Todd Terry
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COW Coin
Forum Replies Created
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[Bill SerGio] “You said “Simple fact is that those “display spots” do work.. Where is your PROOF?”
Hmmm, strangely enough I don’t feel any real compulsion to provide you with any.. However… chiefly my proof is dozens of clients that use them successfully every day, that credit the success of their businesses to them, that see real tangible spikes in sales when they do advertise, and definite slumps when they do not.
[Bill SerGio] “Advertisers are finally getting smart and realizing that spots are worthless”
I guess that explains all those two-minute blocks of dead air that permeate television programs. How much again did they get for a :30 spot in the Superbowl?
I have no doubt that I could find “proof” (some kind of demographic studies or what ever) that “display spots” work, but I’ve got no interest in doing that and shall not bother… infomercial zealots are welcome to think as they please. The people that matter to me, my happy clients, already know they work.
It makes no difference to me if you think that spots are a waste of money… my efforts to contradict it thus far have only been to prevent the possibility of anyone else buying into this bunk. You can drink the “infomercials are the only smart advertising” Kool-Aid all you like, I’m aware I won’t sway your steadfast “spots are worthless” opinion. I don’t spend too much energy trying to convice doubters that the moon landings were real or that pro wrestling isn’t legit, either.
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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I certainly understand the infomercial theory as Bill has laid out…
But to contend that clients like Pepsi and Coke are throwing their money away on “display spots” is an asinine assumption.
(By the way… I’m guessing that is a well-known term in the infomercial world, but despite a couple of decades in the business and 11 years as creative director at my own shop I have never heard the term “display spot.” Thinking I must be crazy I called two Creative Director buds — one at a BIG agency — and they had never heard the term either. Display ads in print, sure, but never heard it in TV. But I will use it in this posting for clarity’s sake.)
Simple fact is that those “display spots” do work, and can work very well if effectively created and placed well. Coke, Pepsi, GM, and a thousand other big advertisers would not be spending billions of dollars a year on them if they didn’t.
Before we moved into a bit more high-end stuff, our little company started by doing price/product “display spots” for grocery store chains throughout the southeast. Yes, those gawd awful spots. Yes, I fully realize they are barely one click above infomercials on the advertising food chain and they certainly never “make the reel,” but they enabled us to start our company and get us to where we are. But the surprising thing about those spots is that they work. Advertise frozen pizzas at a “special price” (which might not be all that special) one week and they might sell 150 cases… as opposed to the usual 10 cases that week. I was honestly amazed to hear reports from the clients and their vendors as to how well they worked. I guess I’m a typical man… I never look at a price in the grocery store, I just put stuff in the basket… and I would never dream of driving across town to save a nickle on a jar of pickles, but apparently plenty of people do.
As for infomercials, outside the office I consider myself an “average viewer” and can’t say that I’ve ever really watched more than a few minutes of one other than for the can’t-look-away factor (“Wow, Chuck Norris’ face sure looks tight”), and never considered buying anything from one (although I was intrigued by the Little Giant ladder, until I learned the price).
But I guess infomercials do work, or they wouldn’t still be around in such mindnumbing droves.
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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[Bill SerGio] “Spots are 2 minutes or less and are a worthless form of advertising.”
Well, that’s a pretty broad and, in my opinion, completely innacurate statement.
I don’t get on a soapbox often, but I will now…
I’ve made a pretty darn decent living directing commercial spots, by this point many many thousands of them, over the past decade…. and 99.99999% of them were :30 spots. We manage to keep all our bills paid, my employees very well compensated and happy… and my clients provided with extremely effective advertising that works for them.
It all depends on what you are trying to sell. We’ve done our share of informercials, too, but they are definitely not my favorite kind of advertising. For one, the production values are typically lower. I know price ranges vary wildly, but if we produce a 30 minute infomercial for, say, $30K (an average guess for our shop), versus $10K for a :30 commercial, we are putting a lot more bucks on the screen per minute for the spot… which usually (although not always) translates into higher production values. Our profit margins are also much greater on spots than on infomercials.
Secondly, although I’m sure this is not true in all areas or for all advertisers, the potential clients that come to us wanting infomercial production tend to fall much more in the “slickster” or huckster categories than do those that come to us for :30 spots. The infomercial clients tend to want us to help them sell used cars, exercise videos, bargain hot tubs, or a variety of gadgets and tchotchkes that when you get right down to it most people don’t need. I’m not deriding them as a client… we take their money and it spends just as well as the other clients… it’s just that we tend to gravitate toward and are happier working for the type of higer-end clients that benefit best from :30 spots.
