[Mark Suszko]

If there is no professional script, it’s more expensive. Because it’s harder to produce something that won’t be a miserable failure.

The lower-tier type clients, the ones with no real experience in broadcast media, will make a lot of assumptions about how things are done that aren’t necessarily true. For example, they will believe in having a real treatment and script created first, they will wanna just go out on the links and give their sales pitch that they are already accustomed to doing, only it’s in front of a camera. And they wanna pay like that’s how the real thing is done.

But creating an engaging pitch on-camera is a very different thing, requires a very different dynamic. If you watch enough of these infomercials, you find that the best ones break down the time and subject matter to really make things flow more like an actual program, that has detailed, commercial-like pitches interspersed, for the call to action (asking for the order).

This means you really have to figure out an overall story arc to the piece, and even if you are using “real people” to tell that story, you have to give them some “character development” during the course of the show… just like any other piece of entertainment programming. Otherwise, your program looks like Ralph Kramden’s “Chef of The Future” bit. Without this, someone flicking thru the channels will watch as few seconds of the informercial as it takes to figure out what is being sold, make an instant value choice, and likely move on to another channel. See, you just wasted thousands of dollars, because you couldn’t hook the viewer and get them to see that this product is something they need/want. You can’t buy 30 minutes of air time and just run the same 30-second commercial over and over in it as a loop, and hope that works. You need more. You need story. You need to develop a message that locates and pre-qualifies the customers, that makes them identify with the need your product fills. Your product requires more customer education than a 30-second spot can deliver.

To put all those narrative and sales elements together, in such a way as to retain the viewer’s interest, involve them, and reinforce the advantages of the product being sold, requires a real honest-to-gosh writer, who does research, then creates a creative treatment, from which the script and budget are derived.

The client, especially a first-timer, perhaps will not understand all of this right away; to them, TV is magic: you push a button, there it is, all that is required is a camera of some type and the entire program just pops into being like Athena sprouting from Zeus’ forehead. They won’t immediately grasp the lighting and sound requirements of a location shoot on a golf course, the mechanics of multicam coverage or single-camera technique and shot breakdowns. They will be amazed how long the shoot takes to execute. Editing is a mystery to them.

You have to take all of this into consideration when planning the bid for the job. What elements are they bringing to the table? Have they done all the due diligence of this creative treatment stuff and production of a real script already, and are just coming to you for the actual execution? Or is it the more likely scenario; they have no clue about any of that stuff, and are coming to you to give them the end-to-end solution? Then you gotta charge more, way more, because obviously you’re doing way more work. You are not just a D.P. at that point, you are producing, and so much more.

[Mark Suszko]

Well, you could have recorded the head-gap-switching from the older tapes onto the beta. (scratches head) Can’t remember how many lines each format gets you. Perhaps you are not seeing it in other places because your monitor doesn’t underscan? Have you looked at a sample of all of these tapes on a real broadcast monitor with cross and underscan? Not just a regular TV? My gut tells me all the same sources will have the same problem. You could mattte it out if you ran it thru a switcher, or DVE the screen a few lines worth and re-center it. Some dubbing systems add lines with each generation, as does closed-captioning… well, that’s not *exactly right, cc puts information on line 22, you can see little white boxes flickering in and out of existence if your monitor allows looking at the VBI.

[Mark Suszko]

Can you describe your complete signal chain (path)? Is there a time base corrector or proc-amp in there anywhere? If these terms sound alien to you, I think we may have found one likely source for the problem. There could be others.

[Mark Suszko]

Kevin, in the greater sense, it’s ALWAYS a different background on the reverse-angle, even if in the same room… unless you’re shooting in a hall of mirrors. And I like that there are noticeable differences in the two shots, that helps keep the orientation, to my way of thinking.

Obviously, if you shoot in a Charlie Rose Black Limbo set, your only cues become the faces of the people talking. I think that that’s a stylistic choice made to really concentrate the viewer’s attention to the person speaking, and you don’t see really wide shots used in limbo settings much, they are not the point: the widest shot is usually a medium shot, and everything else is a variation of tighter and looser closeups.

