[Nick Griffin]

[Jeff Kitchiguine] “”why do I have to sign this form?””

Short answer: “So we can use the images we’re shooting of you in our film.”

I’ve said much of this here before so I’ll be brief.

Here in the US a release form is used to create the ILLUSION that the signer has given irrevocable permission for you to use them in your photo, film or video. I say illusion because, I believe, in reality an individual can demand, at any time, that you stop using their image. The typical release has wording that indicates otherwise so your average person believes what it says.

A release must also have “consideration” in order to be a legal contract. Basically that means something of value has changed hands. In our case it means that we’ve given them a dollar upon signing the release.

The best releases are a few paragraphs in length and offered for signature in a matter of fact manner. You act like it’s anything other than routine and your subjects may become reluctant to sign. And if anyone else you’re shooting sees that someone has turned down your release it can get ugly fast. However most people are so pleased with themselves at the prospect of being on film or video that they jump at the chance and sign the release without reading it. The real trick to getting people to sign a release is to act like you can just as easily have them in your project or not.

BUT… all of his may be different for you for a number of factors:

1) Canadian laws may be different than US, so a properly executed release may be more or less binding. Suggest you ask a Canadian lawyer.
2) Because children are involved the laws may be different. Again, suggest you ask a Canadian lawyer.
3) If this is a documentary you may not even need a release. I know that here in the states if your end product is considered “news” you don’t. I think. You guessed it… suggest you ask a Canadian lawyer.
4) If you are just shooting in Canada but producing/distributing in another country you probably don’t need a release because many types of minor contracts are unenforceable across international boundaries.

But. I’m not a lawyer — here or in Canada — so I may be wrong.

[Nick Griffin]

Legally it’s likely that they can prevent you from showing their work in any kind of public way, ie. – online, mass mailing, etc. It’s also likely that they may be willing to invest more in a lawyer’s time to twist you around than you are to have another lawyer keep you un-twisted.

I don’t know what they can do in the way of preventing you from showing examples of your work in a one-on-one situation. They probably can, but they would have to prove that you were doing it which would be more difficult. Have you considered producing a spec project all your own which you could use along with a list of the things that you worked on for this employer? I doubt they can prevent you from naming clients for whom you’ve worked on their behalf. Just be sure that you stay on the high road. It’s better for both your image and long-term business karma.

You are wise to resist your former employers attempts to sign a non-compete after the fact. Keep not signing. And just in case it’s not obvious by now, the chances of your former employer ever becoming more reasonable about any of this and giving you any work are somewhere between minuscule and NFW.

[Nick Griffin]

All of the suggestions have merit but no one has yet, IMHO, stated the obvious.

Recording studio windows in my experience are made with the glass angled to prevent internal reverberations of the sound. Almost always (at least in the several dozen studios I’ve seen and the couple I’ve built) the control room side of the glass as well as the studio side is angled so the space is wider at the top and more narrow at the bottom. This means the glass is pointing it’s reflection downward. Keep the camera above the midpoint of the window and your reflection will never be an issue.

You may need the duvetyne for the front of the console and the area beneath it, though. A site survey is essential otherwise you’re wasting time on the shoot day which could be better used.

“Just my opinion. I could be wrong.”

[Nick Griffin]

[Chris Blair] “But any reasonable “Joe Manager” that hasn’t figured out it’s a bigger waste of time, money and productivity to try to do something in-house without equipment, without proper software, and especially without people that have the know-how, should’t be managing people and departments.”

I continue to be AMAZED by the fact that sooooo many “managers,” owners and others in business simply can’t think this through until it smacks them in the face. And as ridiculous as it is for video, it’s even more nuts for web development.

I’ve literally heard, “Why can’t we have on-line ordering easily and cheaply. It’s no big deal. I use Amazon.com all the time.”

Because, genius, Amazon.com spent over a billion dollars and a few thousand man-years getting their system to run so smoothly that you think nothing of it.

[Nick Griffin]

[Mark Suszko] “a “Kobayashi Maru test””

Jeez, Mark. You think I’m not enough of a “basement of the Science Building, 5th period A-V geek” to not know that this was the impossible test presented to James T. Kirk in… oh crap… now I can’t remember which episode it was. (Or was it one of the earlier movies?) See Mark, we’re coming from the same place. 😉

[Mark Suszko] “because training in what we do itself is a highly specialized skill”

[Mark Suszko] “You wouldn’t send your traveling salesmen to pilot school and buy them each a Cessna; you use a professional travel agent and buy them cheap airline tickets. The salesmen are there to go and SELL.”

Brilliant! And excellent answers. Or as I have been known to say to clients, “Great! Give him a stethescope and see if he can handle your health plan, too.”

My whole goal in letting this guy try and fail was to keep him from forming a relationship with ANOTHER video company. Then again, it would have been fun to see the hour long show that the hotel’s guy produced from 5 hours of his own garbage.

[Nick Griffin]

Geeee-gross. And all this time I thought “being made into worm food” meant losing the gig.

[Nick Griffin]

We had a similar situation and, so far, it hasn’t turned out well, but I’m really not sure how else I could have handled it. Here’s the story:

The training manager of one of our clients, not someone we routinely dealt with, but part of a larger organization for whom we do a fair amount of work, asked for a “bid” (whoop, whoop, whoop — danger word there) on what it would cost for us to produce a video of one of his new training sessions which would then be used to promote future sessions. It would entail us flying 3/4 of the way across the country, economy FedEx-ing lights and heavier gear, shooting for a day, two hotel nights so I could be there first thing on the shoot day and not have to red eye the night after the shoot (something, as a grown up, I refuse to do) and edit the show once home. Length was, in his mind, to be a day truncated into a hour, or so program.

