Todd Terry
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COW Coin
Forum Replies Created
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My thanks, as well, to all those here who give innvaluable adivce on an almost-daily basis.
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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Mark…
I know DG Systems does that for advertising… a lot of broadcast stations use them to receive commercials. I don’t know if they do full-length programming as well, but couldn’t hurt to ask.
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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You’ve been given good advice.
I will second what others have said. Run, don’t walk…. away.
Your observation that “The woman was very terse, sounded demanding and somewhat haughty,” would have immediately earned my polite “We appreciate your call, but we’re probably not the best option for you…good luck!”
This client is nothing but trouble from the get-go. No one needs those kind of headaches, even if you are hurting for business. I would gladly pay your rate not to take her. Have any enemies you’d like to refer them to? 🙂
And speaking of rates… I have no concept of your equipment/capabilities/abilities/talent, but if you are halfway decent or better you are giving your work away. If you fall into the “pretty darn talented” category you could easily triple your rates. That would not be at all out of line for “small-crew-but-high-end-production” work.
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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[Nick Griffin] “With the noted exception of Todd Terry, which of you would not be ready to fight if someone, even tangentally related, came into your space using a similar name to one you had spent years building?”
No no, my comments have been misconstrued.
If someone moved in next door to me (or even in my city, or region) used my company name and was in the same business as me… then yes I would be upset and take appropriate action.
We are actually fairly vigilant about protecting intellectual property, and one of the attorneys that we keep on retainer is indeed a trademark/copyright/patent specialist.
I was just saying that like Brendan (beenyweenies), I didn’t see an obvious confusion with the Blue Cow name nor would I have made an immediate mental connection/confusion with Creative COW. Frankly, it would have never crossed my mind. Others here obviously think differently, with reactions ranging from offense to repugnantion (is that a word?).
If Kathlyn and Ron feel that their company name has been compromised (and I notice neither of them have complained about it on this thread), then by all means then they should seek relief. I’m just saying that in this particular instance if it were me in their shoes, I don’t think that the name Blue Cow would particularly ruffle my feathers…er…fur…or hide…or whatever it is that cows have.
But hey, that’s just me.
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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[beenyweenies] “Personally, if I had never read this thread and randomly came across the name “Blue Cow Creative” I would never in a million years have made the connection to Creative Cow.”
I would have never made the connection either. It’s pretty innocuous and they are pretty common words.
Duplication of words and terms in the English language is something that happens pretty frequently, there’s not much that can be done about it. My personal example, my name is Todd Terry, and there is also a well-known music producer named Todd Terry. To take one step further, my company is Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc., and one of the music groups that the other Todd has produced in the past happens to be called The Fantastic Plastic Machine. Pure eerie coincidence, but it makes for some interesting Googling and mixed-up emailing.
There’s also a British record label called Fantastic Plastic (we get each other’s email), and there used to be a vintage record store in Seattle called Fantastic Plastic (they actually had the domain http://www.fantasticplastic.com before we bought it off of them about 8 years ago). Through the last few years I’ve also seen a couple of banks and one department store run credit card promotions that they called “Fantastic Plastic.”
I wouldn’t sweat it. On the upside, Blue Cow Creative does have a very beautiful website, and looks like they do good work. If any confusion does happen, I always prefer to be confused with someone good than with some hack. 🙂
T2
__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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Office over a bar???…hmmmm, now why didn’t I think of that?
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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Working out of a home office or an in-home suite can certainly have its advantages…. but it can of course have its pitfalls, too.
My little company has been around for ten years now, and for the first year of that I was a one-man-band company working out of the house. I thought it was great (and it was, at first). It was cheap (obviously), and it was so super convenient that I could literally roll out of bed and go to work. The best advice I received about that setup was from a buddy who also had a home office… who told me that you must still treat it as “going to the office”… i.e., get up at a regular time, shower, shave, put on your “work clothes,” and go to work. I managed to do that for about nine days, and after that the FedEx guy started catching me in my boxer shorts on a fairly regular basis.
Starting the company at home was a bit of a challenge on the legal side. My house is zoned “residential only,” plus on top of that it is downtown in one of my city’s three historic districts and the historical commision (or hysterical commission, as we call them) is very picky about what they allow. But after begging and pleading and assuring them my business would be completely invisible to the neighborhood, they allowed it.
