Todd Terry
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COW Coin
Forum Replies Created
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Loss or theft of gear is never mentioned in our contracts… the producer is responsible for his stuff; I’ve never heard of a producer attempting to stick a client for stolen gear (unless for some reason the client somehow facilitated the theft).
Good luck with the airlines… they have surprisingly limited liability when it comes to losing stuff. You would likely never get back anywhere near the actual value of expensive equipment that was lost or damaged.
To that end, we almost never fly with our gear unless we absolutely have to. We almost always FedEx everything. We have a number of cases that are dedicated just for shipping our stuff (and of course insure everything out the wazoo). We FedEx it “hold for pickup” to our shooting destination, get off the plane, then go to the FedEx office and pick it up. It can be pricey, but I have never even once had a problem with gear being delayed, go missing, or finding something broken… which is something I can not say about the airlines.
If you can arrange your shooting schedules so that you do not have a local shoot immediately prior to (or right after) your distant location shoot, you can FedEx 2-day or 3-day and save a lot of shipping costs as well.
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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Well, it will probably make the real high-end DPs in here cringe, but I made several fixtures that were pretty similar to this, but just kicked up a notch or two.
We took the same cheap $15 “shop lights”… and first drilled a hole and put a 5/8” post through the back so they can be attached to an ordinary grip head. We also swapped out the ballasts for flicklerless ballasts (and a couple have dimmable ballasts), and added switches to them. Lastly, we painted the exteriors flat black so they don’t look quite so “homemade.” We also bought the clear protective sleeves so that if a bulb breaks there’s no problem. Tubes are available in a variety of color temps.
And, gotta tell ya… although the workmanship is not quite as nice, in practically they get the job done almost as well as my real Kinos… at about 1/10th the price. Whenever I get around to making eggcrates for them (a future project, when the mood strikes), I’m betting they will work as well.
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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My first questions would be: 1) how long does this effect last, 2) is it confined to the areas inside the frames or does it bleed across the frame lines and onto the film edges, and 3) when it happens is it only at the beginning and/or end of a take, or might it happen in the middle of a shot as well?
What you are seeing there is obviously film fogging… although without a little more info I can’t tell exactly how the fogging happened or what it looked like. It could have occurred as the camera motor was ramping up or down at the start/end of takes, it could have occurred when changing lenses, or it could have happened when the film was out of the camera (being loaded, etc.).
I have done effects like these electronically in the past, but I have never run across a single plugin that would do this exactly. I have usually done it with a variety of filters, etc., usually tweaking brightness/contrast/hue/saturation and a few other things and changing them throughout time to create the proper look.
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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I don’t there is really one right answer… it just depends on how your business is set up and how you like to work.
We have a couple of land lines at our place as well as a fax line (yes, still a fax line… some people still insist on sending faxes). There is one published number, and if the first line is busy an incoming call rolls over to the second line, and so on and so on.
Although all of our crew has company cell phones we don’t publish the numbers (although most of our clients have them). Usually if everyone is out of the building it is because we are on a shoot… and we don’t like incoming calls busting takes or tying up someone who is trying to shoot, etc.
We do however have the phone system set up so that if everyone is out and an incoming caller leaves a message, then the system will call one of our cells and alert us to that… so that we can quickly check it and get back to them immediately if it is urgent.
If I happen to be in house, given a choice I much prefer to talk on a “real” phone via a landline than a cell phone any day (but then again one of my tired catchphrases is “We prefer the rotary phone,” a line I stole from a greeting card with an elderly couple on the front). If I get an incoming call on a cell, I can’t transfer it to another suite upstairs, etc., if the call really isn’t for me. I’m old fashioned enough just to like a heavy handset and a corded phone when possible.
That being said though, when I am home the cell is the only phone.
Different strokes for different folks.
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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Hi Bob…
I’d suggest that you conduct some tests quickly…
With a “real” net scrim you shouldn’t have to worry about wrinkles much. They are frequently folded, rolled up, or even wadded up and survive just fine.
I have actually used window screen myself back when I was a little more do-it-yourself inclined (I’m tired now). It works, and works well. BUT, it’s not going to travel well. You can’t fold it, or wad it up… you will bascially have to roll it up to preserve it.
On the upside though, a roll of black fiberglas (yes, you want black) screen door material is available at places like Lowe’s or Home Depot for about eight bucks (I haven’t used it for photo use in years, but as luck would have it last week I did have to repair a screen door). Depending on where your documentary is traveling (is it domestic?) that’s more than cheap enough to buy on location, use it, ditch it, and pick up another roll at the next stop if it proves to bukly to travel with on a lean mean run-n-gun shoot.
My biggest concern would be your deep depth of field. I almost always shoot very shallow DoF so it’s not an issue, but the deep DoF will be as you do not want the scrim within the focus plane. It must be soft for the effect to work. In this case the screen door stuff might actually work better than real scrim (sharkstooth or whatever) because the weave is so much tighter on the screen door material. But again, it must be out of focus… if you have to use the Z1 with the stock lens I bet you will have to position your camera fairly far from your subjects and the screen fairly far behind them, and zoom in to properly frame.