Other times, the place you’re conducting the interview in informs some of the content. When I interviewed an instructor pilot for a program, I shot them sitting in and near the pilot seat of a plane. I could have as easily interviewed them in a nearby white room (with better acoustics) and talked about the exact same stuff. And in my chosen shot, the pilot doesn’t bother to point out “hey, there is an airplane behind me, and we’re talking about airplanes”. It’s just a given, a subconscious, semiotic reminder, putting the person’s words into an unspoken context, reinforcing the meaning. That’s the obvious part.

The not always as obvious part for beginners is, when you have the choice, you probably want to erase/remove/blur items from the background that don’t reinforce your message, or that distract or clutter or lead the eye away from the person speaking.

So, I would say as long as the program viewer believes the interviewer is in the same room as the interviewee, that’s all you really need. How you achieve that is a matter of craft. When you watch ‘The Daily Show”, and they are doing mocking interviews of crank persons they are planning to make fun of, not everything they do or say is actually happening as you see it – things are changed around in sequence, some of the really obnoxious questions are asked last, with the subject’s back to the camera, or with the subject not even there. Editing makes it all come together the way they want it to.

[Mark Suszko]

I’m still trying to figure out why he was doing this on-camera in the first place;-)

[Mark Suszko]

If your area competition is cut throat, this is one of those “value-added” areas where short-run dubbing is a loss leader that distinguishes you from others. Likewise with the FTP and encoding services, those will really take off in the near future.

[Mark Suszko]

30% maning change in frame size, right? Well, that that seems a reasonable rule of thumb, and close to what I try to do when shooting interviews. I try to snap-zoom to change the shot while the questions are being asked. Sometimes, if the answer is long-winded, and I feel the subject has come to a conclusion for at least the first part of the answer, I’ll snap-zoom while he’s taking a breath and get the rest wider or tighter. I do feel it cuts together smoother to go from distinct shot sizes like a true medium to a true CU, etc.

I have seen interviews shot with one fixed frame size, then deliberately jump-cut together. This seems to work best with a lot of short, staccato edits, and a short overall run time, where the person in the frame moves around in the frame or changes expression/emotion a lot. It’s usually reserved for deliberate quirkiness, IMO.

Other times, I see it shot fixed-angle and soft wipes are put in to ease transitions, this looks lame to me. Some of the gonzo celebrity news programs shoot everything fixed, because there’s nobody on location with any savvy, then the editors “fix” it by re-scaling the shots in DVE to fake a camera change, or they do extreme DVE’s like page peels and z-axis trombining or card-shuffling, or PIP effects, anything to hide the fact there is only one shot. It can be challenging;-)

[Mark Suszko]

Robert:

The question you’re asking doesn’t have an easy answer. Not the way you’re asking it.
“Corporate video” is a very wide term, covering so many different kinds of work, performed at various levels of budget and craft. It encompases everything from copying a canned powerpoint slide show onto DVD’s and videocassette, to lining up and overseeing far-flung live satellite feeds, special effects, etc. for a gigantic live show in front of thousands of people, or travelling to exotic locations to shoot product photography. Or trying to get images of the invisible, in some lab or workshop. It could involve many aspects of production, or be confined to one narrow area, such as DVD authoring. Or animation. Or sound. And even there, to do that one job right, you need to have experience in a lot of overlapping disciplines. You can be doing training tapes, or commercials, or public relations/news work, or forensic documentation, teleconferencing, or web video/streaming… just to name a couple things. There isn’t one book, one teacher, one “right” way to learn “everything” about it. “It” is too big to be contained that way. Most people only think of TV as broadcast TV, news and entertainment. Corporate covers not only those, but everything else too! I got into it back when it was called “Industrial” video, and was considered a secondary or tertiary part of the overall “business”. The name change reflects the expanded universe of possibilities.

For people wanting to break into it, I advise you read as much about it as you can from various sources, decide which aspects of the field appeal to your talents and creative inclinations, then work towards that part specifically, while learning as much as you can stand about all the other puzzle pieces of the business. Production courses at a community college or community access station might help if they concentrate on the key areas you’re interested in.

