[Todd Terry]

Mark said pretty much exactly what I was thinking… except one of us was too lazy to write it all out, and one of us wasn’t.

I’d forgotten what a producer I knew years ago said about on-screen phone numbers… he said instead of the actual number you might as well just super “Hey, we have a phone”… because that’s really all it means. No one actually gets the actual number (except for Mark standing by with his clipboard).

Again, I think it all comes down to educating clients about what is useful and what isn’t. And I always preach to try to narrow down your info to one message if possible. Actually getting it to one is darn hard and usually a battle, but it’s a good goal. That extra info (like a phone number) just dulls the overall message.

We have two basic kinds of commercial clients… advertising agencies, and the rest who come to us directly. Most of our agency clients are good/smart enough to know what works and what doesn’t. It’s those individuals who hire us both as a creative agency and a production facility that usually require some educatin’.

You can’t win them all though, no matter how hard we to try to, as I said above, help a client have good taste. We have not one but two disparate clients who insist their dogs appear in their spots… for businesses that have nothing whatsoever to do with dogs, nor are they utilized in a clever method or even in any way that makes sense… they’re just stuck in there, that’s what they want.

I want to quote them a bit from one of southern comedian Ron White’s routines, where he says… “I’m a dog lover, I love dogs. Well… I love my dog, I don’t give a sh*t about yours.” But we know that argument would fall on deaf ears. We plop the dogs in, take their money, and move on to clients who do listen and let us do good work.

T2

__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com

[Todd Terry]

Your opinion is, in my opinion, not wrong.

I’m of the opinion that a phone number in a television commercial is a total waste. Unless you are specifically telemarketing something, or unless you’re advertising one of those mattress companies that has a jingle that sings the darn phone number over and over again… then no one ever gets a phone number off a TV commercial, especially for a “regular” business.

But… it’s a losing battle.

Clients often want (or insist) on phone numbers, and we give them to them. It’s their money.

I’m often reminded of Carrie Fisher’s great line to Bruno Kirby in “When Harry met Sally” when she said “I’m just trying to help you have good taste.” Part of our job is to help our clients have good taste, help them implement marketing ideas that actually work, and create good effective advertising.

We’re constantly trying to “guide” our clients in the right direction, and help them learn what should be in a TV commercial and what shouldn’t. Sometimes it’s hard because you want to yell “Nobody wants to see your kids,” or “It doesn’t matter that you’ve been in business since 1978, that’s not what’s will bring people in the door.” But you can’t scream too much.

We do tons of health care advertising (several medical practices, a couple of large hospitals, numerous dentists, a couple of cancer centers). It’s taken a long time to educate doctors that their potential customers (and that’s what patients are, customers) don’t want to see anything scary or “medical.” We have to plead with them don’t show a patient in an operating room, don’t show a dentist with his hands in someone’s mouth, don’t show someone strapped into some scary medical apparatus… all of which invariably seem to be their first thoughts as to what they want seen. So we try to educate them… there’s a reason that pharmaceutical companies show nice slice of life footage, not patients going through scary drug trials.

Same deal with phone numbers… we try to educate, then eventually beg and plead.

But, at the end of the day, it’s their money… and sometimes they want what they want. The customer is always right, even when they are wrong.

In those cases, we put the phone numbers on, cash the check, and move on.

T2

__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com

[Todd Terry]

Excellent, excellent.

You know, we don’t have any printed collateral at all. I originally started this company 16 years ago pretty much to serve one client and one existing big contract at that time, so I didn’t even have business cards for three years. Which could sometimes prove embarrassing (mock looking through wallet: “Shoot, I must be completely out of them.”).

I have mulled over creating a nice brochure, though. I’ve said to myself several times that whenever she has some down time I’ll put my art director on it (she’s the print expert here, the rest of us are clueless about anything that goes on paper). So far she’s been way too busy, though… plus the combination of me being too lazy to write it. Probably a smidge more of the latter.

Ned’s story has me a little more motivated to get on it, though…

T2

__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com

[Todd Terry]

Yeah it makes my head hurt.

We did one of those “sidewalk perspective” things a few years ago… or at least tried to… and it was wildly difficult and was still only 1/1000th as complex as that Honda business.

We were doing a corporate video for a shall-remain-nameless Fortune 500 company headquartered in our town. The video had a drawing/crayon/chalk theme running through it (we still have a bunch of giant five-foot crayons in props). The idea was to do a big 20-foot chalk drawing of their logo on the sidewalk in front of their building, created with a perspective which looked “right” when shot from the ground… then their CEO and about 30 employees walk out and across the logo as we crane up to a high perspective.

