[Mike Smith]

Hi Ty, and thanks for the welcome. As you can tell I’m on new ground here. Scary. Though years and years ago I was trained a little in film studio sound, using 1/4″ analogue nagras, SQN mixers and a range of microphones. But it’s all a very hazy memory.

I wouldn’t be against a usb interface, but thought I might get better performance from an internal card / pci ?

What I’m wanting to do is set up a way to write and demo record songs – not recordings for sale or a production studio, obviously, but demos of writing. Long, long ago I studied classical guitar for a while, though I haven’t really touched music for years. Last year, though, a local writer and amateur singer asked me to set a poem to music for a soprano singing group. This took me some time, working with guitar and staff paper. Since then, I’ve learnt there’s software for all that now, and have experimented with some sequencing software and would like to do more. It turned out I had a version of Cubase VST with an old Soundblaster, and I’ve also been playing with a free version of MuLab and wondering about e.g. Sonar as a possible tool.

So now what I’d like to try to do, in an amateur way, is to record a singer, ideally giving a live audio out from a sequencer into headphones for her. So I guess “full duplex” sounds like a good idea ?

On the microphone front, I think I might be OK for now. For demo voiceovers for (offline edits of) videos I’ve used (and have) a Bayer dynamic mike (M300 ) and a mini-condenser Sennheiser (MKE300), but when people asked to keep my voice on a couple of videos I invested in a Rode K2, which offers an XLR-to-1/4″ lead from the power supply, and produces what for me is a nice sound. I figured this was the one to use – good enough for current purposes anyway.

On the where-to-record thing, I’ve made a reasonably quiet space around my video edit gear – far from perfect, but again good enough for now for my purposes. I want to keep this off the video gear if I can, and record onto a (quiet) Windows 7 / 64 bit machine which is in the same area.

Thanks for any guidance.

[Mike Smith]

Tricky.

You need to try to have a good clear-the-air session with your contact. It’s great that s/he brings you good projects. But you do need to clarify your boundaries, for benefit on both sides. It sounds like your agent is on a journey towards producer status, and wants a little more of the control and the production money that you’ve both seen as yours in the past.

For this latest, it sounds like biggest project together, s/he is on the hook too if your company, ideas and proposals are part of what helped to get funding. So your negotiating position is quite strong – you can insist on managing things how you, as the experienced producer, think appropriate and as you budgeted, so long as you are prepared to walk away if you can’t get agreement. But it would be much better to get an agreement. You both know that it’s not about “taking care of the details” for you. You have to decide if and when you are prepared to take a step down in responsibility and control, becoming perhaps a hired manager or hired director. S/he has to decide if s/he’s ready yet to fly solo – that has to be on the radar.

[Mike Smith]

Scott is surely right.

While there are many new outlets and uses for video, there’s a very large supply of video makers, prices are falling, over here in the UK the economy is still in post-financial-crisis meltdown and business is tight for everyone. I believe it’s not much better over there, with unemployment still very high (around 9%) and growth not enough to make a dent in it anytime soon. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-11996435

But, on the Sisyphean theme, there’s always hope – Pandora’s last gift. https://myths.e2bn.org/mythsandlegends/playstory562-pandoras-box.html

There’s no reason to be ashamed of a news background ; that’s a great grounding in speedy, economical and accessible storytelling.

Your skills could open doors in news, maybe documentary, maybe in business communications. You have to research your target markets and work out where you have something to offer. Then go hard for what’s there. Experience and a great reel will get you further than a paper qualification and no experience, with many potential employers or customers.

I just checked out your vimeo links, though, and have a caution for you : if you put a compilation reel at the front like that, it had better be great, because that’s all many folks will look at.

And I wonder whether your reel plays to your strengths.

If feels bitty, and does not bring out your reportage and tech skills. More, opening with the blurry mobile images you have does not necessarily send out a good message to potential employers, particularly with those images being unexplained. But you could post the reel in the showreel forum if you want a wider response.

Maybe, thinking like a reporter, you could put together a great two minutes about yourself. It would be for you to plan the script, but maybe editorial and scripting, camera and editing skills and experience might feature. If those were related to specific stories and challenges, and how you were able to make great work in varied circumstances, and how well you can work with different teams, that wouldn’t necessarily play badly to your target audiences.

[Mike Smith]

You have to decide what your priorities are, in terms of cheap, good or fast … No doubt you have an approved budget level in mind.

1 Shortlist companies based on quality of work.

Build a long-list of possibles, from the COW, contacts, local trade directories, web, wherever.

Review reels from companies you could work with, whether local or, perhaps, via remote link if you are used to remote working. Try to see at least two whole videos, and avoid compilations of effects, clips and highlights.

Probably unless you are selling to designers and video techs it’s editorial quality that you want to prioritize : do their videos tell interesting, compelling stories that move audiences like your target audience?

