Todd Terry
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COW Coin
Forum Replies Created
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Two ways, really… or a combination of both.
The first option would be single-camera style, just as if one were shooting a movie. In this method you would shoot the scene in a master shot (wide shot), then the performers would do the scene again (and again and again) for your various midshots, closeups, different angles, etc.
The second option would be to do a well-rehearsed multi-camera shoot.
We did a couple of exercise videos way back in the day… and we did a bit of a hybrid. The main shoot was a three-camera shoot, with the cameras shooting both wide shots and closeups. After each take, the scene was performed again a couple of times, moving the cameras in this time for various closeups and alternate angles. Back in editing, the first three camera takes were synched up and a version was cut from that… then we went to the alternate (second and third) takes from the various cameras for other shots to augment the original cut.
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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Well we do what most people here seem to, which are approvals either in person, via DVD, or electronic files.
I’d say well over half of our clients are in-person approvals… which we encourage. We much prefer them to come here and see the cleanest version possible of their project under controlled conditions in a comfortable suite on a good big monitor. A lot of them really seem to like doing that, too… I guess it’s a fun outing from an otherwise kinda boring corporate existence.
It’s not too often, but occasionally we have gone to a client’s place to do an in-person viewing… we will take a good portable production monitor and play it off DVD.
Other clients would just rather come pick up a DVD and view it back at their place. That’s never my first choice because I know 9 times out of 10 they are viewing it on the DVD drive in their computer, not on a real TV monitor via a set-top DVD player… but that’s what some want and get.
Others, mostly out-of-towners, get electronic files… usually mediumish-resolution “approval quality” .wmv or Quicktime files. The vast majority of our projects are :30 broadcast commercials so the files are of manageable sizes. We’ve basically given up doing any FTPing, clients invariably call with “So how do I do that again?” questions. I simply stick the files on the server here and email them a link. Some clients are large enough and have enough files that they have their own folder on the server with their own name… but for onesies and twosies I’ll just put the files in a general “client downloads” folder. That folder does have a dummy index.html page in it, so clients can’t access the root folder and see anyone else’s projects that they aren’t given access too. It’s all not rock-solid secure, of course, but more than secure enough for what we are doing. No national secrets going on here. We don’t timecode burn the files or prevent clients from downloading them. In fact I encourage them to download them for later viewing, rather than eating up my bandwidth by streaming them over and over again at different times. We trust our clients, and there’s really nothing useful they could do with crappy low-res .wmv or .mov files anyway.
Works for us….
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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[Mark Suszko] “When you put literally every last item down on the bill in detail, I find that troublesome people or grinder wannabees will start to question these items point by point in an effort to whittle down your price.”
Exactly true, I completely concur with Mark.
We’ve had people do that, even though our bills aren’t super itemized. For example, we charge a certain amount for a Betacam dub or a DVD… and once or twice a client has said “Hey, that’s ok, we’ll just buy our own box of Betas and bring them to you.” We’ll explain that’s fine, if they wish to do that… but the cost per dub is still the same. The cost of a dub is not the tape stock, which is minimal… the actual cost is labor involved to make it and the use and wear on the expensive machine needed to do it.
I know of another company here that itemizes everything to death… hire them for a shoot and your invoice will even include the specific amount in feet of gaffer tape that was used. That’s just crazy, in my opinion. Not only does it give the client an opportunity to question everything and whittle down and nitpick items… but it’s got to be a massive billing headache.
Contrary to that, we have adopted very general and flat fees for almost everything. Need an edit? There’s a flat suite rate… doesn’t matter if you use all the NLE’s bells and whistles, or very few. Need a shoot?… we didn’t always do it this way but we have now evolved into a flat base rate there as well… it doesn’t matter if we are shooting DV video or 35mm film, the base rate is the same and almost all of the shoot toys that we own are included. That way there is no “I don’t think we need a jib” or “I don’t think we’ll need a dolly, how much less would that be?” conversations. The only equipment that we charge extra for are teleprompter and Steadicam. Otherwise the only itemized extras for a shoot are tape or film stock and mileage.
Obviously if we have to pay more ourselves for equipment or personnel that we don’t already have (say they need a specific makeup artist, or the shoot will require 10 HMIs and we have to rent some) then those items are charged appropriately and itemized.
I just wouldn’t itemize a credit card charge… it just looks kind of sleazy and nickle-and-dimeish. It’s certainly easy enough to hide 3% in a bill… just charge a little more per hour on an item or two, or pad it into something like props, meals, or craft services. There’s nothing dishonest about it. And do that for every project, even if you don’t know how they are going to pay. If they don’t end up paying by credit card, just consider it interest on however long they do take to send you a check. If they hand you cash as the job is completed (when’s the last time that happened?), consider it your little bonus for a job well done.
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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Well, if you accept credit cards, whether through PayPal or if you have a merchant account and take credit cards directly… you are going to pay a fee for the privilege. It’s not limited to PayPal, no credit card usage is free.
We do not take credit cards, but if we did I would just eat the CC fee, just like most any other store or business does. It would be more than worth it to have the funds quickly rather than having to hound clients about paying.
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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[Steve Wargo] “I could have purchased those awards at an auction and gotten the same results.”
Hey that just might be the best idea yet. Maybe even throw in a bowling trohpy or two. I’m semi-serious, that’d be fun.
Of course with a lot of these contests (depends on which ones), that’s pretty much what the entrants are doing anyway… buying a trophy.
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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Found him… just in case anyone cares.
He is Bill St. James, lives on Cape Cod.
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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I second my colleagues’ opinions… this sounds like a case that calls for LED lighting.
