[Todd Terry]

Thanks guys…

We have custom-cut foam in most of our cases… but this was an emergency throw-it-together-on-a-Saturday deal. I was stuck with the pick-n-pluck that was in the only appropriately-sized empty Pelican that I had on hand (a 1650, I think). I’ll get “real” foam later if we continue to use this set-up, but this will have to do for now. Fortunately this particular equipment combo is likely a one-time deal.

Just as a test, I Super77’d a big chunk of the excess foam that was removed to make a hole for a camera body. After several hours, although it was “dry” it was still darn sticky… and didn’t really seem to be reducing the “pluckability” factor too much… so I think I will forego that.

I’ll just be extra careful loading and unloading the case next week… maybe it will hold together long enough to get the shoot in the can without stray cubes of foam going everywhere.

I promise a more legitimate business topic next time!

T2

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

[Todd Terry]

Website looks great.

I’d agree… lose the rate card (which is indeed way too low based on your ability… unless that is just what your particular market will bear).

I know you didn’t ask for any spot critique, but I can’t resist one… the “Luxury Granite” spot looks good enough that I would consider re-dubbing a better narrator than the original budget could afford, just for demo. It could go either way, someone voice-of-Goddy (such as Don LaFonatine, Andy Geller, Ashton Smith) or someone sweet and emotive (such as Peter Thomas, George DelHoyo). Some of those guys would actually do something like that pretty dirt cheap if it was just for demo (not broadcast)… and you’d have a great big-shot sounding spot.

All looks excellent….

T2

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

[Todd Terry]

Good advice from all… I will throw in my late two cents here…

In each of our edits suites we have a reasonably big (not gigantic, 42″) plasma monitor for clients. However the editor has LCD monitors for computer and HD, and good old-fashioned CRT for NTSC monitoring.

I find the CRT critical for NTSC, for reasons including the one that you mentioned… sometimes stuff can knock your socks off on the plasmas or LCDs, but definitely reveal problems on the CRT. But if it looks good on the CRT, it’s almost always going to look good on the others. And since we mostly do broadcast commercials, they have to look good the way that most people are going to see them… which at this point is still CRTs.

I’m reminded of a story I’ve told before… years ago I was visiting a zillion-dollar recording studio in Nashville. The audio wiz was mixing an album for some group (I don’t remember who, but somone well known). He was sitting there behind a million-dollar board probably twelve feet long, surrounded by banks of huge monitors that would make any audiophile drool. He would make countless tiny tweaks with the sliders, diffferences he could hear, but I of course couldn’t. Then every so often he would kill the room audio and reach arond to turn up the sound on a little crappy 12″ black and white TV set from Wal-Mart. I’m sure I had a puzzled look… but he quickly explained that the song had to sound just as good as possible on the TV’s little 3″ speaker, that a lot more people would be hearing it that way from the song’s video on MTV or VH1 than would be hearing it from monitors like he had. He had to make sure it was adequate for the weakest link, as well as the best one.

Sometimes CRTs are a bit like that.

T2

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

[Todd Terry]

[Rich Rubasch] “Sounds like Fantastic Plastic is raking in the dough…what a problem!”

So true, Rich, it gets so tiresome driving truckloads of cash to the bank twice a day (insert eyeroll here).

I WISH!… sadly we are more like John Candy said in Planes, Trains…, “Still a million dollars short of being a millionaire.”

Sometimes we are out shooting and I will take a look at some of our more well-heeled clients who really do practically have pipelines to the bank (plastic surgeons, cosmetic dentists, etc.), and I’ll think “I should have listened to my dad and become an orthodontist.” Wouldn’t be nearly as much fun, though.

Unfortunately I don’t know of anyone really getting rich in production. We pay the bills, pay the salaries, pay me enough to keep living indoors and funding a few foolishly expensive hobbies… but sadly there is not a whole lot left over after that. I occasionally say that I’m still looking for a rich socialite to keep me (a phrase that doesn’t seem to go over well with the old lady).

We’ve considered buying some real estate a couple of times and building a new studio… but my house is in an old downtown neighborhood in our city and my four minute commute to the office has really ruined me (spoiled, spoiled, I know). Unfortunately downtown commercial real estate is either unavailable or a bazillion bucks a square foot.

Except for that, it’s actually a great idea.

T2

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

[Todd Terry]

Without seeing your reel or any of your work, it’s a bit difficult to say exactly what you need to do or what areas you need to improve in order to give your work a “national” look… but I will take some stabs….

Firstly, is your composition, direction, blocking, lighting, and camera moves up to the level that you’d like? If not, those are all things you can work on… there are a zillion books and other resources on lighting and direction and all that…. and there’s a great education to be had in just plopping down and watching movies, television, and commercial spots all with a “How exactly did they do that?” eye and trying to figure it out. Watch a few movies or a bunch of commercials with the sound off, just looking at the visuals and watching for composition, moves, lighting, and editing.

Secondly… keep in mind that most narrative national commercials (those Chevy spots included) are not exactly shot on an XL2… they are shot on film. And while the little Canon is a great camera and a great bang for the buck, it’s still not a million-dollar Panavision, and that grade of digital video doesn’t have nearly the lattitude that film does. But you can squeeze the Canon to get out all of the goods that you can. Again, watch national spots and pay close attention to things like color timing, contrast, and saturation. Your camera is probably not giving you that look natively. Learn to emulate the looks that you want either in camera (by adjusting settings) or in post (filters and such), or a combination of both. Most likely both.

