Todd Terry
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COW Coin
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Fellow COW Todd McMullen would be the one to ask. Since he shoots Friday Night Lights, I’m sure he’s been in that scenario more than once.
If he doesn’t chime in, he might be away… you might be able to track him down via his “host” profile in this forum…
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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[walter biscardi] “I never order from or recommend B&H due to three horrible experiences with them.”
B&H seems to run hot or cold. People either love them or hate them.
I’ve never had anything but great experiences from B&H, and have probably spent well over $100K with them through the years.
I’ve never had trouble with returns, either, and service has always been great. In fact, they used to put a lot of their demo stuff on eBay, and their used dept manager (at the time, a guy named Marty with a very thick Bronx accent) used to call me ahead of time to tell me what was coming up. “Tought I’d tell yoouz guys what we’re about to put on da eBays, knowwhaddimean?”
But bad experiences abound, too, I think Wargo has had some (I think it was him). Never happened to me, though.
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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This doesn’t have to be complicated… it’s potentially super easy.
Just ask them.
Even though it’s not completely a pro bono job, if this organization is getting a greatly-reduced or almost-free gig out of the goodness of your heart, they should have no problem with a stip in the contract that says you own the rights to the footage.
If they aren’t willing to do that, they’re probably not the kind of folks that you want to be giving work away to anyway.
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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I feel your pain, Chris…
The closest similar thing that ever happened to us was when one of our small clients decided to try to shoot some of their projects themselves… and then called us to ask if there was any kind of gadget or something to “stick on the front of their camera” to make their video look like ours.
My smartass answer: “Yeah, there is. A sticker with our phone number on it.”
In seriousness, if I were in your shoes I would simply politely explain that training is “Sorry, just not what we do.” Which it isn’t.
To start with, they’d never pay you enough for the training to make it worth your time. Secondly, if they were swift enough for you to teach them to actually complete acceptible projects (unlikely), then you’re cutting your own self out of the loop.
I think I would just wish them well, let them falter, and wait ’til the phone rings to either “fix” this project, or hire you for the next one.
At any rate, a half day shooting plus a half day editing and cleaning up PowerPoop graphics plus travel and DVDs and the general headache of it all…. at $2K you’re giving it away in the first place. If a “very large foreign corporation” isn’t willing to pony up what is basically chump change, I’d re-evaluate whether they are worth fooling with at all.
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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Hard to say, Barrett… it just depends on the market, and the individual clients.
Sadly, MOST clients tend to shun anything too “out there.” I often watch great national spots that really went out on a limb, and wonder “Just how did that sell that crazy idea?” Crazy meaning great, just outside the norm.
Now and then though you’ll find ones that let you stretch your brain. And sometimes they are unexpected. Strangely enough, our client that allows us the most creativity is a credit union. They are a gigantic and frankly kind of stuffy financial institution, but their marketing department lets us do almost anything we please.
Couple of examples… they wanted some spots to run specifically during some of the baaaad nighttime soaps that were briefly on the CW network, and to appeal to younger people. So we came up with these purposely-bad-acting fake movie trailers, with the late great Don LaFontaine…
https://fantasticplastic.com/portfolio/downloads/fpe_spot03-highres.wmv
We also did a campaign for them where each spot had cartoony hand-drawn and rotoscoped elements.
https://fantasticplastic.com/portfolio/downloads/fpe_spot04-highres.wmv
But they are not the norm… almost all of our other banking clients (and we have several) are very stuffy and traditional.
So… to take the long way around answering your question, there really is no good answer. You just have to beat the bushes until you find a client that lets you have a little fun.
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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Decent spot. Looks good. BUT….
Marks observations are all correct….
I’ll made a couple of additions….
Not to quash creativity or rain on anyone’s parade, but this is going to be a VERY hard sell to car dealers for a number of reasons. We do tons of automotive, so we have a little bit of experience to go on here….
1) It’s not what most dealers want. Most simply want to scream louder than the other guys. Doesn’t make it good, doesn’t make it right, but that’s what most want. Like Mark said, the exceptions are high-end dealers. We actually do do some non-screamer spots (black and white, beauty shots, classical music) for Landrover, Jag, and BMW dealers, but they are exceptions (and high-end dealers are not likely to want “no credit check” type spots). Car dealers want in-your-face buy-this-at-this-price spots.
2) You are likely approaching the wrong people. We’ve dealt with dozens of automobile dealers, and invariably no matter if they are a huge dealership or just a small mom-and-pop, at least in our experience they all use advertising agencies. When we do automotive work, it is always for an agency, never for the dealer itself. So, you can talk to the dealership until you are blue in the face, but it’s their agency that you really need to be talking to.
