[Mark Suszko]

If you need to do it fast without rights hassles, GIS for NASA earth pics, find a large-scale flattened globe image. Try to get it as something better than jpeg, like a targa or tiff. If your NLE system has DVE effects, you can wrap this image as a skin over a ball shape in about two seconds, then keyframe your zooming moves to taste, it’s really not hard, I used to do that stuff for fun with my Pinnacle Alladin.

The other fast way would be to use Lightwave 3d (if you have it) to make the animation: LW comes with the major planets already installed, last I knew, you just make a sphere, apply the texture, set a starfield picture as the render background, and go hog wild animating the flying camera. Bryce 3D would be good for this as well.

There are cheap or free animation programs out there that all work pretty much the same way as that, you could try something like Blender or crystal 3d impact pro, just find that NASA flattened image to wrap around a sphere and you’re good to go.

The NASA maps will not get you awesome detail all the way down to building level: for that, you cheat by addin g ina cloud layer to fly thru, on the cut when you come out of the white cloud, you can now use a higher-rez areial photography view of the neighborhood… but those are usually copyrighted. You can find free resources for that closeup stuff from the USGS web site. Also google “Terragen”.

[Mark Suszko]

I have combustion on there, but have had no training time on it yet and was going even slower so I switched over to trying Motion.
Gawd, I hate trying to learn new software on the client’s time, instead of during a quiet, peaceful sabbatical.

Got another word or two that would help with the FCP or Motion problem? At this point, If I don’t have a certain fix for it by mid-moring, I will be out of time and will have to go back to my trusty old Discreet Edit to “get ‘r dun”. I HATE having to surrender like that, but I’m just out of time this week, need to be showing it finished by Thursday PM, so Friday is free for any fixes/changes, it airs Saturday morning.

[Mark Suszko]

As far as the script writer goes, if you’re talking non-guild, well, whatever they will accept, is the direct but useless answer.

I think it has to depend a lot on how much work the writer is taking on. To do the job right, the way I would do it, I would demand to do some research and the needs analysis, if there isn’t good enough material already available from the client. Then I would need x amount of time to come up with the creative approach, then a treatment stage, which would then be brought in for client review, before I even wrote a word of the script. Call me insane, but I try to do this exercise even for 30-second spots, it’s good discipline.

Your freelance writer, if she or he does all these due-diligence steps, would want to charge you either a day rate or an hourly rate, one that has a fudge factor for the “thinking time” they are putting into the project even when they are “off the clock”, and the gas they spend driving to meetings and such.

How do they figure the rate? Some start with a total number they would like to get to, and work backwards to figure the likely hours and rate. That’s about as safe as playing the horses; every gig is different, every job brings up different obstacles, all of which may blow the predicted time on task, so you overshoot or underbid most of the time, niether of which is good for business.

Then what of revisions? Gotta charge for re-writes at some point, though I think most non-union guys give you one free re-write as part of the package. I would, if I was confident in the treatment. If the front-end work leading to the treatment was done right, re-writes would be pretty rare, and usually minor tweaks.

Let’s say for fun, it’s a 30-minute infomercial.

*Three one-hour meetings, one up front, one for research, one to present the treatment.

*A couple of phone calls in between, to discuss some of the creative approaches and nip the impractical ones in the bud. Maybe an hour’s worth, spread out here and there.

*A day of thinking and writing time.

*A day to write the actual treatment.

*A day for tweaks after the review meeting.

*Hour meeting to re-present the revised treatment and get approval for script or termination of the effort.

*2 days to write the actual script.

*One hour meeting to present it.

*One day for any final tweaks after legal and etc. have “put their stink on it”. Approval over phone or e-mail.

*Optional “stand-by” time on set or in post, to help with any unforseen problems that crop-up during the shoot or edit, one to four hours. Some writers insist only they are allowed to execute the script changes, depends on the contracts.

