you can take advantage of fickle fortune or generate opportunities. Or you can build a business, like any entrepreneur does, step by step, over a long period of time, seeing business and marketing opportunities and grabbing them when you can.

It’s great reading, no question. But I can’t see how you make any kind of a TEXTBOOK out of it, is my long-winded point.

[Mark Suszko]

Nope, that in a nutshell was what I was gonna tell them. I do like to look at jumpbacks and de-construct them to get design concepts and ideas. Livetype in my FCP has it’s own looping background generator built-in, as does Apple Motion, so I tend to use those first. When I’m in the linear suite, I have an old single-channel DVE I love because it’s just so responsive and intuitive – I use that to throw together stuff for looping backgrounds sometimes, usually soft amorphous shapes with varying color and transparancy, passing over each other. In that suite, I have to go to and from tape a genration or two to build up the layers. In the NLE rooms, I use whichever compositor is handy: boris, combustion, etc.

Soft looks are not the only way to go; you can make more complicated and hard-edged stuff in a 3-d program, and the timeline interface and absolute positioning tools make seamless looping a snap. One of my first projects in that veing was making a continuously spinning 3-d coin with some NICE reflecting surfaces on it.

In the linear suite my best loop on the Alladin was a rushing asphalt road surface with dashed yellow and white lines whizzing by. To generate the road surface, I used the random clouds generator in photoshop and threw some embossing and blurring onto it. Translucent paining on of blobby oil streaks between the tire paths added verisimilitude. Once I had a stretch of road long enough, I just created a looping DVE pass on it that perfectly matched begining and ending positions with a linear motion type. I ran off ten minutes of this to tape, (single channel remember), then brought the playback into a fresh DVE setup that let me angle and distort and even bend curves into it at will. The final comp looked for all the world just like the view 3/4 ahead and to the left, out your driver’s side window, (in the USA) if you were watching the paint stripes unwind past your car. It looked like I had gone out and shot it with a camera, the blurring of the fast motion helped a lot.

[Mark Suszko]

Pat, we’re the good guys here, and we’re on your side, don’t take George wrong. We have to get past the anger and concentrate on being productive, is what he was getting at. Let’s not forget we’re here to help each other out, take a little breather, hit it fresh in the morning, ok? Illigitimatum non carborundum, or whatever; i.e. don’t let the bastards get you down.

[Mark Suszko]

Actually George, that would be “Thuck it up”, due to the hockey player’s missing dentition:-)

Everybody needs to vent from time to time, he just can’t afford the time to wallow in it too long, and while we’re sympathetic, we really can’t do as much for him as the love of a good woman. If it were me, since I don’t drink but twice a year I’d go beat the hell out of my piano’s keyboard for a couple hours until I got it out of my system. Headphones on, volume to eleven. Blues moving into reggae works well, I find. Then it’s time to hunker down and bull thru the job until it’s been conquered.

It could always be worse: I could have to dig ditches or wear a stupid plastic nametag on clothing I don’t own. Here they pay me to do the same thing I would do at home for fun. One way or another, the crisis will be over eventually, with a lifetime ahead to put it out of your head and move on. Don’t let one little bad job kill you. Look ahead to creating something on your own, of your own.

[Mark Suszko]

Jumpbacks has given away some free downloadable samples in the past.

You can also make your own from scratch, basic ones are not all that hard to do. If you describe your technical setup and software, I’ll talk you thru an example you can make by yourself in an hour or less.

[Mark Suszko]

I understand comp time exceedingly well: I’m a state employee on essentially the same system. In my place of work, you burn off comp time before vacation time, and any remaining unspent comp at fiscal’s end has to be converted to a cash payment after the end of the fiscal year. Some years that was a HECK of a lot of O.T. and made a nice summer bonus, but you have to understand that if it seemed like lots of money, it was at the cost of a lot of missed sleep, lost weekends, blown opportunities etc, that I am loathe to give up now that my kids are at an age where I need to be around them. Also, money lost to extra staff compensation is typically money borrowed from equipment maintenance and upgrade money, so it’s not in my interest to try to accrue too much OT or I never get new gear. I would try to take time off to burn off the comp time, but they wouldn’t have anybody cover my job while I was off, so as soon as I came back I had a larger pile of work to catch up on, leading to more comp… they could break the cycle by hiring more people, but that’s not going to happen.