3) Dealerships aren’t prone to wanting to do “image” spots. They almost always want a “price/product” spot with a specific offer in them. We’ve done some image spots, but they are defnitely in the small minority.
4) They won’t pay for it. Car dealers are notoriously cheap when it comes to paying for advertising production. They live and die by co-op spots…. that is, they only pay a portion of the air time and production, and their manufacturers (be it GM, Chrysler, Lexus, whomever) picks up the rest of the tab. There are VERY strict regulations and restrictions as to what makes a spot “co-opable,” and this one is simply not going to be… and couldn’t be made so.
Again, good effort, but I think this particular one is going to be a hard sell. Like Mark said, I think you are approaching the wrong type of client, because automotive is such an unusual beast.
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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[Mart Parker] “Do you edit for film-outs specifically with Canon footage?”
I can’t say that I exactly have done a film-out with the Canon footage. But I’ve cut footage for film-out that was Genesis in origin, and I used the same exact project settings and parameters for the Panavision footage that I use with XLH1 footage, so I can’t imagine why there would be any difference as they look and function exactly the same way.
Maybe some systems treat the video differently than others, I’m not sure… I can only speak for mine. I’m cutting in the PC world on a Boxx computer, Matrox AXIO LE guts, editing with Premiere Pro CS4 (probably switching to CS4 soon). We start jobs as Matrox HD 1080p Uncompressed 10-bit 23.97fps projects. Usually footage is captured as uncompressed 10-bit Matrox AVI files via HD-SDI. Occasionally though to save space on a really big project we have made the initial capture as HDV via firewire. As far as frame rates etc. go, the footage is exactly the same.
[Mart Parker] “sounds like yourself and many others have been dragging the footage into a 23.97 timeline with no problems”
Yep, do it all the time. Did it today, in fact, with no issues at all.
I don’t doubt that some people have had problems dealing with the footage, and maybe we’re just lucky or have exactly the right system for dealing with it… but it always works exactly as it should here. Knock on wood.
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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Hey Bill…
If you can afford to, I think I’d just sit tight a little bit longer, since your client is apparently dealing with the same issue not with just your check but with others. They sound like they are working on it, at least to some degree.
The canceled check business is a bit mysterious… but not unheard of. I’m in the process of buying a new house right now (closing Wednesday, actually), and one thing that I was asked for was a photocopy of my canceled earnest money check. Like your vendor, my back does not return canceled checks to me. When I called them up, they could not find any trace OR RECORD of the actual check, even though it had cleared… and even though I was able to see an electronic copy of both the front and back via online banking. So I guess weird things do happen… but at least in my case I do know who got the money, and it was the appropriate party. Sadly, not so, in your case.
Since it was technically your booboo and not theirs, I think in this case patience may be a virtue, especially since they are finally communicating with you again and seem to be working on it.
Unless you don’t believe their story, then that’s a whole ‘nuther can of worms….
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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Best to just ask them….
They can deny you airtime… but I bet they won’t…
Cable companies typically don’t like to do commercial production. They do it out of necessity, in order to sell airtime. Even with their crappy $200 spots, they are losing money on actually doing the production part… but they make it up with selling the airtime (ummm, rather, cabletime).
I’m betting the cable company would love having you as an advertiser… it can only lead to more business for them, and lessen the loss-leader production work.
We have great relationships with all of the cable systems in our region… they come pick up spots here every day, and will even refer their clients to us when an advertiser needs a production that is beyond the abilities of the cable company. Broadcast television stations do the same thing.
The only problem that ever happens is the “sticker shock” that cable advertisers get when they decide they need to move up to a “real” production. They are used to $200 spots, and learning that a slick spot from a real post house is going to require increasing their production budget somewhere in the 20x – 50x range is sometimes a surprise. A fairly large percentage of them do bite, though.
Just ask the cable company. I’ll bet they go for it.
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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[Mart Parker] “Post houses that offer film-outs LOATHE the Canon Frame mode”
Do they still? I wonder why. I frequently shoot XLH1 footage in 24f mode as well as 35mm film at 24fps… and have to say that they import, cut, and perform exactly the same, frame for frame.
Perhaps their troubles came from earlier efforts to do filmouts from Canon 24f when shot in standard def mode rather than high def. Canon’s standard def 24f footage comes in as 24fps footage but in a 60i wrapper. However, 24f in HDV mode indeed comes in as true 23.976 progressive footage… I use it in 24p uncompressed 10-bit HD projects all the time, in exactly the same setup as if I was doing a project for a 24fps filmout, Panavision Genesis footage, or if I was dealing with a 1080 digital intermediary from 35mm-originated footage.
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com