[Todd Terry]

Well, here’s my two cents’ worth…

I have a degree… a film degree. Want to see my diploma? Need to line a birdcage? Or wrap some fish? That’s about all it is useful for.

Now, don’t get me wrong… I’m not down on education, I’m very pro education. Just get the right education.

I went to school close to home in the southeast, at a good ol’ SEC school. One that happened to be a football powerhouse, where that was just about the only thing that anyone cared about. The athletics facilties looked like the Taj Mahal, of course… whereas the communication facilities looked more like the Munsters’ house on a bad day. Interesting enough, because the communications school was one of the easier colleges at the university (which I will freely admit… I graduated with honors and didn’t crack a book in four years) it was heavily populated with athletes (who averaged coming to class maybe once a month). I can’t remember a single professor who had set foot in a motion picture studio, on a film location, or inside a television station in the previous forty years. It was pathethic… but times were tight and that was where I had a scholarship to go, so I went.

Out in the “real world,” I literally learned more about the business in my first day on a real film set than I did in four years of school. In fact, I learned it before lunch.

But again… I’m not saying I’m anti-school. Just make sure you pick the absolute RIGHT one, and that you learn WHAT you need to learn there. Get a good, broad education. I’ve gotten applicants here at my company who are fresh out of school, who have skills, but they are very specific skills and can’t do much else. I had a guy a couple of weeks ago looking for his first job. He was a relatively competent Final Cut editor…that is what he had been studying throughout his college career. Guess what? We’re not a Mac house, we’re a PC house. We cut with PremierePro2, not FCP. He didn’t know PP2 from a hole in the ground. That might could be overlooked (it’s not a big stretch from FCP to PP2), but all of his knowledge was technical. He knew which FCP buttons to click and where all the tools are… but he knew little about theory, style, and technique of editing. That’s what he should have been learning.

Get a good education, but get the right one. And try to work while in school… grip somewhere, sweep floors at a production facility, intern at a post house or television station. You’re gonna learn by doing.

T2

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

[Todd Terry]

This may or may not be appropriate, but I think some folks might find the technique interesting…

We recently did an industrial, and part of it was a parody of a 1970s era newscast (think Will Farrell’s Ron Burgundy in “Anchorman”).

We didn’t have a budget for a real set, so we knew we were going to have to go greenscreen. The problem was, I never thought any of the virtual sets I’ve seen (the computer generated ones) really looked truly photorealistic, and even if they did I knew it would be doubtful that I could find a virtual news set circa 1973.

So… we ended up designing and constructing a scale model (oh, about a foot and a half high and two and a half feet wide) of our 70s era set design. It had the bad wallpaper, the bad formica, the ugly blonde wood trim, the framed logo backdrop that looked as if was painted in two different shades of blue (remember those?), etc.

Then after the project was rough-cut (just using greenscreen footage), we went back through the entire show and I carefully shot the model with a still camera to get all the various angles and shots for all of the background plates that I needed.

The advantage of having a real practical 1/8th scale version of the set is that I was not limited to the couple or three views of a virtual set that we might acquire… I could move the camera around anywhere on it and get whatever shots I needed (and obviously, it was much cheaper to construct than a full-size set). And it looked completely like a “real” set, because it was real… just real little.

T2

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

[Todd Terry]

I completely agree with Mark… actors make all the difference in the world.

I try whenever I can to use “real” actors… although I often have to beg clients to let me do so. They usually just can’t seem to comprehend at first why their Aunt Marge…who would be perfect in the role… isn’t the best choice. I usually try to convince them that it will be cheaper in the long run to hire a pro (which is totally true). If a shoot takes three times as long to finally get something semi-usable from the “talent” on the 20th take… then they have already spent more (for poorer results) than it would have cost to hire a pro who could have nailed it in two takes.

You can also never predict when non-pro talent will be good… or bad. Sometimes you can get surprisingly good performances. More often, not. Around here we still re-tell the story of a commercial shoot for a dentist we did a couple of years ago. This guy is very bright, personable, photogenic, and obviously educated… we thought he would do fine on camera. My general manager encouraged us to bring a teleprompter as the guys were loading the truck for the shoot. I nixed it… we didn’t need it… it was ONE LINE, literally nine words that the guy had to deliver.

It probably took, oh, maybe 50 takes. He just couldn’t remember (or deliver) the line. I probably burned up 1200 feet of 35mm to get this one line…. we were wasting so much film that I finally stopped slating takes… decided to wait until we got a good take, then tail slate it. This was a very low-budget job, so I kept imagining that the footage counters on the magazines were actually counting down our rapidly disappearing profits.

I also agree with Mark, it’s important to shoot for the editor. For quite a few years I was always my own director/DP/shooter/editor… and I always knew exactly what was going to be needed because I knew how it was going to be cut, because I was cutting it. When my company got big enough that I had other people editing my stuff (who admitadly can cut better than me… don’t skimp on hiring the very best editor that you can afford) I had to keep reminding myself to increase coverage a bit. My senior editor Joey usually pulls double duty and crews as soundman on location shoots, which is a GREAT help… because he was there, knows what was happening, saw with his own eyeballs what I shot, and is able to pick up on my vision via some sorty of telepathy that he seems to have developed. And he is always welcome to suggest shots or coverage that he thinks will be helpful.

