[Todd Terry]

A brilliant list of examples and suggestions by Blaise.

Which, I suspect at this point, will fall on deaf ears.

T2

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

[Todd Terry]

[ryan elder] “So are their any lights that can be bright enough for f11”

Yeah. HMIs.

Though shooting f/11 at night is madness.

T2

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

[Todd Terry]

[Stephen Smith] “Doug Liman did not have the budget he wanted for Mr. and Mrs. Smith. “

Oh! Oh!… I get to namedrop!

My set of primes was used on that movie! Well… used some. Most of that film was shot anamorphic but for some reason there was a mix and some of it was shot with spherical lenses (hard matted… I assume). Those shots were my lenses. Well… they weren’t mine then… back then they belonged to DP Bojan Bazelli. But they’re mine now. Great glass.

Anywho… Stephen is right. Maybe the vision has to change. As I’ll re-quote Robert Rodriguez for the third time in all this, “Make the movie you can make, not the movie you want to make.”

T2

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

[Todd Terry]

[Greg Ball] “…how do you folks add deposits to your contacts? “

Easiest question I’ve been asked all day.

Well, honestly, we’ve never requested or required deposits. We probably should, and might in the future… but haven’t so far.

We’re probably too trusting here, but so far we’ve been lucky. In 21 years we’ve only been stiffed on two bills, and they were very small, less than 3K. With one we eventually got most of it paid, although it took months.

The other, I never saw a dime on. And the client was my first cousin. Lesson learned.

T2

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

[Todd Terry]

Sadly….no.

T2

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

[Todd Terry]

Thanks Steve…

I was toying with the Mevo idea as a dirt-cheap solution… you can insert graphics like bugs and lower-thirds with the Mevo, but I haven’t been able to determine if you can do full-screen graphics with it.

It might be a moot point, though….

I just found a place that rents the Livestream Studio HD550 4K Live Production Switcher for a pretty dirt cheap weekly rate. It bears more investigating, but I think that will do everything we need for this event, and more.

Fortunately the company’s corp headquarters is the venue, so we can just put the onus on our client to provide us with a dedicated line of sufficient bandwidth.

It’s funny how the A/V considerations for this particular company (which is an international multi-billion dollar corporation) have changed through the years… we see so many corporations taking video work in-house these days… but these guys are just the opposite. Just a few years ago they had a multimedia department that included probably a $20M studio and had a full-time staff of probably 20 people or more and they did all of their corporate film, video, and photography in house (and did great work, not the usual in-house corp stuff). Now I think they have one A/V guy who kinda knows how to set up a projector for PowerPoint presentations in meetings… and that’s it. They still have a 10,000 square foot soundstage that rivals any Hollywood facility, with a 20ft grid and smooth-as-glass vibration-isolated deck, robotic lighting instrument mounts in the grid, three-walled hard cyc, the works…… and now it’s crammed full of boxes and unused furniture… they use it for storage. Sad sad sad.

But… at least we benefit from it since we do that work for them now.

T2

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

[Todd Terry]

Not there…. but we go anywhere.

This year we’ve headed west as far as Los Angles and east as far as Athens, Greece… and a boatload of shoots in between.

T2

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

[Todd Terry]

There’s a basic difference between you and the RR from back in the El Mariachi days, even though you both face production challenges…

Robert recognized shortcomings challenges and worked around them. You recognize them, but seem to be of the attitude “How do I make them work anyway, or have the audience not notice them?”

Too bright out and you have no ND filters? You seem ask “What is the workaround, how can I shoot it in blazing sun anyway, even though I have no ND filters (despite the fact they are easy and cheap to get)?” Robert would have said don’t shoot it that way… shoot something else, shoot interiors instead, re-write it into a night scene, or just get the dang filters you need. He would not simply try to bulldoze ahead and hope it will work.

Autofocus looks bad in your stabilized shots? RR would say, then don’t use autofocus… the obvious solution. You need a focus puller on that shot. RR would have made sure he had someone to pull focus. OR, he would have blocked his shot that didn’t require focus pulling… OR shot at a high f-stop with a deeper depth of field. Or decided to redesign the scene and not attempt to use the stabilizer at all. What he would NOT have done is say “Is there anyway to fool the audience into thinking this bad footage is actually good,” which is basically what you asked in another post.