We spent days planning this, designing the perspective on the logo, and transferring it to the ground… then all day doing the actual chalk drawing getting it perfect and rehearsing this big crane move. Then…with all our parties in place for our get-it-right-quickly magic-hour shoot, one marketing yahoo decides to yammer on that one of the colors wasn’t exactly right, although it was very close. We tried to explain that sidewalk chalk doesn’t exactly come in precise PMS colors and that we could tweak it in post, but it fell on deaf ears. As the minor argument ensued, the bored CEO just said “Ehh just do it without the logo.” Grrrrr. No vision.

I can hardly imagine the scope of the Honda planning.

T2

__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com

[Todd Terry]

Complete awesomeness.

T2

__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com

[Todd Terry]

Well, nothing really beats flos for greenscreen work, either Kino, another brand, or DIY as suggested.

Softboxes could work, if you have a pretty large studio space and can position the softboxes fairly far away from the greenscreen (and, obviously, position them so they are not hitting your talent). Otherwise you’re still going to get hotspots, just like with your halogen worklights (maybe not quite as hot as those hotspots, but the screen will still not be even, same as the situation you had before).

I’m surprised you didn’t find the shoplight flos to be bright enough. We use those (two-tube 4′ ones) for greenscreening all the time, and ours are plenty bright. In fact, sometimes we take one tube out of each fixture because in some positions they are too bright. Maybe the lighting on your talent is much more than it needs to be?… just a thought.

As for other options, Flolight does make a single LED light just for greenscreening… I haven’t used it (or even seen it in person), but it does look interesting…

https://www.flolight.com/led-lighting/cyclight.html

T2

__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com

[Todd Terry]

OUCH!… Mark you have a DOA Joker?? Man, I’d be making some loud noise about that… sit on the vendor if you have to. The JokerBug 800 is one of my all time favorite instruments. It’s one of the most useful (for interiors) HMIs that you’ll find.

T2

__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com

[Todd Terry]

My personal lighting methods always seem to be evolving, and continue to do so.

For interview lighting, I went through my tungsten phase, and my flo phase… but now about 90% of the time I will light interviews with LED instruments (a variety of different ones). Cameras have gotten so much more light sensitive these days that where I used to heavily light, I will now light much more minimally… or do subtractive rather than additive lighting. We use the C300 primarily which has up to 20,000 ISO so battery-powered LED instruments are our go-to fixtures (and eliminates hauling heavy stingers and worrying about power sources).

I do still use HMIs though… sometimes you just need that to combat bright windows, or for exteriors to give a little pop or fill. I usually travel with at least one or two 1200w HMIs, but do find that I’m not using them as much any more.

For a rental company, obviously you want to stock the fixtures that clients are asking for… which may vary depending on where you are and what kinds of things the clients there are shooting.

T2

__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com

[Todd Terry]

Well, I didn’t make the stands, obviously… they’re just C-stands.

I’m guessing you meant the posts on the instruments which I use with stands and grip heads. Those items are all from the same hardware store where I bought the fixtures. They are just strip aluminum (inside and out), 5/8″ bolts, and washers.

The bolts that I get from Home Depot are great for making 5/8″ posts, because with the longer bolts they are only threaded for a couple of inches…the rest of the shaft is unthreaded. So you can easily sandwich the nuts/washers and attach them to your fixture. Cut off the bolt heads, and voilà, you have a standard baby pin that will fit in any grip head or baby receiver.

T2

__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com

[Todd Terry]

[john sharaf] “The best solution is 4′ Kino Flo’s set vertically,”

John is absolutely correct, as most always….

A 4′ Kino is the best solution…

However, a 4′ flo shoplight is the cheapest solution.

Some people may scoff, but we use the inexpensive shop lights from Home Depot all the time for non-critical things like greenscreen illumination or wall washing.

Are they as good as Kinos? No, not at all. But they are 15 bucks each, as opposed to $1500 for a Kino… literally a hundredth the cost. I love Kinos and for many applications I wouldn’t use anything else. But for something like greenscreen illumination, often times “good enough” is, well, good enough.

We’ve even taken a few shop lights and modified them (painted the outsides black, installed switches, attached 5/8″ posts to them so they can be used in an ordinary grip head)… and frankly they work like a charm…

They are a great alternative if you want to go the cheap DIY route.

T2

__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com