Don’t hire or pay anybody, just dragoon some students, or folks from the alumni association. Or the Boss’ secretary. Have the bosses pull strings and assign you some kids for extra credit. It’s only 2 weeks or less now. The whole project is snowballing towards ridiculous. You are going to have to either get an extension, get more autonomy for the job, or decline it and let them hang. You’d be surprised how suddenly accomodating they can become if they promised THEIR superiors a product by a “date certain”, and you tell them you’re not going to do it without concessions. Don’t sweat retaliation. If you’re a state worker, chances are you have some job protections unless you are considered “management”. They can’t sack you just for turning down an impossible request. Worst they can do is put a reprimand note in your personnel file, one you are entitled to write a long and colorful rebuttal to, so who’s punished by THAT? I would say, despite whatever bluster they give you, YOU are the one in the power position now, as only YOU can deliver on their promises.

You said they wouldn’t hire anybody outside to do it, so you are the only game in town. Use that. Leverage that to get them off your back: demand only ONE contact person from their group to deal with, and have that person have signature authority. Demand that if you get the RESPONSIBILITY for the job, it MUST come with enough AUTHORTY to execute it, or you’re just going home, and they can do shadow puppets at the big presentaton dinner..

And tell them where to stick the TPS forms:-)

[Mark Suszko]

This could be a beautiful work, or a steaming pile. Most likely the latter due to the way they handed you the situation.

The keys are lead time to develop all the assets, and a strong narrative spine to hang the program on. Sounds like you’re not being given either, which is too bad, but typical. Civilians don’t understand what we do: TV is magic; you push a button and there it is, fully-formed. I’ve been given projects like this and usually I get between four days and two weeks to put it together, but the expectations are usually low, I’m given autonomy, and there is no other brief for the material as there is in your case.

There are some producers who would take a year to make such a piece. Others, particularly those with a news background, would feel comfortable with a week. The approaches lead to very different looking and feeling results. Ken Burns vs. 60 Minutes.

To do this “right”, it should have started at least six months earlier or more, if only because it would be nice to not shoot the campus in winter!

It (properly) starts with a needs-analysis that describes the job(s) the video has to do. A common mistake clients make is that they think one video can do many differnet jobs: typically, be a training video for internal staff as well as some kind of sales tool. Client figures he’s saving money by getting two programs for the price of one, but what they DO get are two half-good programs for the price of one good one.

These extra jobs they add are usually very opposite tasks, and a program trying to be too many things to too many audiences winds up pleasing no one. The way I describe it to clients is: the message is an arrow, and the more tasks you put on the message, the wider and more blunt the arrow’s head gets, until it cannot penetrate any target. So tell them they can have a recruitment-flavored piece, or a warm and fuzzy nostalgia piece, or whatever, but to keep it to one theme ONLY, and plan instead to make separate targeted videos for other purposes out of some of the footage later, when deadline pressure is not looming.

After the needs analysis, a writer researches the topic and comes up with a creative treatment. This is not the script: this is the blueprint for the script. The Treatment lays out the creative approach to the material, and any “gimmicks” that will be used in communicating the story. That means here is where you say if and how you’re using humor, or dramatization, or other methods. It describes without actual dialog what the characters will do and say, where and how, and it explains why it must be thus. It charts the entire flow of the narrative. Once written, it also enables one to plan the production schedule and budget, because now you have some concept of the sets, locations, effects, and other elements that will be needed.

Irrelevant to your project you say? Not really: though you would probably truncate the process a bit for this panic production, the discipline of creating the treatment outline is very useful for organizing your material. It also allows your overseers to know, approve, and understand what you’re going to do before you move ahead and spend money. If they don’t like the directon chosen in the treatment, you can stop before any damage was done and try another approach. If they approve the treatment, they don’t have much right to protest soemthing later in the process, which speeds things up for you and protects you from the dreaded:

“it’s just what we asked you for, but not what we wanted”.

After Treatment stage, THEN a script is written based on that treatment. Then you start shooting.

In your case, you are going to have to start a little out of sequence getting the interviews first. But consider them part of the needs analysis and research steps. Go thru the transcribed material and pick out the narrative threads that support the overall theme. Use those to guide your b-roll and visual device choices. Write the treatment up using these. From that you can show the bosses an outline they can approve.

Your hand has been forced by the poor vision of the clients. You can use that as your excuse to refuse any “inputs” of theirs that don’t make sense at this point. It’s too late for a lot of arguments. The rule of the “iron triangle” is that you can have a production done inexpensively, with high quality, and rapidly, but you only get TWO of those three choices: any two, but ONLY two. They took away your time, so they have to expect that quality may suffer and expenses are going to go up. It’s like a law of thermodynamics.