That makes roughly…. 46 hours of work or so, at ten bucks an hour, $460 for about a week’s work, spread out over a week or maybe more, give or take, and cheap at the price. But I could be off by a factor of five or ten, it really varies with each job. Will the guy touch it for ten an hour? Real full-time writers have the same business concerns producers and editors have: they have insurance, taxes, gas, capital costs, etc. to pay off, all from very short-term jobs. They really can’t write more than one big thing at a time, so if they take you on, on your schedule, for your price, they have to be able to pass up any more lucrative work that gets offered perhaps the next day. You pay peanuts, you get squirrels. Once you work out the hours, are you writing for less than minumum wage? What level of writer will work that cheap?

Yeah, you’re mileage will vary. Sometimes, the whole thing just pops out, fully formed, like Athena from Zeus’ forehead, after a short phone conversation, and it’s perfect. That’s more common for 30-second spot ideas than 30-minute informercials. But be wary of projects where the writing is so matter-of-fact; typically, what you’ll be getting will be re-run cliche’ hack jobs, re-treaded from previous productions and sloppily modified to use with your product/service.

Or a snap-decision, without the due diligence, to do something “cool” and trendy, in imitation of the latest pop phenomenon, will cost you a lot of money and maybe look prety slick in the end… but will it actually sell anything? Will the clients be able to remember the visually compelling gimmick, but not recall the product name? The Superbowl half-time spots are infamous for many of these.

How much business is this project supposed to bring in to the company? An extra hundred thousand in new accounts? A million? What percentage of that target revenue is worth investing in the production to get the desired result, 10 percent? More? Maybe you CAN afford a guild writer after all, if it’s worth the effort?

Back when I worked as a line producer on a cable show imitation of PM Mag, we used cue cards on location, and occasionally prompters in the studio, when they were available. We also relied a LOT on the talent being able to memorize a paragraph or two’s worth of links, or we’d prep them with enough facts that they could ad-lib the throws and do all right. In those cases, the cue cards were only maybe five key words, to jumpstart their memory. Prompter rigs today are light and relatively cheap: you can put one together for right around a grand, or rent them for lots less, just when you need them. Mine’s a hundred a day, or $150 for a 2&1/2-day weekend, self-operated. Not advertising, just trying to give a sense of a low-end rental rate, you can certainly pay more.

[Mark Suszko]

I used to play the hell out of those songs in my college radio days. Wore out three tape carts easy:-)

[Mark Suszko]

The albums were taken by “all the young dudes” on “the other side of life”.

[Mark Suszko]

I forgot this inspirational site:

http://www.worth1000.com

excellent photoshop contests, look them over carefully.

[Mark Suszko]

I will offer to disagree with premise number one. Because you and most other event guys have seen so much of this, on a weekly basis, you’re burned out on it. But from the customer’s POV, it doesn’t matter how old or cliche it becomes, nobody else’s video matters, theirs is unique *to them*, and they will continue to ask for this stuff, at least the ones getting married for the the first time. Those that are having a second or third marriage may refine their tastes a little as you suggest, is my opinion. Or they may say “the heck with it, let’s go hog-wild MTV on it this time”, becasue there’s less reason for pretense the second time around.

The younger couples (they seem to be getting married younger all the time) have their tastes driven, for bad or worse, by the current crop of crud they see on cable TV, so demand for gauche or effected looks will stay the same, if not increase. You could always choose not to service those types of accounts, I suppose, but somebody will. Or worse, a civilian with a home moovie kamera and some ten-dollar shovelware on his Dell from Best Buy will take it on; he’s got eleventy-five different 3-d wipes and damn ifn’ he ain’t a-gunna use ’em ALL, yeee-haw!

[Mark Suszko]

You really need to see alawyer with this, most of us here are not qualified to give legal advice. For what it’s worth, my opinion is you seem to be in the right as far as the version you told.

I also agree you should never have moved onto the second job until the first was was paid in full, but I bet you NEVER make this mistake again. Mistake number two was ever allowing his materials to leave your shop without being paid in full. You gave away your best leverage, twice.

You also fell for a variation on the oldest lie in the business:
“If you cut me a break now, we’ll make it up to you later”.
In my experience and observation, this statement has NEVER, EVER come true for anyone who was given that offer. My own policy is to stand up and leave the room without another word if that magic phrase ever comes up. With my hand covering my wallet.