You seem to have an overall attitude of “I know this won’t work, but how can I make it work,” or “This turned out badly, how can I salvage it?” We all have to do that sometimes, but it shouldn’t be the standard MO (which it seems to be). There’s no better way to get it right than by doing it right in the first place.

Dolly track is uneven? Don’t use it. Operator can’t make the stabilizer work? Chunk it. Blazing full sun but you don’t have ND filters? Don’t shoot then. Shoot is wrapped but focus is terrible? Reshoot it. It’s not brain surgery.

Rodriguez learned what shortcomings could be worked around, worked through, and which ones should simply be avoided by doing something else. Just because you want something to happen doesn’t mean it will. Just because you want a piece of gear to do something it wasn’t made to do doesn’t mean it will. Do what you CAN do and what your skill level and gear availability will allow… and don’t do the other. As RR said and I quoted here before, “Make the movie you CAN make, not the movie you WANT to make.”

T2

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

[Todd Terry]

Yes, that will obviously have editing issues and considerations.

And now a bit of encompassing heartfelt and genuine advice, not necessarily for this post but to you in general…

Son, if you’re gonna make a movie, you need to go out and try to make it. This constant over-analysis of every minutiae of the production process, the worrying over every piece of gear, grip, and gak, the fretting over whether this way to do something is better than that way, the constant hand-wringing…. is wildly unproductive.

Maybe it’s a fear of failure.

If that’s it, stop worrying about that and get over it because here is a news flash… YOU ARE GOING TO FAIL. That’s a given. You are obviously a newbie with little to no knowledge about how many very rudimentary pieces of film gear and processes work. There’s nothing wrong with that, ignorance is not a character flaw, everyone has to start somewhere and there was a time when we all knew nothing. BUT… someone with little to no knowledge cannot reasonably expect to go out and make Citizen Kane right out of the gate. Again… you are going to fail. So… go out and fail. Enjoy it. Celebrate the failure. That’s how you learn things…by failing the first time. The first 10 times. The first 50.

We all learn by doing, and learn by watching other people who are better than us. I’ve said this many times before, and it is not an exaggeration: I learned more about filmmaking (especially DP work) in my first four HOURS on a real movie set that I learned in four YEARS of film school. Totally true. And even after doing this a few decades now, I still learn things every day by going out and doing.

You also need to learn to have reasonable expectations not only of yourself, but the tools you use. Many of the tools you have mentioned in this and previous posts have serious limitations, especially considering some of them (i.e. Glidecam, Twixtor) are pretty low-end consumerish tools. You can’t expect them to do everything, espcially things they were not made for. In particular in another thread you seem to pretty much refuse the advice not to use long lenses with stabilizers. No matter how many times you were advised against it, you kept bringing it up.

It was a little like this fake/exaggerated conversation…

Ryan: I want this regular 100 watt light bulb to shoot real laser beams.
Us: It doesn’t do that.
Ryan: But I want it to.
Us: But, that’s not what it was made for, you need a laser.
Ryan: But my guy can’t get a laser, and there are no laser stores here.
Us: Too bad, you still need a laser. Can you rent one?
Ryan: No, I only have a light bulb, and this is what I want it to do…

You can see how that would get a little frustrating.

I’m not trying to beat you up, I’m trying to help (if you are a real filmmaker, there’s some question about that). I took time out of my Saturday to write this long response, I hope that is evidence of trying to be helpful.

NO ONE ever made a good movie, film, short, YouTube video, or whatever by writing a million posts online, self-questioning every move, and being resistant to the generous advice from older and wiser veterans. Those good movies were only made by people who actually got out of their chair and made them.

Go make a movie.

Rant over.

T2

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

[Todd Terry]

Twixtor works only so well. I would rate it as “fair” in most circumstances.

It can look pretty good on occasion, but only if you go in knowing you’re going to Twixtor footage and shoot it exactly precisely according to the requirements and recommended parameters that work best for using it.

It’s not a fix-all or everyday tool for most people, and certainly isn’t a substitute for real proper slow motion.

T2

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