[Todd Terry]

I’m mobile on location right now, so can’t see the video… but I can certainly imagine what it looks like.

Search “tilt-shift lens” and you’ll find all kind of info. The tilt-shift effect is exactly what you are talking about, it can be done practically with a tilt-shift lens, it can also be simulated in post by selective focusing and blurring.

T2

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

[Todd Terry]

The handheld “hyperlapse” portion was no doubt stabilized in post. Or rather than stabilized, it was probably assembled by hand in post frame-by-frame from a series of stills.

Sounds tedious… but not really. While some of the conventional timelapse shots are longer, the hyperlapse shots are actually really short, only a second or two… maybe three at the most for the longer ones. If you get in the groove it wouldn’t take very long to align/fix 48 frames at a whack in After Effects… or even as Photoshop layers.

T2

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

[Todd Terry]

[Greg Ball] “if necessary he is willing to sign an indemnification releasing Ball Media for any liability.
“

That doesn’t fly.

One person cannot give permission to another to break the law. If that were true, there would be a lot more hitmen out there.

If I am stopped by a cop for speeding, I can’t tell him, “It’s ok, this isn’t my car, I borrowed Greg’s. Here’s his note that says it’s ok for me to speed. If you have to write a ticket, he says send it to him.”

Don’t do it.

T2

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

[Todd Terry]

[Stephen Smith] “I think overusing or misusing a technique can be applied to a lot of things in our industry. “

True.

I think there was a couple years during the early 90s where every single shot I set up was a Dutch angle. Looking back at archives, you’d think every scene I directed was in a Batman villian’s hideout.

I’m guilty of that a bit today with curved sliders, too.

T2

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

[Todd Terry]

It’s a very good looking setup.

But not a hard one at all.

The key light could be something as simple as a single china ball hung above the table just out of frame. I’ll note that the light on Lucas is pretty flat (the key is hitting him straight on), whereas it is not quite as flat on Cameron… he is obviously a little to one side for it. That could have been on purpose, or he could have simply shifted his chair a bit.

The lens flares couple be real and practical, or might have been added in post. The have a little bit of a Magic Bullet look to me, which makes me think they might have been a post effect.

And yes, as Stephen pointed out the camera moves are just slider or dolly moves on curved track.

For a similar setup that looks great watch David Letterman’s interviews on his new Netflix series. The lighting (lots of backlighting) and camera moves (lots of arcing dolly moves) on that show are brilliant, giving a real dynamic feel to what is basically two people sitting still on an empty stage.

T2

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

[Todd Terry]

Hey, sorry for the slow response…

[paolo drusi] “You mention that you assume that I’m intending to shoot at 60fps with a 1/180 shutter speed. I’m actually intending to film 60fps with a 1/120 ss”

No, I said you’d be shooting 60fps with a 180 degree shutter, not 1/180th. A minor but important difference. A 180° shutter means that in the equivalent of a film camera (which would have a rotating mirror shutter) where the shutter is 180° a disc-shaped rotating mirror that is cut exactly in half … that is, it exposes the film for half the time during each advance of the film, and blocks the film for the other half. Ergo, shooting 60fps with a 180° shutter yields an exposure time of 1/120th of a second (a “normal” shutter speed being the equation “One over twice the frame rate”). In the same vein, shooting 24fps with a 180° shutter gives you a shutter speed of 1/48th of a second.

In hindsight, I probably shouldn’t have even mentioned the degrees… that was probably confusing. That was the old film guy in me coming out. While many digital cine cameras (such as my Canon C300PL) will let you set shutter speeds in degrees, most people prefer to set them as fractions of a second.

Sorry for the confusion….

T2

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

[Todd Terry]

You do have to make a little bit of a deal with the Devil though, if you want to do political.

I’m firmly entrenched as one of those “liberal media” types, and while I’m not jammed up as far left as you can go, I do certainly lean that way. A “moderate Democrat,” I guess you’d say.