I know how hard it is when you have bills to pay and mouths to feed, nothing much coming in, and the possibility of a payoff presents itself in the form of a guy like this. But mostly, you wind up working for minimum wage or even losing money with clients like this, especially if they keep you too busy to take on other, better clients. Not only that, they ruin your local reputation and drive better business away, while attracting more of their ilk to your door. Considering the hourly rate versus profit (or lack thereof), you would make more money spending that time on the phone cold-calling for new client business instead of working on his junk.

Now you’ll be out more money and time pursuing him in the courts, distracting you from your work. Be sure your lawyer takes that into account in the damages. I had good luck suing a deadbeat client once in small claims a long time ago, but OTOH I was single, unemployed, living with my folks, and had nothing but time to make the case my “job” until it’s conclusion. Your time may be more valuable spent otherwise, depends just how much you think you really can get out of the guy. Most slugs like this have their best assets stashed where the law can’t find or get them.

[Mark Suszko]

Well, it’s obvious to look at what everybody else does, to watch commercials on adcritic, to peruse magazines from Graphis to Computer Arts to HOW to whatever. Lots of times two different things you see will cross-pollinate in your head and give you something new. But if you only ever copy or deconstruct things others have done first, it’s like driving a car using only the rear-view mirror to navigate. What you want is to go forward with something truly out of your own skull.

When I burn-out on ideas, I look for ways to change where my head is at. Go walk somewhere you’ve never walked, or just walk around somewhere familiar, but look at the world thru a cardboard tube that crops your vision way down to a detail level. Or make up a few customized cardboard sheets with different shaped slits cut in them, some with scraps of old rosco gels on them, to re-section your view. Go thru an entire color magazine with a huge magnifier, just drag it randomly around each page. Doodle without looking at the paper, while listening to music or something with headphones on. Stop by the craft store and check out all the custom papers and bits they sell for scrapbooking projects. Play with magnetic poetry tiles. Google “creativity exercises” and see if anything interesting pops up.

[Mark Suszko]

The inexpensive photomontage program is by Arcsoft. It’s cute, I want it too, I think it was under fifty dollars to download and I have tried pitching using it to clients for a PSA or commercial promo a couple of times, but this is one of those things clients can’t really imagine well until you’ve shown them the finished product… yet you need them to approve the week’s worth of work before you CAN show them a product… so (sigh) I have yet to play with it myself. It’s PC and I’m mac at home.

It’s only designed for stills, but if you were to render out at a really *large* size, you could then bring that into a compositor and fly it around a bit, could look really choice. How I would do it is to build three to five of the posters, the same size, the same master image, but with different “seed” files. Stack them in a pile, all registered perfectly on layers in the NLE or compositor. Then a simple dissolve or cut between the versions, while the animated camera flys over the entire comp, would give you a “little” motion/change in the thing, perhaps enough to sell the effect you want. Or you cheat the thing: build onefull-frame poster image, but don;t reveal it up front: start with a single full-frame, full-res image on it’s own layer, and z-axis shrink that into one tiny thumbnail to reveal the poster image behind it.

Other ways to go with this would be to use the After Effects “card flip” effect plug-in. This gives that effect you see when people in the stands at a stadium each hold up colored cards that work like giant pixels to make a large image. Supposedly, a lot of this effect can be automated, but just thinking about it intimidates the heck out of me;-) Smaller versions of this have been pre-built in Boris FX, you just assign the footage to the requisite number of timelines and it does the rest. A time-saving tip for trying this way: Build ONE master timeline full of base footage, then copy-paste it into all the other tracks and offset each track a couple seconds randomly forward or back. This makes all your panels change seemingly at random, while looping your set number of shots. Economical of your time.

Then there’s a 3-d application. You can model a sea of panels in lightwave, max, or the like, then map actual video to each panel, and keyframe as few or as many aspects of the composition as you need. The render would take a long time, overnight at least, but you could get fabulous quality that way. I would not reccomend it to a rank beginner animator, though, unless you started small, with say a dozen panels. Each panel can be set to accept a targa file sequence of images or an actual .avi file. Either way, that’s full-motion video.