But… it’s cheap to test. If I were in your shoes I’d head to the hardware store to buy a roll and set up some test scenarios.
By the way, you can also use the screen door material in an overhead butterfly if you want to cut sun intensity but not cut shadows and you don’t have, say, a real Matthews quarter-stop silk on hand. If it is far enough above your subject you won’t see the weave pattern (if it is close, you will). But resist the urge to use this setup with an artificial lighting instrument… the fiberglas screen is fairly low-temp flammable, and has a coating that will start to smoke and burn off in very short order (something I foolishly tried a zillion years ago).
Good luck!… let us know what you come up with.
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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Hi Jim…
We normally shoot with XLH1 as our primary camera… but we do happen to also own an HV20.
We bought the HV20 mainly as a crashcam, for B-cam use, and for tight spaces where the XLH1 wouldn’t fit (the H1 isn’t that small, plus we put a big Anton-Bauer brick on the back and a lens converter and some fairly big lenses on the front… and the result is a bigger-than-Betacam camera so sometimes we need something small).
In actuality I also got the HV20 simply because it seemed neat… and I wanted a new little toy to play with. But I have actually been fairly amazed with it. For its almost throw-away pricetag it actually puts out a really amazing picture. I would say that its biggest flaw is that lack of a total manual mode… but fortunately it is possible to “trick” it into working as more or less a manual camera.
Its full “idiot” auto mode, however, does work surprisingly well… and that might be very helpful if you plan to put it in the hands ot novice shooters to record their own footage.
It is what it is… it’s not a professional camera, it is of course a handycam for recording birthday party home movies… but it happens to be a handycam that can record some unbelievably good stuff. Considering how cheap it is and how easy to use, I think it would be a good choice for the application you describe.
And, back to your original question, it does intercut with XLH1 footage very very nicely.
Good shooting!
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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Philco Predicta…. nice, Rennie, I’m a big fan.
We have a 1959 Predicta in our lobby, you can barely see it here in this pic on the extreme right side (sorry, small pic from our webstie)…
Does yours still work? Ours works with actually a halfway decent picture… we used to keep a loop of an old Rat Pack movie playing on it, but it gets hot enough to fry eggs on the back after an hour or so, so we don’t turn it on much.
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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[Greg Lindsey] “Can I be a run-around on a set just to see how stuff gets done?”
Well that probably won’t teach you much about the business side (probably none), but it is definitely a good way to experience the filmmaking side.
I’ve told this story many times before… but before I became a wanna-be director I was a wanna-be actor. I literally learned more about the craft of filmmaking (especially cinematography) on my first day on a real movie set than I did in four years of film school… and that is no exaggeration but is the sad but absolute real honest-to-goodness truth.
Watching real pros work is almost never a waste.
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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Well everyone has different tastes, I suppose….
Our whole place (not just the suites) is very retro-y and funky….
Most every room in our place has mostly cool/funky Eames-era furniture… some we paid a lot for, some we paid virtually nothing for (vintage Eames lounge chair in almost perfect condition that I got at Goodwill for 10 bucks… probably worth a couple thousand).
In the suite I normally work in, the artwork is large black-and-white prints (one aerial shot of the NY skyline taken in the 1940s, and a nighttime shot of a very cool 50s era diner)…
Adjacent to the client seating area is a gigantic seriograph print of “Palm Springs after Dark” from the artist Josh Agle, who paints under the name “Shag”….
I use to have real theatre seats in this suite (great art deco seats that were rescued from a Hollywood movie palace), but they proved cooler in theory than in practicality… so we ditched them.
Our other main suite also has black and white prints, a big vintage funky Curtis Jere wall sculpture (very “Bewitched”), and a great client couch that we rescued from a thrift store that should have been in Ricky and Lucy’s apartment.
Lots of Lava Lamps, etc. too.
But that’s all just our (well, mostly my) personality. Your space should reflect who you are, but still professional and workable. If you are going to spend a good deal of your waking life there, it should be a place that you want to hang out in.
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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[Steve Wargo] “having been stung by B+H, we don’t shop there”
Wow, I agree, that’s surprising…
Just goes to show you can get bad service from anyone, on occassion. I’ve probably given B&H probably pushing $200K of hard-earned cash over the last decade or so, and have never gotten anything but outstanding service from them.
For a while they were putting a lot of used/demo stuff on eBay, and I was buying so much of it that their used manager (a gruff yet friendly fellow named Lou with the thickest Brooklyn accent yooz ever heard) used to call me up out of the blue to let me know what was coming up…
Always found them to be pretty good folks. Maybe not the best prices (sometimes yes, sometimes no) but always have most everything in stock and are easy to deal with.
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com