Yet, I live in a virtually 100% Republican state (with the exception of our new Senator Doug Jones who beat accused child molester Roy Moore… barely), the Democrats barely even bother to field candidates in many races here, so we do find ourselves often working for people who don’t have the same beliefs and values that we do. Is that hypocritical? Maybe, but there are degrees of it, I guess. I’m reminded of one of my favorite exchanges from “Mad Men” where Don Draper was asked “How do you sleep at night?” His smug answer… “On a bed made of money.”

We do like working with candidates that we like though, and we like for them to win as well. We’ve been pretty lucky on that.. last go-’round we worked on 11 races and almost all of them were likable people…and fortunately 10 of them won. The one that lost… well, we knew going in he didn’t have a snowball’s chance anyway.

I think though there was only one time that we worked for a candidate whose platform I just could not stomach, that made me almost ill to even be around him. Why did I do it? Because his polling numbers were in the dumpster and we knew he did not even have the slightest prayer of winning. Being a pre-determined loser and a vile human being to boot, I took great satisfaction in taking as much of his money as possible. 🙂

T2

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

[Todd Terry]

Despite Mark’s excellent suggestion, that does beg the question… what do you guys do with old editing systems, or computers in general? How do you dispose of, liquidate, or find new lives for them?

I’m almost embarrassed to admit this, but this is our 21st year and we have never gotten rid of an editing system here. In the studio behind the cyc are bunches of deep shelves (I call them the bunk beds), and there are all the old editing computers… lined up in a sad lifeless row.

I even have the very first system that I started with. It was the size of a small refrigerator, cost four times as much as my first car, and had a whopping 15 gig hard drive that even high-end computer geeks would come in and literally marvel at, slack-jawed and eyes agog at trying to conceive of something so huge… like it was a Cray Supercomputer or something. Times have changed. Actually, I’ve hung on to that computer for forever because it was a DPS Perception-based system which used a really crazy setup (it renders AVIs that actually only contain audio and pointers to the actual video frames which live on a separate RAID in a very proprietary format), and I would need that if we ever needed to restore any projects from “back in the day.” So far, of course, we haven’t.

But it could happen… a couple of weeks ago I got a call from an old client that I literally do not remember. At all. None. I didn’t recognize their name in even the faintest way. They were wanting to update a commercial spot we did for them with a new logo. They sent me a low-res version of what we had produced for them. I do not remember it at all. I have no memory of producing it, directing it, or being on location when it was shot. We looked it up, and it was from almost 10 years ago. So old stuff does come back around again.

This is why our props and costume rooms look like an episode of Hoarders. But with less organization.

T2

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

[Todd Terry]

What Mark said… times two.

Here at my place we love politicals for a couple of reasons. Firstly… they pay fast. You never have to wait 60, or 30, or even 14 days to get paid. Because of election law requirements campaigns always try to clear their books as fast as they can and have no current outstanding bills, so the money always comes quick.

And secondly, and this is the important part, they don’t care what anything costs. Especially when races are tight, and the closer and closer it gets to election day, campaign frugality absolutely goes out the window… and they are willing to pay almost any price and will practically throw money at you.

So… don’t low-ball it. Get as much as you can.

We never try to actually take advantage of candidates, but we sure make them pay every penny of what something is worth, and never low-ball a project’s potential budget, or offer any “deals.” And the rush-rates or overtime charges that we might normally overlook, well, they get looked at.

Right now political season is killing us… we’re doing production on seven or eight different races (I can’t even keep track)…. they include a statewide gubernatorial race, a US Congressional race, a couple of state senators and several local elections. I can’t even keep them straight in my head, but I’m really glad to have them. Of course, when political season is over you’ll probably hear crickets chirping here for a bit, so we have to get it when the gettin’s good.

T2

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

[Todd Terry]

Really, pay no attention to where it is used, in what market, or for how long. For something like animation, that’s really irrelevant so don’t get bogged down into trying to figure out how that weighs in… as it really shouldn’t.

Just whatever your usual hourly or project rate for a job like this is appropriate to bid… don’t get caught up in sweating the “Hey this might play in New York” drama, as that really doesn’t matter.

T2

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