However, as Gary said, “they need to be rentable.” I’m not sure how big a rental market there is for LEDs just yet… I do know that neither of the grip/lighting houses that we use stocks them yet. I’m sure they will in time, but not at the present.
If you want to go flo, there are a couple of Kino models that could work, the Kino 12v Single and the Mini-Flo both operate off 12v. I’m not sure if they will give you the punch you need though.
Are you shooting this project while the boat is at sea (or lake or ocean or whatever)? If you are shooting it while docked (which would be the easiest way, I would think), surely there is at least 110v shore power available.
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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Chris very aptly pointed out a couple of problems with awards, which seem especially common in the ADDYs…
[Chris Blair] “We’ve found the addy’s (in our area at least)to be poorly juried”
You got that right. ADDY judging panels are historially print heavy in virtually every region and district. In our area, it’s common to have a panel made up entirely of people in the print industry, none from electronic. I wasn’t invovled myself last year, but our company’s GM was an AdFed officer and sat in on the local judging… just of one note, when they got to “web and interactive” categories the judges summarily and immediately dismissed any website entry that used a blue color scheme no matter how slick, inventive, or creative the site was… simply because one judge “didn’t like blue.”
[Chris Blair] “TV categories make no sense.”
Again so true. Although there are usually something like 80+ categories, because most of what we produce are :30 broadcast commercials, it’s not unusual some years for every single one of our entries to be in the same category… something like “CATEGORY 42B, TELEVISION, LOCAL, SINGLE, :30, $5000+.” So not only are our spots with little $8-12K budgets (on average) competing with productions costing several times as much… but we might have 15 or 20 entries that are basically competing against themselves.
We have found the ADDYs can be a good opportunity to schmooze clients, some winners like to be invited to join us at the ceremonies… a chance to get dressed up and rub shoulders with the creative set.
They can also be an opportunity to have a little fun. Two years ago although we had a bunch of winners we just really weren’t in the mood to attend the ADDYs, so we decided to make ourselves get in the mood. We took down everyone on our staff’s suit measurements (there’s only five of us), and I went on eBay and bought five horrible 1970s-era vintage tuxedos which we all wore to the show. It made a splash, and turned dull into fun.
Every year we say we are not going to do the ADDY thing anymore, but we keep doing it. And like Rich we have produced the big-screen show a few times… and that leads to recognition which can be useful. A couple of years the ADDY shows we produced won local and district ADDYs themselves the following year… which I always thought was a bit odd. Kinda like when they award an Emmy to last year’s Emmy awards show. I always thought that was a bit funny and twisted.
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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We enter awards… but only the AdFed awards. I don’t care much for those vanity awards contests… your entry fee is pretty much just buying you a trophy.
We enter the ADDYs for two main reasons: Firstly, to support the AdFed of which we are members. But more importantly we enter because the audience at the awards show is made up of our clients and our potential clients… who get to see our winning spots up on the big screen. That’s the only really useful part.
The awards themselves are just pieces of plastic that go in the closet.
Slightly funny story… when we moved from our old location into our present studios, a big pile of ADDYs were deposited in our new lobby, just in a heap in the corner. Unfortunately they ended up staying there for two or three weeks before we got around to putting a few of them up and carting the rest to storage. A client visiting one day pointed to the pile on the floor and said “Hey, I really like that… it says ‘Hey, we win lots of awards, but we don’t really care about them.'” I thought that summed it up pretty well.
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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Hi Dan…
Yes, we indeed attend. It was an interesting experience.
It was a very small show as expected, and probably only a couple of dozen vendors… but the attendees were exactly the kind that we were trying to hit.
I don’t know if anything will come of it… we made a lot of contacts and gave out a lot of demos and had a lot of visitors. One advantange of the small show was that we were able to meet with probably every single registered attendee. We didn’t exactly sign up anyone for anything concrete… but a large number of them have big 2009 first or second quarter projects that have promised to call us about. We will touch base with them again before the end of the year.
It was a bit of a whirlwind… after committing to go to the thing we had to update our reel, burn a bunch of DVDs, produce a loop demo, and build a booth… which was starting from scratch since we had never even thought about attending a trade show before.
I was pretty proud of our booth itself which was quite a success, and one of the more notable things of the whole show. Every single other vendor had just the usual boring standard “pop up” variety booth. We tried to make ours a bit more fun, turning our 10×10 space into more or less a small living room right out of “Leave it to Beaver” or “I Love Lucy” in keeping with the very retro look that is the trademark of all of our company’s graphics. We did buy a cheap used fold-out tradeshow popup off eBay which formed the “back wall” of our “set,” but then tricked it out with a bunch of big fun graphics and a few pieces of vintage furniture that we stole from our lobby and conference room (small sofa, coffee table, end table, couple of lamps). A demo loop was playing on a 42″ plasma monitor, but we built a facade for it so it looked like an old-fashioned console TV. Tons of people dropped by just to sit on the sofa and have their pictures taken, which was pretty funny.
One of the side benefits of the thing was that we got a good demo reel built. Much like the cobbler whose own children have shabby shoes, our reels were always in need of updating… and this forced us to do that and really do it right. Peter Thomas did a narration track that tied different pieces of it together, and I think it really helped to have a well-known and great-quality national voice like Peter’s on it…. give it some legitimacy… ha.
It remains to be seen if any of it pays off. On the upside, it was a cheap show. Even with show registration, travel, hotel, expenses and all… we probably didn’t spend more than $5K or so on it. So if we get even one little job out it will have been more than worth it. If not, at least it was a bit of a learning experience.
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com