So, we crack open a fresh can of Jolt, sit ourselves down and map the battle plan. They gave you a list of interviews. You will want to shoot these first, as they may give you good ideas for the b-roll and narrative structure. If you can find some common threads in their narratives, this can become the spine of the story. And you *have* to find a “story” here; it’s not enough to just give a chronology, that is as fun as reading out loud all the “begats” in the old testament. It also will not meet any of their future goals in using this footage for recruitment or fundraising purposes. When they balk, you just have to tell tham that there is no time for argument, you have found the best and only way to make the deadline, and you’re going for it.

Those interviews should be shot in different settings. Put each speaker in a nicely-lit sit-down situation first, then shoot them again on a walk-around of the campus and also get footage of them in their classrooms. For the walk-around, hang a wireless on them and walk ahead of them with the camera while they free-associate a narrative off the top of their heads, stopping every once in a while to let the shot be static and let them walk thru it as a natural transition. Set up establishing shots of well-known campus landmarks and have them walk in and talk about one particular thing. You will want some variety in takes, so if they get to a good bit, let them finish it, then have them do it again while you change from close-up to wide or whatever, so you can cut better. For the sit-down, it might be good to hand them a coupl of the yearbooks to look at and talk about some of the pictures and the stories they spark. Don;t ask yes-or-no questions, as leading queions, “How” and “why” questions. Ask them to try and put the question into their answer, so you cna edit your questions out and have a narrative without non-sequiters. Example: “Tell me about how they chose the team mascot name, I understand there was an argument about it?” “There WAS a big argument over the naming of the team, originally, one faction wanted it to be…” -and now you don’t just have a chronology, you have a STORY. One people will care to watch.

While you work on all THAT…

…Hopefully, the library at the school has a good archive of the yearbooks and publicity pictures from public events and newspaper articles. Deputize a brace of students to get in there and scan all the best pictures, or have them take a camera, softlight and tripod to the library and tape 15-second shots of the pictures with a couple pans and slow zooms on each. This could be a huge time saver for your edit, saving render times for moves you’d otherwise have to animate. They have to know how to do this right, so be on hand to train them for the first hour or so. Have them use the camera mic to slate each take for date and location and other pertinent info as they shoot it. Have them log each shot and TC number as they get it. One kid from the helpers gets a job to research cultural references for the significant years of the school: the pop music the day it opened, major historical events in the timeline and what the reaction was at the school, that sort of thing. You don’t have time/money to get legal clearances for any stock images or pop music recordings, maybe if they’d given you a year… but you CAN have interview subjects or narrators REFER to the song titles and things like that, to help set the mood in time period. Musi Bakery has some great pop music sound-alikes for several decades/eras, all on one CD, might be worth a few bucks to use it, it’s all cleared legally, and will give you flavors of the motown era, beatle-era, surf era, do-wop era, hippie era, disco era, New Wave era, metal era, grunge era, etc. Don’t underestimate the power such tracks give a presentation, even if they are not actual songs of the time.

Find a graduate from the earliest possible class, go to their home or work and get ten minutes with them, maybe bring a freshman with you and do a compare/contrast on how they felt their first day at the school.

In the edit, I’d concentrate on getting a flow to the narratives first, then I’d go back in and add the b-roll, music, graphic art and montages to cover holes and establish time periods. Some purchased, canned jump-back type background motion video can be used as a visual “glue” between elements. Depending on the time left, you’ll cover more and more of the interviews with visuals if you have the time for it. When you run short of time, you stick to the faces on camera and just get it done.

You really need a team to help you make this deadline, doing it all by yourself, something is going to crack. Your snippy response to Leo’s useful questions indicates the stress is already beginning to tell. Demand helpers, especially for the b-roll elements. Tell the boss it’s the only way to get it done on time and budget, while keeping your sanity. We’ve all been where you are, you have our sympathy. Hopefully, soem of these suggestions will help. With a rational plan and outline and a team to help you, you can do it.

Best of luck with it, let us know how it comes out.

[Mark Suszko]

As sick and twisted and funny as it is, it DEFINITELY gets across the proper safety messages in a MEMORABLE way, without lecturing.
Funny you mention Monty Python, because John Cleese has a company that makes humerous industrial training films like this for that very same reason. He used to run it from Chicago, and it would be a kick to see him in town occasionally. Though he never did a silly walk:-)

[Mark Suszko]

Thanks will try it.

[Mark Suszko]

You’ve already gotten the best advice, so all I can add is, look at this, if you haven’t yet seen it.

https://www.ifilm.com/ifilmdetail/2692969?htv=12

Or google: “Stafler Fahrer Klaus”
AKA: “Forklift Driver Klaus, the first day”.

For what it’s worth, I think converting to flash is your optimum method now, second choice would be a quicktime file scheme.