Todd Terry
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COW Coin
Forum Replies Created
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I agree… stipulating that you only want to use one instrument and one instrument only yet saying that you want the “most flattering” lighting possible is a statement that is a bit at odds with itself.
However, with one instrument you can create flattering lighting, but it might not be the most flattering lighting, as you requested.
If I were limited to one instrument, depending on the size of the room I’d probably throw up a 575w or 1200w HMI into a medium high 4×4 white bounce… sort of simulate soft light from a large high window or skylight. Lord Snowden has taken countless (beautiful) portraits with just this setup (although natural light in his case).
Or…
Just put a largish very soft instrument fairly near to the subject, at somewhere between 45 and 90 degrees. Could be a Kino, a softbox, or even an open-faced instrument with an umbrella. The setting would be relatively dark and limbo, with fairly dramatic lighting on the subject. Might not be the most flattering to her, but could be interesting nonetheless.
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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I rarely use tablets myself, but our senior editor swears by his and has pretty much abandoned his mouse completely. We bought it for one particular job that needed tons of rotoscoping, but as it turns out he is now using the tablet for pretty much all computer control (I had to look for the mouse the last time I was on his system).
We got him the biggest Wacom that would fit on his desk. It’s about 12×19″ or so… I’m not sure if that is the very biggest Wacom but it is definitely one of the larger ones.
When we decided to buy him one I was surprised that they were pretty darn affordable. I don’t remember exactly how much it was, but it was in the “few hundred bucks” neighborhood… definitely less than a grand, and it seems to work like a charm.
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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Whether you are promoting dealers vs. brands can be a little sticky… and it just depends on where you are and what the competition is…
We do some dealerships (Honda, Buick, Chevy, Chrysler, Jeep) where the stores have major competition from other dealers in the area, so those spots focus heavily on the particular dealership and why customers should by from them.
Conversely, we also have some dealerships (BMW, Jaguar, Land Rover, Porsche) where they are the only game in town. In our area a potential Porsche buyer has to buy from our client or go out of town… to the next dealership 150 miles away. In that case we are a little more heavily advertising the cars and incidentally advertising the dealership.
Just a couple of other observations about car spots…
Running footage reels from the manufacturers can often be used, but the quality varys greatly. And weirdly enough, it seems that the more expensive the car, the worse the reel (and vice versa). Reels for, say, Buick or Honda… they are georgous. You’d swear Steven Spielberg directed them and Haskell Wexler shot them. But BMW or Jaguar?…hand my mother a camcorder and you’ll get better footage. And often sometimes you have to shoot your own footage. The reels are so expensive to produce that manufacturers don’t always do a new one every year… sometimes even less often than that. So often times we will need a particular new vehicle or model for which manufacturer footage simply does’t exist yet. In those cases we have to shoot our own. Fortuantely in our area we have found a couple of locations (the typical winding mountiain roads, bridges, etc.) that enable us to shoot running footage that mixes fairly seamlessly with the stuff from the manufacturers.
The other problem that you can quickly run into especially if you work for a lot of different dealers like we do is scheduling. They ALL want to advertise, and they ALL want to advertise at the same time…with new campaigns typically starting right at the middle of the month when the manufacturers release the “deal details” for the month ($5000 rebate, or 1% financing, or whatever). The problem is, that they never release these details in advance…because Chrysler doesn’t want to tip their hand to Ford who wants to keep details secret from Toyota and on and on, so you never know what you are going to need to do very far in advance and it comes right down to the last minute. We’ve probably done as many as a couple of dozen car spots in a month (maybe more, actually I think 31 was the most we ever did)… now that normally wouldn’t be a scheduling problem, but when they all have to be produced during the same week because none of the dealers can give you any advance info it can be tough to get them cranked out because there is a limited amount of pre-production that you can do to get a jump on it.
As I said, car spots rarely make the reel… but they definitely keep the doors open.
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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Hi Chuck…
I agree, it was a little confusing at first, but it’s fairly clear and simple now… this guy simply wants you to serve as his advertising agency.
At minimum that would mean that you produce his spots, that you research the market, learn the market, establish a budget for him, determine how many GRP (gross ratings points) you want to try to hit for his shows, deal with all the media sales people, determine when and where his media buys take place, and place the commercials.
He would pay you for production, and he would pay you directly for the cost of the media placement. You would make your money from the production, and from the fact that although you are charging him the TV outlets’ standard rates the TV stations and/or cable companies will be giving you “agency rates” (usually 15% less) and you pocket the difference.
If he wants to take that a step up and have you serve as his full full service agency, it would be all those things and a few more… it could extend to fully concepting/writing and implementing everything about all his campagins, not just TV but into a lot of other areas as well: radio, web, outdoor, newspaper, fleet graphics, displays, logos, signage, events, etc.
I don’t know what your experience is, but although we don’t really “talk it up” we have and do continue to do a lot of automotive work… we regularly do about 15 different dealerships throughout the southeast right now (some really good, some really bad but hey, it pays the bills)… most of them do a new campaign every month but a few of them are less frequent than that. We try to steer away from the cheesy screamer stuff and attempt to class it up a bit when we can. For example we just created a campaign for a dealer with high-end products (BMW, Porsche, Land Rover, Jag, etc.) and these spots are very copy light and free of heavy offers, all shot in black and white with a classical music track…. it remains to be seen if they work, but the client is very happy.
