Todd Terry
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COW Coin
Forum Replies Created
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[Chris Campbell] “what qualifies as a good logo?”
Well, domestic harmony would require me to say “One that is thoughtfully created for your company by a graphic designer with real expertise in logos.”
Really good logo design is a pretty specialized thing. Not every graphic designer (even really good ones) is a good logo designer. And there are some fantastic logo designers that aren’t all that great at general graphic design (although most are).
My better half Kim is a three-decades graphic designer and has created zillions of logos. She loves great logo design, and once when she found out our neighbor actually worked years ago in Los Angeles as an assistant to Saul Bass… well, I thought she was going to have to lay down and recover.
One of her pet peeves is seeing a logo designed by someone who has no business doing it, or someone doing it themselves…. or, art by committee, where she’ll create an outstanding logo and then the client wants to “pass it around the office to get everyone’s feedback”… which is fine in theory, except when that feedback becomes design suggestion feedback (“Can that line be a little thicker?” or “What do you think about Comic Sans instead of the Futura you used?” or “Can you work my cat’s face in there?”).
When she starts with a logo design job, she has a fairly extensive meeting with a client, and then has them fill out a pretty comprehensive questionnaire about their business. Some are obvious (“Are there any colors you especially like? Or don’t like?”), and others are more ethereal, in the vein of Barbara Walter’s “If you were a tree, what kind of tree would you be?” They help her figure out not only the personality of the client and business, but the moods and personalities of the customers they want to attract, as well.
Your logo should represent you and what you do… but at the same time, it shouldn’t be busy and probably shouldn’t be too literal. I had to laugh out loud one day in traffic, I was stopped at a light next to a truck from the Repair and Maintenance division of our city school system. They had a logo on the side of the truck… a logo which contained a hammer, a crescent wrench, a screwdriver, a pair of pliers, a pipe wrench, a tape measure, and about a half dozen more tools… and that’s not an exaggeration.
If you need a logo… at least consult with someone who really knows how to do it.
Know how you hate it when your clients think they know just as much or more about video or film production (or advertising, or marketing) as you do? We’ve all been there. Really good graphic artists have that same view of the logo do-it-yourselfers… with good reason.
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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[Mark Suszko] ” Or go to radio Shack, where they have wall warts with variable output from 2.5 up to 12 volts.”
Well I have a box full of those… I’ll dig ’em out and give them a look, but vast majority of the “wall wart” type transformers are well below the 5amps that these motors draw.
I’m trying to keep all of my wiring simple, though… and my control center, the Frightober Spooktacular Scare-a-bration Command Console is built in with dedicated 12v. It MIGHT be that running the motor at 12v on its “slow” speed will be slow enough for the particular effect that one is doing (the other motors can run on high speed). Or I could just pop the $25 for the “real” speed controller for this motor, but I’m trying to be very stingy at this point… I’ve spent a boatload of unnecessary money on this year’s Frightober Spooktacular Scare-a-bration (I’m determined for that name to catch on).
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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Nick is very correct, my bet is that well over half the voices on Voice123 are also on Voices.com.
I too don’t want them to cut the breaths. I’ll do that myself. In fact, I don’t want them to monkey around with the track in ANY way. I want dry totally unprocessed raw tracks. I can always DO to the track whatever I want, but can’t necessarily UNDO what they might have done. It’s like getting a haircut… you can always take more off, but you can’t put it back on.
Nick’s also showing his age (which is similar to mine, sadly) by using the term “announcer.” That’s one word, when putting out casting calls, I will NEVER use. In fact, I will always note that I do NOT want an “announcer,” I want a “storyteller” (one guy, Doug Turkel who is the voice of one of my banking clients, bills himself as the “UNnouncer,” which is pretty clever marketing). They might cycle back around again, but at least for right now the deep booming “Voice of God” type is terribly out of vogue (which is one reason you hear so many film actors doing VO these days). I much prefer to cast lighter, more natural, “guy next door” types of voices that can really tell a story. But if you solicit for an “announcer” you’ll get lots of auditions from guys who ought to step into the Wayback Machine and head right back to 1979 radio.
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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By far the best “look” will come from actually playing the footage at whatever frame rate you want the “master” project to be.
This is easily done in Premiere, I assume it is just as easy in FCP or Avid.
What I mean by that is, lets say you desire your master to be 24p… Then use a 24p project/timeline. Your 24p footage will go right on that timeline, easy breezy. Now you could just lay your 25p footage on that same timeline as well. It would play, but you might see some artifacts due to the different frame rates. So… what you want to do is re-interpret that footage so that it is playing at 24fps (actually 23.976fps) instead of 25fps (in Premiere you’d do that by selecting a clip and going MODIFY >> INTERPRET FOOTAGE >> USE THIS FRAME RATE >> and inputting 23.976).
If you want your master to be 25p (are you PAL), you’d do the opposite… a 25p timeline and reinterpret your 24p footage to 25fps.