Me, I like to write, produce, direct, and edit. Writing and directing and editing I feel are my strengths; producing, I do because I have to, to get the writing done my way. But I don’t always get to write, sometimes I get stuff handed to me and my job is to polish it up and make it all work somehow. Shooting, I can do fine, but as time goes on, I feel pulled more in one direction than another, and I can let shooting go, let someone else cover it if I’m concentrating more on something else in the production.

I still like to be the all-around generalist “Renaissance Man”, don’t get me wrong, but when the stakes get sufficiently high, I am willing to expand my team of one to working with a crew, where each can do their specialty better than I can. And it’s getting ever more difficult to BE a competent generalist, with things like authoring, streaming, compositing, animation, etc. If you were really good at just ONE of these, you could make a good living at it, somewhere.

I think maybe one way to look at it is: generalists tend to be full-time on-staff hires, and specialists are brought in most often as freelancers to do a specific job only, then split. Though they may get called back to do that one-shot gig many times for the same company, they typically work for many places, where the generalist hunkers down at one place to handle the most common jobs they have full-time.

So, what part of the business attracts you most, Robert? Start reading up on it at sites like this one and others, check out books in your library that relate to it, peruse the more obscure categories at Amazon for even more sources, read some of the trade magazines. Then start building a resume’, reel or portfolio of stuff to show when you interview, any way you can.

You may or may not get a lot more specific recommendations than that, because to many people’s way of thinking, the first step in seeing if you’re cut out for this is: do you want it bad enough to self-direct your research, show initiative? Corporate work is part of business, and business is cutthroat and unforgiving; you need to be able to stand on your own feet most of the time, have more answers than questions. Also, Corporate people specifically want to hire people that come “pre-trained”, because frankly, they mostly don’t know anything about how to do these jobs themselves – they are looking for people that solve their problems, not learn a job on their time.

Makes for a “chicken/egg” situation, for sure. You beat that by starting with one specialty you can master, and you build up skills as you go on from there over time.
This is why I suggested the hotel shooting gigs for you as a good entre’ to Corporate work. I got my first corporate gigs after 4 years of college learning the craft and some practical experience thru hands-on internships, so even though I had no resume, I came into the interviews with training.

This is why I suggested the hotel AV stuff for you as a logical beginning: At the start, the entry-level versions of those jobs only require you to be a good shooter and manage good audio, plus understand basic connectivity of A/V gear – how to set up laptops, projectors, etc… You have a head start on that with your wedding work.

After you shoot a bunch of these, get repeat business from the hotel and other hotels in town, you branch out as a freelancer, make contacts, and you can maybe find work on larger corporate theatre type productions: multicamera jobs where you might be the IMAG camera guy, or run a mixer and wireless microphones, or the light board, or a character generator, etc. As the jobs get bigger and the people that hire you build a trust (and you add to your skills), the time will come where you get a break on some project, doing more than you ever expected. You will have switched from being a simple hired hand techie to a producer. Then many doors can open for you, if you play it smart.

It’s not fast. And not immediately exceptionally lucrative.
But it’s one possible path. You start down that path by picking a direction.
What do you like to do best?

[Mark Suszko]

This has happened to such varied film makers as Orson Welles and Jerry Lewis;
Film stuck in vaults of processing labs because a check bounced or there’s a lawsuit or some such thing. I agree with the consensus so far: give him whatever materials he came in with, but unless he’s paid up in advance and the check has cleared, your contribution to his materials in your editing and compositing is YOURS, and you can erase it at any time.

I would personally archive it off to deep storage on tape or data DVD’s in case you need evidence for a lawsuit later.

[Mark Suszko]

Nothing’s stopping you from picking up some used college design texts from Amazon. Also look at magazines like “How”, “Creative Arts” and “Graphis Annual”. My wife is a graphic designer, in the classic fine arts sense, and I crib off her magazines and books and things all the time, picking up terms and concepts. I really should emulate you and follow this up in more detailed fashion, it can only make you a better editor.