That being said, automotive advertising often “is what it is,” and most of our car stuff would never “make the reel.” In fact, our regular reel only has a couple of very high-end car spots on it, we keep a completely separate specific “automotive reel” for potential car clients that want to see it.
One thing to remember with automotive clients is that sometimes the money is a little slow. That’s because much of automotive advertising is co-op… the dealer gets paid back a certain amount of his advertising cost (usually half) from the manufacturer (assuming you stick to all of the company’s nit-picky rules… BMW and Volvo are especially tough sticklers). So in those cases the dealers often try to wait until they get the co-op money in hand before they pay you. So often your net-30 invoice can turn into 60 or 90. And by the way, co-op generally applies only to what you spend on media placement and not on production… so there is often the struggle with car dealers who might have very big budgets (we’ve had dealers who have spent $100K a month on advertising) but still want to keep their actual production costs as low as possible since they have to foot all of that part of the bill. We usually try to convince them that it’s better to spend part of their money to air a better spot fewer and more targeted times, than to blow all of their money on media and wallpaper the airways with a bad spot. We try to get our dealer clients to dedicate about 20% or so of their budgets to production costs, and put the rest on the air.
Good luck!
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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I can’t speak to the RCA composite connector, as I never use that….
BUT…
You CAN in-camera downconvert and get SD out of the S-Video port while simultaniously getting HD out of the HD-SDI and rear component ports… we do that all the time with our XLH1 feeding HD to a high-def LCD monitor (via component) and feeding SD to a standard-def Sony CRT (via S-Video) at the same time.
So… I would imagine that it is pumping SD out of the composite port as well. I’ll check that to confirm when I get a chance.
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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I completely agree… I’ve never ever heard of an editor in a paid position getting residuals.
Now, if you are doing the work for free (or at a reduced rate) in exchange for promises of a piece of the pie and money on the backend… then you are not just an editor. Then you are a producer who also happens to be serving as the editor.
But again, if you are being fully paid at your usual rate for cutting the project then residuals really would never be expected. Maybe the producer is unusually generous, or simply doesn’t know how the money usually works.
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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I can’t say enough good things about the jibs from Porta-Jib. They are a little bit more expensive than the ones you mentioned (the Porta-Jib Traveler that we use is about $2500, I think), but they are really well thought-out and well-built pieces of hardware.
I think one of the best things about the Porta-Jibs is that you can easily vary the length… many other jibs have varying length as well, but with most of those you have to add or remove sections… with the Porta-Jib it just telescopes in and out, so you can easily make no-tools and no-parts adjustments on the fly.
We’ve had ours for almost ten years and it’s still going strong.
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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[Mark Suszko] “some client guy looks at the rough cut and shoots it down because “it’s not like I pictured it”. Boards up front put everybody on the same page,”
Sometimes, but there are exceptions to every rule.
Last year we were doing a big (and pretty expensive) industrial, and the lady in charge of marketing at this very big company has absolutely no ability to visualize things whatsoever (how do these people get these kinds of jobs?).
She wasn’t going to be able to join us for the shoot of the biggest and most complicated scene (a “motivational speaker” type scene doing employee training in a big theatre, audience extras, custom signage, lights and smoke effects, etc.)… so it was storyboarded within an inch of its life. After the scene was cut, she said “Oh. Ohhhh. I didn’t know it was going to look like that. That’s not what I wanted at all. I thought we would just have this guy talking to a couple of people in a classroom.”
Which of course is not what she had asked for, described, or signed off on.
I could have hit her with a shovel.
Instead of that though, I just smiled and said we would be happy to do her new idea, and that the good part is that it would cost only about a tenth of the unused scene that we would be billing her for anyway.
It just goes to show that even boards sometimes can’t impart the vision.
Me personally, I usually operate opposite of Mark and Walter I guess… I never make boards unless I absolutely have to. To me the downside of them is that a client will see them and then be mentally “locked in” to that scene. And when a final product varys from the board (which it almost always does at some point), it automatically provokes the “Oh, I thought you were going to do it such-and-such way” response, even when the new idea is much better than the one on the storyboard. While I will always sort of “pre-direct” a scene in my head, my vision invariably changes once I’m on location or on set and I don’t like being locked into a preconceived notion, even if it is my own. We might do some pre-vis on something that has complex and precise blocking, but that is usually not the case.
When needed we do use a really good artist (he’s basically a comic book, oops, er, graphic novel illustrator) and he does really beautiful boards…. but I would much rather take the money that goes into producing the boards and put it on the screen whenever possible.
Unless we need them to get the job. Then we will do boards all day.
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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Thanks Rick… will do.
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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Hi Steve…
Yes, KayeLites was one of the sources I had checked (I mentioned them in my original post), but they are pretty dry right now.
And yes… I know you can edit posts (sadly, I have to do it frequently)… but it was more than an hour after I posted that I noticed my booboo, and editing was no longer available.
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com