This will give you absolutely PERFECT frame-for-frame images…absolutely no chance of flicker or any artifacts, and (depending on your machine) this would likely be realtime with no rendering needed.
Now, you might say “But my footage is playing back at the wrong speed.” True. You’d be slowing down your 25fps footage to fit a 24p timeline. Or speeding up your 24p footage to fit a 25p timeline. But the amount is miniscule… only 4%. No one would ever notice it. In fact, this used to be done all the time, in the days before 24p cameras were readily available, to get that 24p look. People would sometimes shoot PAL cameras (to get the 25fps instead of 30fps) and play it back at 24fps instead of 25fps. Several feature films were done this way, in the days before digital acquisition (and 24p shooting) was the norm.
Depending on your editing platform, that might slightly affect the pitch of your audio, but that is easily corrected.
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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Yeah it is eay enough to burn a few yourself, of course.
I hate labels, though… we buy the white printable blanks and print right on the faces. They look very professional and it is actually cheaper to do it that way than to print and stick on a label… though you do need an inkjet printer that will do discs.
Still, we have found that if we need more than just a handful it is significantly cheaper to outsource replication to DiscBurn…. when you figure in the cost of the blanks, ink, and your time.
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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Oh yeah I always have talent from Voice123 (or anywhere else) audition part of my real script.
I also request ONLY dry tracks, no processing or sweetening of any kind (especially compression). Lots of artists (especially old radio guys) want to compress the hell out of tracks and the waveforms look like they have had a severe crewcut.. I want zero compression.
I’ve also started insisting that talent do not use music beds to watermark their auditions, which some are want to do. I tell them other kinds of watermarks are fine, but never music. It colors an audition too much, and can also mask too many recording-booth sins.
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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I swear by Voice123.com… use them all the time. In fact I’m getting auditions for two different projects there right now.
I have cast dozens and dozens of projects there. Could not recommend more highly.
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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Not a digital download expert, but know enough about DVD authoring that I might be able to make a couple of uninformed observations…
If you want to electronically send someone a DVD, and retain all of its functionality, menus, etc., there are two ways to do that…
The first is to author the DVD as an IMAGE file. Then you get a single file that can be sent to the recipient, who can then use it to burn their own DVD. It is highly unlikely though that the recipient could directly play the IMAGE file, as-is, on their computer. It would require them to actually burn a physical DVD, using appropriate software, and then view it in either a set-top DVD player, or in a computer DVD drive (with the proper video DVD software).
The other way is to transfer the recipient ALL the files that make up the DVD. That would be the VIDEO_TS folder, and all of its contents. Since you can’t easily/instantly transfer a folder (only files), one way to do that would be to create a compressed file (.zip file, etc.) and drag your VIDEO_TS folder into the .zip file. Then you would have a single file you could transfer to someone, via FTP, or put it on your own server where they could download it, or use a file transfer service such as Hightail. The recipient would receive a file they could unzip and then play directly on their computer, or use to burn an actual physical DVD.
How best to transfer? I dunno… if you’re just doing one or two every now and then, you could do it by one of the three methods I mentioned above.
But if you expect a high volume of these and need to do online merchant sales and delivery of digital downloads, no doubt there are third-party companies that do just that.
Or… you could just get more discs replicated. There are companies like DiscBurn that do that (including packaging and face printing) and do a good job at unbelievably cheap prices.
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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Another thing… you say the room is small… understandable, we are crammed in small rooms for shoots all the time.
But, I got the impression that this was a fairly closeup portrait, maybe all of the baby, but not much else.
If so, why shoot in that room? Or as Mark suggested, why shoot on the bed at all?
If it were me, and I had to shoot in whatever house that was, I’d find the biggest room that I could make dark (living room, family room, whatever), strike whatever furniture I could, make a pallet with blankets in the middle of the floor, and go to work. So much easier when you have plenty of room to play with.
It’s sometimes easy to get confined in thinking (a baby on a bed is naturally in a bedroom, right?), but no viewers will know where that baby/”bed” actually is. It could be in the middle of the backyard at night for all anyone knew. We are always shooting things that appear to be one place but are actually somewhere completely different… it’s just part of showbiz.
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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Well… that device is for holding a mic boom. You might be able to figure out how to make it workable with some spring clamps or something to hold foamcore.
What you really need is what’s called a “Duckbill clamp” or a “Quacker clamp”… which is essentially two pieces of sheet metal welded to a pair of vice grips and a baby pin… that’s the “industry standard” piece of gak for holding foamcore.
I made this one myself, but we have some of the “store bought” ones as well. Matthews makes them, some other grip companies might as well.
You can also just “pinch” the foamcore in a grip knuckle without using a clamp, but it doesn’t give you quite the control of a real clamp.
However in the case of shooting a baby on a bed, I’d probably just prop the foamcore up on the bed with something… easier/faster/cheaper than doing it any other way.
And certainly put sandbags on those C-stands (you drape one over the highest of each leg) especially if you have gear hanging over something valuable… like a baby. Or a dog.
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