Within a day of submission he said that our “bid” shocked him and he wasn’t trying to do a James Cameron movie, just a simple training video. He said that the “A-V People” at the hotel (who of course didn’t need airfare, FedEx and hotel nights) could shoot this for him for a fraction of what we had estimated. In fact they would give him an ENTIRE day for $400 plus the cost of tape. Also, he’d be there to “make sure that they were getting what he needed.”

This is the point where I tried to explain the difference between apples and oranges, but since all he could see was a number less than one tenth of mine, I adopted a new tactic. I suggested that since his organization had been such a good client over the years, he could use the hotel’s people, bring the tapes back to our place. I would set him up on one of our un-used edit systems and show him how to pick out the scenes he wanted and make a simple cuts only edit — at no charge since he’d be doing the work and our secondary system probably wasn’t going to be in use that week anyway.

Then, once he had something basic that he liked I could step in, at my normal hourly editing rate, and create some graphics, an open and close, tighten up the program and viola(!) he’d have what he wanted for his very inexpensive price. In my mind this was a simple way to maintain a relationship by being helpful and even nurturing.

Then when my training director client returned from his “successful” shoot, reality hit the fan. The hotel’s AV “people” (one guy it turns out) had quite literally “covered” (and I use the term VERY loosely) the 5+ hour training session from two fixed positions, seemingly one morning and the other afternoon, with some zoomed into CUs (most for no particular purpose), just ambient flourescent ceiling lights, and UNBELIEVABLY nothing but camera mic sound — no wireless on the presenter, not even a handheld mic lying on a nearby tabletop. He had five hours of the presenter walking around a circular set-up of desks with the adult students asking questions all of which was seen from eye level, one position at a time, with only the on-camera mic for audio in an otherwise hollow room.

Once the tapes were back at my place I controlled my urges to once again bring up the apples and oranges comparison and proceeded, with a straight face, to show my new “producer” how to load the tapes, mark ins and outs, log, digitize and then review what he had. I showed him how if he had missed something or cut something too short he could read the timecode to help him find it again and fix his mistakes. At the start of day two I stepped in to show him how he could start laying the scenes he’d selected on a timeline and move them around.

This has to have been one extraordinarily patient (or dense) man, because it wasn’t until the end of the second day that he came to me, threw up his hands and said that he had absolutely nothing, wanted nothing further to do with this thing called editing, greatly appreciated my letting him try, greatly appreciated my providing lunch and coffee and water, etc., and would pay me whatever I wanted to take over the project and save it.

I gave it a couple of days before calling him with the bad news. As he had seen for himself (still being helpful and nurturing) we had very little to work with. I suggested that an hour or even a half hour would be so deadly boring as to be highly counter-productive. Instead I proposed that with numerous graphics setting up numerous brief clips and with the addition of some punchy production music, we could make a couple minute long promo or “commercial.” This is what he opted for.

What I was left with was a client who, without my needing to say it, knew that I had been right all along, that he knew nothing whatsoever about producing video, and that I had saved his butt.

Problem is that this whole experience either frightened him so much or was so uncomfortable that even the possibility of another video for his department never came up again. Six months later he left for another job.

SO what could I have done differently? I still have the client and their other departments still use us, in fact, more than ever. Should I try to track down this training “producer” at his new job and see if there’s any chance that any of this experience has stuck. I’m all ears for the wisdom of the COW.

[Nick Griffin]

John-

I’m not too knowledgeable in such matters, but can’t see why what you proposing shouldn’t work. That said…

You really should check out the current version of Media 100. It makes it quite easy to “come home” from FCP and if you’re using an AJA card you already have the hardware side covered.

We use both FCP and Media 100, but whenever there’s a choice I’ll always start anything new in M100.

[Nick Griffin]

[Aaron Cadieux] “can the cable company deny a competitor from advertising with them?”

Maybe. Possibly they might want to but the people in a broadcast or cable organization who sell spots and the people who produce spots are seldom one in the same. And the people who sell spots and make commissions selling spots typically will have a LOT more influence over management than will the production department. So the long and short of it is yes, you probably could do this. But that doesn’t make it a good idea.

[Aaron Cadieux] “If I were to make a 30-second cable spot for my freelance videography company advertising the fact that I can produce 30-second spots for cable advertising”

I and others have written about this here before. An incredibly tiny percentage of people watching TV are the ones purchasing TV production. So why pay for the whole viewing audience when you’re trying to reach just a fraction of it? A better — and MUCH cheaper — strategy would be to identify decision makers within companies who advertise and offer them a $100 bill to watch your reel with you and listen to your sixty second pitch.

[Nick Griffin]

Ummm… huh?? We’re a bit more about the business and marketing side of film, video and other creative enterprises here than we are about regular business questions – especially one of corporate valuation. As far as alcohol products go, most of us here at the Cow are experienced with what happens after the beverage is sold. We drink it.

But, what the hell, I’ll take a brief stab at your questions.

I would guess that the best course of action for determining the value of your company would be a small-business savvy accountant. I mention business-savvy because value is a lot more than just numbers.

Regarding whether you’ll need a broker I have to believe that importing any form of alcohol is VERY complicated. Not only does each state have different laws, often counties in the same state have widely different laws. Like I said, it’s complicated. Have you considered going into the video production business? It has fewer laws pertaining to it and most places you can consume it 24 hours a day.

“Some people say that I’m superficial. But that’s just on the surface.”