2 Qualify your best preferences can work in your price range.

Contact your best preferences and ask for budget range information – what did the productions you liked cost their clients, and what is their floor price for a x-minute your-style production. They may resists telling you too much, but at this stage you just want to know if they can work happily in your approved budget range.

3 Prepare a brief covering everything you, as a producer, would want to know.

Delivery requirements. (DVD? webfile? Master material? Edit timelines? Copies? Whatever you want) Audience. Objective. Any specific desired content or style pointers. Stuff you like. Related web, ad or print material you use. Resources you can supply in terms of people, places, contacts. Schedule – and make this realistic, allowing for your buying and admin processes. Target budget. How many people / companies you are inviting.

If you are really going to choose on price, tell them. And when people build to a price, they need to know what corners it’s OK, or not OK, to cut. So tell them.

Caution, though: you’re heading towards a process that supplies just *exactly* what’s requested and contracted and nothing more – so if you don’t spec a tripod, don’t expect one. And if you change the spec after contract, what extra charges will you face?

You have to decide if you are aiming to build a conflict-oriented, price-dominated negotiation – you’d better be good at this, since your suppliers will be – or are trying to find creative, committed film-makers interested in making a fair return on producing the best work they can for a given project, client and budget. This will influence who you approach and how you approach them, who you choose, how your videos come out, and the eventual overall cost.

There’s a lovely example from the UK building trade (one of many great examples), where a museum contracted marble cladding to fit in with an existing marble area, using the common name of the marble in the contract. One cute contractor offered a much cheaper price than the others – and got the job. The marble went in (it costs millions) – and didn’t match. When the client complained, the contractor was able to prove that the material he used matched the contract spec (though not the common usage of the term in dispute). The contractor was not liable, and the museum had to choose between accepting the mismatch of paying heavily to have the work redone …

3 Invite your top 3 or at most 4 to tender proposals.

Include a personal covering note or email. Explain what of their work you liked, and why.
If they ask for a pre-meeting to discuss and start research, say yes.

[Mike Smith]

The link breaks partway down the image in FF too. Checking, it looks like you might try increasing the height of your gallery and / or reel_holder divs in your style sheet info … you also have some validation erros, which you could see at https://validator.w3.org/check?verbose=1&uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.erikhermesman.com%2F if you want.

[Mike Smith]

That’s all normal if you think the relationship is going somewhere, that the contact is a potential client who might want to do business with you. If you’re not feeling that trust, it’s a lot of free time.

[Mike Smith]

Yes, I’m sure Richard and Fernando have a better approach with going for a different form, and best one supplied and approved by your ISP.

The one we were looking (too hastily,on my part) was worryingly lacking in basic security, and we would have been having to think about cleansing user input, checking the domain calling the script, and hiding it from direct access over the web, once we’d got it working !

[Mike Smith]

Try putting a ? before the final close angle brackets so
?>
Try closing the title tag line with a </title> so

<title>sent message </title>
Try closing the inverted commas in the http meta refresh line so

And try closing the CLOSING style tag with a close angle bracket instead of the special & gt ; character, so
< /style >

there may be more little things I haven’t spotted yet. If you want the message sent message to last longer before the page returns to your contact form increase the value in the meta http refresh to say 5

like

<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="5;URL=https://westbrookadvertising.com/contact.html" >


[Mike Smith]

Using what you have, you could try replacing your php file contents with these (save your originals somewhere as a backup) and be sure that your second and fourth EOD are the first and only things on their lines – no spaces before or after. This is my guess at what your script file was meant to look like …

<?php

/* Email Variables */

$emailSubject = 'contactformprocess!';
$webMaster = 'westbroo@westbrookadvertising.com';

/* Data Variables */

$email = $_POST['email'];
$name = $_POST['name'];
$comments = $_POST['comments'];

$body = <<<EOD

[Mike Smith]

Sorry Carl

PHP is a server-side language – it all happens at the server, not in the browser. If a file has PHP in it and the server knows that, then before the web page is served a PHP interpreter on the server looks at the script in the PHP file, and, we hope, carries out the operations asked for, passing the results to the web server to include in the page supplied to the browser.

The usual way people let the server know what to do is to use a .php file extension = not with .html at the end.

So in your case you could try setting as your form action
https://westbrookadvertising.com/form1formprocess.php

and let us know what happens ?

All best

In fact I’ve just tried that, and your server has supplied me the raw php file, which is not good – a security risk for you.

OK it’s not quite that bad, security wise, though you do have some PHP issues. Someone has replaced the open-angle-brackets < signs with the html entity ‘< ” on your vital php opening tag and elsewhere, which looks the same over the web but does not work the same at the server end. I’m not sure I can offer a quick fix on this – your php page is a long way from what you need.