Thirdly… the vast majority of those national spots (the ones I mentioned that were shot on film) were photographed at 24fps. You’ll come closest to getting that look by shooting 24p. And, a film camera shooting at 24fps with a 180-degree shutter is going to have an exposure of 1/48th of a second. In the video world, if you want to achieve that same look your best best is a 1/48th shutter (or if that is not an available option, the nearest thing to it, such as 1/60th). Go slower than that and you will get smeared images… go faster than that and you will get a choppy stacatto look, similar to the way film looks when shot with a narrow shutter for effect (i.e., “Private Ryan,” “Gladiator,” etc.).

Fourthly… the XL2 (and any other video camera in that size range) is going to have an almost infinite depth of field. The 35mm film that you see in national commercials has a depth of field that is much shallower… the subject is sharp, but the focus on the foreground and background falls off either fairly gradually or fairly dramatically depending on the lens’ iris (f-stop) during the shot… but with your video camera not only will the subject be razor sharp, but the foreground and background are going to be pretty darn sharp, too. This makes it difficult to “pop” a subject out of the frame. Unfortunately, due to the principals of physics and optics, this is just the way it is… a camera with tiny 1/3″ sensors is always going to have a very deep depth of field, even with the iris wide open. If you want to use the camera as-is, the best you can do is use long lenses (zoom in) when the direction will allow it… that will tend to “flatten” the image but it will also give the shot a perceived shallower depth of field and might help cut the subject out of the background. To get a TRUE shallow depth of field, there are a few choices: 1) you can shoot real film (35mm for a really shallow DoF, or 16mm for a DoF roughly equivelant to what you get with a bigger 2/3″ video camera), or you can shoot with a video camera with a 35mm sized sensor (RED, or rent a Panavision Genesis), or you can 3) use a depth-of-field converter with cinema lenses attached to the front of your XL2 (this is what we do, for projects where we can’t shoot real 35mm film we shoot with cine primes and a P+S Technik converter with our Canon XLH1). There have been lots of posts and lots of threads on this subject… do a COW search for “depth of field” and you’ll get tons of results.

T2

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

[Todd Terry]

Hi Brendan…

Our little company is, and has been since its inception 11 years ago, an S-Corporation. Now, exactly why we chose to incorporate as an S-Corp, I can’t say… that was just the advice of our lawyers and our CPA at the time.

I will say that an S-Corp does have some difficulties, and we have considered converting to a C-Corp on occasion (and should probably revisit that). The biggest challenge, is of course taxes and profits. As you said, the S-Corp pays no income taxes, but the tax burden falls upon the owners (in my case, I have 80% of the tax burden and my general manager who is also a stockholder has 20% of the burden).

What we find is that at the end of the year we are spending money like crazy, buying everything we can, paying bonuses, whatever… anything we can do to get rid of “profit” at the end of the year so we don’t have a big tax liability. That’s all well and good, but it also makes January (and sometimes February) very lean and cash poor… especially since we sometimes delay invoicing December jobs until January to keep the profit off the books… which delays that money coming in even more.

Just some thoughts….

T2

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

[Todd Terry]

I’ve actually never used LightBreaks, but I’ve been making my own smaller homemade versions of them for years.

Go to an office supply store (Office Depot, Staples, etc.) and you can find packs of clear 8 1/2 x 11″ printable acetate. They are made for printing transparencies for overhead projectors.

Then just draw a black-on-white (or white-on-black) pattern (in Photoshop, or whatever) and print it out on the sheets (you use one side of the sheet for ink jet printers, the other side for laser printers).

We’ve used these with random patterns to break up lighting, and even sometimes printed clients’ logos on them to lightly ghost over a wall or other surface.

It’s super easy and super cheap to do.

T2

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

[Todd Terry]

There has be a LOT of talk on the COW lately (not just in this thread) about “Who owns the rights to this?” and “Who owns the rights to that?”

It’s hard to do after the fact, and it’s only natural that those conversations come up.

But to prevent those issues from coming up in the future the obvious no-brainer answer is to start with an iron-clad contract specifically spelling out who owns what, and what rights usages follow whom.

Then it’s easy breezy… with no fuzzy issues.

T2

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

[Todd Terry]

That’s pretty much SOP with higher-end commercial photographers… you hire them for a shoot but they still own the negs and images, unless you have made specific contractural stipulations otherwise. Then you license the specific image for a specific print campaign, or billboard, or whatever.

That doesn’t mean though that even though they technically own the images that they can use them themselves for their own use… especially if there are people photographed.

That’s similar to the way we work in our shop, too, for commercial production. A client owns the finished spot, but we own the footage. Nor can a client take a finished spot and have it recut elsewhere or reuse the footage. It’s all spelled out in their contracts. Part of that is to keep the business in house… but it is also to protect talent and keep from starting a paperwork and redtape nightmare. Say there is an actor in one of our spots… two years later the client recuts the spot themselves and airs it again. Well, then they are using more than just footage, they are using an actor’s performance that they do not have rights to. To stay legal they have to deal with the actor again, or his agent… and might have SAG/AFTRA to deal with as well if he was a union talent. Some people here might think our contracts are restrictive, but in 11 years we have never had a client question it. Only once (that we know of) did a former client use the footage anyway… one phone call got the “Oh, I didn’t know I couldn’t do that” answer. We educated them, and they pulled the footage.

I think this whole 1000-post thread would probably be a non issue if it hadn’t involved an “evil empire” like Wal-Mart, as there is aways some satisfaction with seeing the “bad guys” get what is coming to them. But of course this is NOT the right way to do that.

I’m just dumbfounded that Wal-Mart didn’t have a contract… you know they have a building full of house lawyers. Someone definitely let this fall through the cracks.

T2

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

[Todd Terry]

The M2 is a pretty decent unit, but if DC Camera has both available I would definitely go for the P+S Technik.

The rental price might be a little bit higher, but it will definitely be worth the difference.

T2

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