I quickly found that it was just TOO easy to go to work… ergo, I was working all the time, even when I didn’t need to be. I can’t count the times I would go in to the suite around bedtime “just for a second” and the next thing I knew the sun was coming up. Plus I didn’t really like having clients in my house, even confined to the edit suite.
I finally moved out to outside studio space about about a year… and it was great. Finally we had a “real” space, attractive and comfy for clients, and a cool place leave the house for. The biggest plus was that office was about two minutes from my house. More clients, expansion, and employees necessitated a move to a bigger place a couple of years later, but it’s still only about four minutes from home, which works well.
We don’t have a huge space now, but it works well. Finally we have a real lobby, soundstage space, three small edit suites, conference, accounting, greenroom, makeup, etc. I have found though that you physically expand to slightly bigger than the space you have, so you always need a little more. When we first moved in here we thought the space, about 3600 square feet, was more that we would ever need… we even rented out a couple of the offices to an advertising agency client of ours. But now, we’ve filled it all up… and even have to rent external storage for set pieces, props, wardrobe, and general crap that we don’t want to throw away.
I am way too old for the temptation of working around the clock any more, therefore, I will never have a home office again (knock on wood). I still, however, never put on a suit for work (when I left the corporate world I gave away a rack full of Brooks Brothers straightjackets, vowing never to return to them). All clients get me in my usual uniform: cargo shorts, Hawaiian shirt, sandals, and baseball cap… no matter how much of a bigshot they are.
This long diatribe was my way of saying that while home offices work well for some people (and I’m glad they do), they sure didn’t work for me. Be careful, or you will find yourself at work all the time… and life is waaaay too short for that. You gotta do what makes you happy.
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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All true and valid points… but…
[Steve Wargo] “The one major problem is that the Image records upside down. I have seen cameras and monitors upside down”
Well… NOT if you use a good one 🙂
We use a PL mount DoF converter almost every day with our little Canon XLH1 (not with an upside-down image)… but not purely so I can get a super soft background. Rather I use is so I have a controllable background… as a cinematographer sometimes I want DoF super shallow, sometimes deep, sometimes in between. On a “real” movie set how deep the DoF is, is one of the first thing that the DP considers… and then the lighting is affected accordingly to allow him to get that. Plus it allows me to use real cinema lenses, lenses that are many MANY times better than any video lens that I could ever hope to use on the camera.
It’s just part of the package for us… no more (or less) important than good sound, lighting, or anything else.
Without some kind of conversion to a 35mm frame size… video will never truly look like 35mm film (which is obviously the goal of many people). Even the highest-end HD at 24p… it still looks like video. GREAT video, but video nonetheless. I remember watching “Once Upon a Time in Mexico” in the theatre (before I knew how it was shot) and remember thinking, “Why is this VIDEO”? For me, a good DoF converter just gives the image the “look” that puts it over the top. Not necessarily because of shallow focus, but because of a number of factors combined.
I thinkk a lot of it has to do with one’s background, and what one is used to shooting. For the videographers who are used to electronic images, then HD knocks their socks off, and rightly so. But most cinematographers who have been used to shooting film feel that HD just doesn’t look “quite right” to them, even at 24p. It’s the up-and-coming kids who think a DoF converter suddenly turns their little palmcorder into a Panavision that have unrealistic expectations and put too much weight on using them.
They are just a tool, they aren’t “God’s gift to filmmaking”… but to be honest, if I didn’t have my P+S Technik Mini35 and great lenses I would be shooting 35mm film a little later today, not HD.
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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We just use the Epson Stylus PHOTO R260. It ink-jet prints on the white printable DVDs and looks like a million bucks. It was dirt cheap, too… probably well less than $200. It’s a year or more old though, I’m betting it has been replaced with a higher model by now.
It’s quite fast, and as I said the results are very professional…they look just as good as the four-color process printing that we’ve had done when we have outsourced big duplication jobs. We only do very short runs of printed DVDs (a few at a time for client copies of stuff)… if I had heavier needs I might go a more “pro” route but for what we do this is fine.
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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I would have thought that would work, unsure why it doesn’t.
This is an audio COW forum, you’ll probably get better answers there…
Find it here:
https://forums.creativecow.net/viewforum/30T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com