[Mark Suszko]

You can find a bunch of cheap clip art and key it with some color effects, layer it with some motion video of character generated coffee-related words and phrases, and DVE the cr@p out of it to make a looping background. Over this you use bits of the stock footage clips, and the music bed. For an interstitial, you cna do a “coffee trivia quiz”, using CG sreens over that graphic bed, ask a question, and give three multiple-choice answers below. Let the question sit for just enough time to read the answers twice, then highlight th eanswer and move on. make the quiz questions a mix of really obscure and really easy. At the end of the loop, you can post a curve of grades key, where 100 percent right is “Venti” or only 1 right is “demitasse”, or something like that. You could gather the questions and answers in a night of wiki and googling, and build the keys in a day. The booth guys can give out a special prize to you if you got all ten or whatever questions right. Even if you don’t stay to watch all the questions, you will probably stay long enough to read and retain one, and if you have a logo bug in the corner of the screen or incorporated int he wallpaper of the screen, that’s a good impression to leave. Just take my advice and don’t ask any questions about those coffee beans that get their flavor from being passed thru the GI tract of a Civet cat. =:-p

[Mark Suszko]

I would contact a stock house like WPA and order up a large number of ultra-short clips of coffee being brewed, served, sipped, from old movies and industrials. I would intersperse them with some guys and gals doing poetry slams, all with a coffee theme. Jazz music bed, with bongos. Hepcat vibe, lots of blue and dark maroon shades. If you’re using it as an attract gimmick, you pace it so you can come into it and depart at any point, so each poem should be 60 seconds long or so, interspersed with some motion graphics and the aforementioned historic clips. Maybe get the rights to use the song, “I like the java-jive, and it likes me”, I think it was The Andrews Sisters, at least that era. Probably can’t afford Sinatra’s “They grow an awful lotta coffee in Brazil”, but maybe you can find a cover of it by someone else for less.

[Mark Suszko]

On the fly, I too use the “white china marker” pencils from the art store, until I (sometimes) get around to a real label.

But did you know, 3M I think it is, makes an eraseable label that works something like whiteboard. If you wipe it with your thumb in a certain direction, the specially textured surface sheds the writing. I think it’s supposed to be good for a couple dozen cycles of write/erase.

[Mark Suszko]

Companies have been marking using ultra-tiny CG type way out of safe title for decades. That’s easy enough to defeat if you are looking for it, by masking or DVE-ing it out. Putting something in the close-captioned line 21 area is also done. I knew about digitally watermarking still images, but not about video, I’ll have to check those companies out.

[Mark Suszko]

I have done videos like this a few years ago, it was very educational and interesting to see some of the special issues involved. Your signer will already know to dress plainly, in something dark and without pattern, so the hands will be easy to see, but also keep the background they work in on the dark and flat side, don’t make it look like a backlit situation, make sure the lighting on the signer is suitably flat and doesn’t cast confusing shadows.

Remember that signing in real-time is a very physical activity, so you need to schedule breaks for resting the arms, or at least be observant of the signer and be ready to ask if they feel like taking a rest, if it’s going to be a long shoot.

As far as placing the window, I have seen upper right third/corner and lower corners, I have even see a 2-box, I think as much as anything it depends onthe avaialable technology. In case they later decide to add captioning, it’s probably best to keep the signer higher than the lower-third titling area where captions might someday go…

This one time I worked on a program for the deaf and had the deaf clients not only write and produce, but they were on the set, did much of the acting, and sat in on the start of the edit. (man, try to explain linear editing and tape pre-roll and the like in that situation, it was freaking them out, especially all the shuttling and a-b rolling, until I explained it a bit). Anyhow…

Comes the day to show the finished piece, all is well for a few seconds, then the clients are signing like a house afire back behind my chair. The same people that were in on every aspect of the program were now upset because the on-screen signing was done in Signed English and not ASL… by the client themself, who wrote and performed it!. I was off the hook because it was their mistake, and they accepted the blame for it. Lots of jokes were made on both sides about who’s not listening to whom. I think we re-shot a few inserts and let the rest go for deadline purposes. Overall it was a different but enjoyable experience, working thru the translator/signer with the clients and seeing their needs were met.

I bring it up so you know to ask in advance if there is a preference for the language choices made. Same as with Spanish tracks: do you want classic Castillian Spanish, PuertoRican Spanish, Cubano-Spanish, Mexican Spanish, Columbian…. there are many variations, and you want to make sure the client knows and approves the choices in advance.

[Mark Suszko]

They said something similar for Capacitance Discharge video disks and laserdisk, and the media may well survive that long, but the only players still around able to read them will be in museums, or bubble-packed in nitrogen and cosmoline in your basement.

Can you even FIND a working laserdisk player anywhere besides ebay now?

I think most DVD-R’s will last longer than the players will be available, and our future involved “bumping-up” old media to new formats every decade or so, for the rest of our lives.

[Mark Suszko]

https://realitytv.about.com/gi/dynamic/offsite.htm?zi=1/XJ&sdn=realitytv&zu=http%3A%2F%2Ftlc.discovery.com%2Ffansites%2Fweddingstory%2Fweddingstory.html and no I don’t know how to use tinyURL so get over it:-)

[Mark Suszko]

Ask the artist known as “Falco”, of “Der Kommissar” fame.
You can google his unfortunate story.

[Mark Suszko]

Bob, one way to handle that kind of thing is something I call “virtual billing”; creating an invoice with the rates and work description and the total amounts it *would* have cost them elsewhere. One way to use this when they keep coming back for more freebies is you can tell them your budget has a cap on the cash value amount of free billings per month, reative to paying customers, and they’ve exceeded that limit for the month: they can either wait another month for the next available freebie time, or they can continue on a “non-virtual” cash basis right away, like the other paying clients.

[Mark Suszko]

There is a stock company that supplies generic footage of people with alpha channel masks already included, I want to say it’s VEER, but It may be someone else. Still, I too would probably “roll my own”, it would be faster, cheaper, and more closely resemble your actual vision of the shot because you arranged it.

In a pinch (like it’s late at night already and due in the morning)
you can use Poser to create a quick individual shadow or a whole crowd and render as shilouettes. This is good for one of those foreground elements of people in front of a stage. Old versions of Poser are free downloads and sometimes given away in magazines like DIGIT or COMPUTER ARTS. I think half my graphics tools at home came out of the free giveaway versions from those mags:-)

Too, you and one other person can be layered dozens of times in most compositing programs.