Todd Terry
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COW Coin
Forum Replies Created
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I don’t know about the model number, but mine are the 15v versions.
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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I use different sizes, whichever ones are laying around… all 14.4v of course… but the most common ones I use are rated 5.9Ah 85WH
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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I have the somewhat different Camtree LED lights, with ones with the bigger LEDs (see my posts above)… but I power mine with regular Anton Bauer bricks. They originally had V-mount battery plates on the back but I switched them for AB goldmount plates since we had plenty of those batteries… and since the goldmounts are sort of the standard in our industry I knew I’d be able to easily find them if we were on a distant location without batts and had to rent them.
When I first got the lights as a test I just turned one on and waited to see how long it would take to exhaust the battery. It outlasted me though… I got bored with the test and turned it off after about 8 hours because I knew I would never need them that long. The gauge on the battery showed it to still have about a quarter of its juice left.
LOVE having to never run stringers anymore, and rarely if ever having to change batteries.
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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Yes Greg… you can go through their “stable” of talent and pick someone you like… but personally I always put out a casting call with them (they call it “Smart Cast” or something like that).
That way you only get responses from talent that fit your criteria, and who are willing to work for whatever budget you already have set.
It saves a ton of work, and I’ve never gotten anything less than excellent results.
You still have to weed a bit. If I get 80 auditions in for something, at least 20 of them will have me saying “Really? REALLY?? This is supposed to be a professional voice person?” Some of your results will indeed be terrible. But we’ve never not gotten a few great ones to pick from.
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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Well Mark that’s one of the great things about Voice123… you pay whatever you want.
You decide (and post in the details) what your project’s budget is, and if any of the voice talents are interested, they’ll audition.
Obviously you will get better results (more auditions from the quality talent) with higher budgets, but you can even post no-pay pro bono jobs and people can respond if they choose. If there is a PSA for a cause that an actor has a particular connection with, they might do it for free.
I mentioned that no-budget project before… I think I literally only had $50 to spend and I got a number of quality auditions in.
Generally though we typically offer somewhere in the $300-400 range for a local :30 and get lots of auditions at that level (generally about 100 responses).
You can choose union or non-union talent (or no preference). If you choose union, obviously that will start at scale… but we always go the non-union route. Don’t get me started on how much I hate the unions…. even though I’m a card-carrying AFTRA-SAG member myself.
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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Unless there is a very specific talent that we want to hire (i.e. Peter Thomas, Tim Russell), we get all of our voice talent from Voice123.com.
It’s awesome… and we’ve had a number of good auditions in the past from African American males.
You post your project, auditions come in, you pick the talent.
I can’t say enough good things about how well it works. If I have a mediumish-or-higher budget I’ll get tons of auditions within a day or two.
Once I had an almost no-budget project (a favor for a client, a phone message on hold). I posted the project at noon and by closing time at 5pm I had almost 50 auditions.
You will have to sign up, but it costs you nothing (the talent pays a fee to Voice123). You’ll put in your posting what type of voice you are looking for, budget, sample script and all that jazz. When the gig is finished you pay the talent directly.
It’s stunning how well it works.
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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[Stephen Smith] “It isn’t unusual to have two people sitting on the couch in my edit-bay chiming in with their opinion.”
This is precisely why I purposely have uncomfortable seating in my suite. I used to have theatre seats… vintage art deco seats rescued from a Hollywood movie palace… but they proved to encourage too much lounging.
The room looks inviting (cool lighting, artwork, client platform, phones, etc.), but my hard-as-bricks chairs now will often have a client saying “You seem to know what you are doing, I’ll be back this afternoon,” which I love to hear 🙂
I was thwarted once, though… when one agency creative director started bringing her own cushion to edit sessions. Foiled again!
Unfortunately (for him), my other editor has the vintage “I Love Lucy” couch to deal with. I love the look… but I put it upstairs in his suite to shift the camping out elsewhere.
I by far do my best (and fastest) work alone… and my other editor would definitely say the same. I don’t think he likes it when I barge in myself.
As we (sarcastically) say here, “There’s nothing better than art by committee.”
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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This is much more of an editing/compositing question, and really doesn’t have much to do with cinematography (since the footage is already in the can), so if you don’t get an answer here you might ask in one of the editing forums or one for the particular editing platform you are using.
Keying in a situation where you have green spill can be super tricky, and you’ll be a little bit at the mercy of the sophistication of whatever keying software you are using.
KeyLight in After Effects would be a good place to start, it’s definitely one of the better key options that’s readily available.
One option is to do some really extreme color correction your footage… playing with brightness, contrast, saturation… until you are able to get a key with clean edges (even if the footage looks terrible itself, but keys cleanly). In that case you can use that key to generate a black and white key mask that you can then use as track matte key with your normally-color graded footage. You might still have to do a fair bit of garbage matting and maybe even some rotoscoping… but it can work.
If that can’t get you where you need to be, you’ll likely have to move up the food chain a bit to something like Ultimatte or other very high-end solutions. In that case it’d be likely best to farm your composite work out to a post house that can handle it.
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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Bring me back something from the duty-free shop.
This board has been so quiet-as-a-church lately, it wouldn’t surprise me if your post is still not at the top when you get back.
Have fun!!
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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[Mike Cohen] “In the corporate/hospital world, youtube type sites are sometimes blocked”
Mike’s right… that hadn’t occurred to me. We don’t really use YouTube for clients but two of our biggest are a gigantic hospital group, and a large credit union. I now remember both of them saying that they couldn’t view YouTube videos because of internal settings there.
Also like Mike, in the distant past we also put files on our internal server here, and I wrote a custom html page to display the videos (at that time I did them with flv files). I honestly don’t know why we stopped doing that… I might revisit that idea.
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