Although we do work for individual clients, the vast majority of our clients are advertising agencies… we work for probably a dozen or so of the bigger ones in our region. And I would say very few of them if any do much if any infomercial work at all… instead, :30 spots are their stock in trade. And I have say most of them seem to be rolling in the dough from those “worthless” spots.
To broadly characterize television spots as “worthless” is incredibly ill-informed.
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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[Rick Wise] “he would be “playing” to playback of his own recording”
Yes, almost always the easier way to go.
The last time I shot a no-budget music video (yeeeears ago), even though it was shot in a real recording studio, the artist was lip synching to playback of the track she had just recorded standing in the exact same spot a hour earlier. It was 3am and we only had about 45 minutes for the shoot, so we rolled playback a half-dozen times and shot it different ways… MS, WS, CU, floating around on a jib, and continuously walking around her with Steadicam. Super fast down and dirty, but I must say it all cut together really well for a pretty nice zero budget video.
Not only is using pre-recorded playback easier for about a zillion technical reasons… but you are guaranteed a good vocal performance from the artist — because that part is already in the can.
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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True HDR requires multiple bracketed exposures of the same subject… not usually suited to video unless you have a locked-down camera and a static subject, but then I suppose it is doable.
To fake it, I’d suggest first playing with camera contrast and saturation settings until you get something that you like, and then stick to low contrast scenes (I wouldn’t for example, shoot outdoors on a sunny day where you would have blown-out highlights along with black shadows that suck up detail).
Then, in post you should be able to do some tweaking (probably proc amp and color correction filters) that will bring the contrast back way up and goose up the saturation a bit.
You might even take the same clip and make two (or more) layers of it… say playing with contrast to bring out detail in the shadows in one later, and details in the highlights in the other… lay them on top of each other and image map them together (maybe a luma key using a third track of the footage but super contrasty to use as a track matte?). That might give some acceptible results.
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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[Kris Merkel] “Ocassionaly I will throw in some Value Added “WOW””
Indeed, sometimes the “value-added wow” is worth it, even if you can’t bill for it.
We recently did an industrial, and the client’s budget was about $15K shy of what they actually wanted would have cost… so we pared down the project and did a lot of cost-cutting to get it within their budget. But in the end we actually added back quite a few of the elements that we cut (those that cost only our time) simply because they are a great client and we want to keep them happy… but also because our reel was a bit lacking in this exact type of project.
In this case giving away a few billing hours helped them quite a bit… and helped us a lot more as well.
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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Thanks Dennis…
Hope I didn’t come off as a crank or a curmudgeon (I am one, of course… just don’t want to come across as one).
I am just as vigilant about praising stuff that I like, such as most anything from LTM.
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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[Nelson Row] “Why so harsh on this fixture?”
Oh god, I’ll chime in too, as the anti-fan club for those particular Lowells is far from an exclusive group.
Actually, they are great instruments if:
1) you want to bake a potato on set
2) you are curious as to what the inside of a burn unit looks like
3) you like totally uncontrollable light
4) you appreciate instruments that fall apart quickly
5) you like it when an instrument makes a comforting rattling sound
6) you like changing lamps a lot
7) your criteria for a lighting instrument includes the word “flimsy”
8) your shoot schedule includes a hour of “cool down” time before striking
9) you enjoy paying for crapKeep in mind, I’m not speaking harshly of all the Lowels, just the DP… some of their other instruments are fine. But as for the DP, I would call them a “piece of junk,” but that is unfair to all the other pieces of junk.
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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There are five of us in my little company…. three of us full-time and two others who are technically contractors (the art director and a producer) who are not here all the time…
I’d say on average we probably bill about 60-80 hours a week, depending on what’s happening. When everyone is in house, usually multiple suites are cooking at once… but if a big location shoot is going on often everyone is out of house on that, so it’s harder to bill as many edit hours (one of the several reasons that shoots are more expensive per hour than edits).
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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Well… some old schoolers (here and elsewhere) would probably say “Don’t try that” (actually, not bad advice)… but…
It can be done, and I’ve probably done worse.
Just make sure that, like all key setups, that you light your key wall and your talent completely independently from each other. I know, it’s the well-known Rule #1 in the Big Book of Keying, but it bears repeating.
Secondly, run a test or two to make sure that you don’t have any flicker problems… since the fixtures from the big-box hardware stores aren’t exactly flicker-free instruments like Kinos or electronic-ballast HMIs are. If so, it may be possible to overcome that if your camera as a variable shutter (film) or clear-scan mode (video).
But…. if you already have tungsten balanced instruments available, I personally would just pop 20 bucks for a roll of black Visqueen and cover the windows. That sure sounds a lot easier to me than buying a bunch of bulbs and rounding up shop fixtures that “kinda work.”
But yes, it can be done….
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com