T2

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

[Todd Terry]

[Bruce Bennett in Madison, WI] “So you

[Todd Terry]

For directorial only… that is, showing up with no crew, equipment, or hardware except for the two director’s “must haves” (director’s finder and baseball cap) we usually bill $175/hr.

I will say though that it’s a very rare thing indeed, at least in this market, for a client to call and need a producer or director only. The call is almost always for a full production crew and equipment… director, producer, DP, lights/camera/sound/support and all the toys. I’d say it’s been more than a year since we’ve even had an inquiry seeking director only. I’m sure it’s different in other markets.

T2

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

[Todd Terry]

I just wish that I had time and energy to track down this shoot, sit on the sidelines, and just watch for an hour or so.

I’m betting it would be a bit entertaining.

T2

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

[Todd Terry]

I agree, very creative idea.

Like a lot of ideas like these, it immediately sparked thoughts of numerous ways to improve it (some that would eliminate the need for high ceilings, another that would allow for fairly repeatable takes).

But hats off to him for coming up with the concept. I’m thinking of a scene in an upcoming project where I’d like to try developing it.

T2

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

[Todd Terry]

Well, that is a fairly complicated (and much studied) shot.

A lot of planning went into it. In fact, Michelangelo Antonioni basically had the hotel set specifically built to accommodate that specific last shot.

The scene was shot right at dusk, so there would not be a huge lighting difference in the interior and the exteriors when the camera moved outside (not riding the iris at all).

In a nutshell….

The camera was traveling on a track that was built into the ceiling of the hotel room. The window grate was constructed so that it had a split in the middle. When the camera reached the point where it was about to push through the grate, the window pieces were swung open from side to side, allowing the camera to push through. At that point the camera left the track and was transferred to a very high overhead crane that suspended the camera below…it was not a camera crane, more like a construction crane. You can see a little bit of “floating horizon” in the latter part of the shot, which is usually the dead giveaway of a Steadicam shot… however, there was no Steadicam. There were however two gyroscopes attached to the camera… which explains why the shot has a slight Steadicam look to it in the last couple of minutes.

It’s quite a great shot. It’s a little slow for my taste though, the camera blocking is actually sooo slow that I’m sure the casual viewer doesn’t realize what a production it must have been. Blocking all of the action and getting all the actors’ timing down was probably almost as difficult as blocking the camera move. Supposedly it was also very windy on the day of the shoot, which made the floating camera move even more difficult.

T2

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

[Todd Terry]

Unfortunately, no.

Depth of field is primarily a function of the size of the sensor, and both those cameras have identically sized sensors (1/3″). So the two different cameras, with their respective stock lenses, when shot at the same focal length and the same f-stop, will have the same depth of field.

All 1/3″ cameras will have extremely deep depths-of-field, because the sensors are so small. The wider you zoom out, the deeper it will get. At the lens’ widest setting the depth of field will be almost infinite.

The only real way to get truly shallow depth of field with a camera like that is to use a lens converter which restores 35mm cinema lens depth-of-field characteristics. This has been discussed in depth in here and in other forums. One recent thread is here:
https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/59/856335

T2

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

[Todd Terry]

Hi Nate…

It’s going to depend on what that market is exactly, but I suspect your salary guess might be a little high.

You said it was a “fairly small market,” and not “LA or NYC”… but that’s still a fairly wide range.

Do you know what the DMA is exactly? If you don’t, you can look it up here…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_television_stations_in_North_America_by_media_market

In my city, which is Huntsville, Alabama (and happens to be DMA #84) your estimated salary range is probably in the ballpark (although I seriously doubt any news editors here make $50K). It’s been a while since I’ve been in the broadcast business, but my film production company does have several network TV stations as clients, so I think I can make an educated guess. I’d say in my particular market here, you’re probably looking at $25K-$35K. It largely depends on the station and the owners. Here, the CBS station has a reputation for paying relatively well (they were a New York Times station until a recent sale), and there are guys and gals in the news department (shooters, producers, editors, on-air talent) that have been there 20+ years and are paid accordingly. Conversely, the ABC station here pays people dirt, practically has a revolving door in the news department, and it’d be surprising to find any employee who has been there more than a year (6 months would be more like it).

Obviously, the bigger the market, the better the pay (and the smaller, the worse). When you get up in the top 30-40 markets, an editor can expect a pretty decent salary, especially if it is a network station with a large staff in a competitive news market… it might even be a union job, depending on the particular station and market.

On the other end of the spectrum, if it is a very small market (say, DMA 100+), a mom-and-pop station, say Fox instead of one of the big three, in a city that only has a couple of stations and the news market isn’t very competitive, then unfotunately a news editor is probably going to be little more than a minimum-wage job, populated by kids trying to “get in the business.”

I don’t know where exactly you are talking about, but unfortunately I think most of the markets in Virginia are relatively smallish… the Hampton Roads market is in the 40s, which is decent sized… but I think the next biggest market will be Richmond… which is in the 90s and that’s beginning to get into small-market territory.

T2

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