Todd Terry
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COW Coin
Forum Replies Created
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Hey Arty…
Or… if budgets are a concern (and when aren’t they?), check out the stuff Richard has over at coollights.biz.
He makes basically Kino-clones… his aren’t the only ones out there for sure… but they are by far the best made (and incidentally, the cheapest) of the knock-offs that I have seen.
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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Well, before I finished reading all of your post I was going to say just put a gel frame inside the box…but sounds like you have tried that resulting in toasted gels.
You said a medium-sized box… is the face on the softbox you will be using larger than a full-size regular sheet of gel? If not, you could just just clip a sheet to the face with a couple of C-47’s on top and couple more on the bottom.
If you were having to take the gel on and off many times during the production, you might put some self-adhesive velcro tabs on the corners of the gel sheet. If you use the “hook” side and the gel happens to be the right size, they would easily attach in the lip of the softbox. If not, you could put some small buttons of the “loop” side of velcro temporarily on the surface of the silk itself. You wouldn’t even have to take the gel completely off… if you don’t need it, just unfasten the top and let it flop down.
If your box face is bigger than one sheet, you could take a couple of sheets of gel and tape them together and cut a piece to perfectly fit the face, then use the same attachment ideas above.
I’m sure there’s a better idea out there, but that’s the first thing that came to mind if the instrument is too hot to put the gel in the interior.
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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Yeah, that’s going to pretty much be standard.
Any tripod that you buy in your size/price range is going to have 1/4″ thread (small video tripod, still photography tripod).
Consumer camcorders and smaller prosumer camcorders will have 1/4″ thread. Big pro camcorders will have a larger 3/8″ thread.
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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Not that it’s a solution for every purchase… but in this case I would hit eBay.
Yes, tripods hold their resell value pretty well… but I will often see tripods going on eBay for well WELL less than would you’d think their market value should be.
My best tripod deal was a set of sticks and head just a few years old (and in pristine condition) that we bought for a couple hundred bucks. New retail was several thousand. Now admittadly this was one of those cases where the seller (not a photographer or cinematographer, I think it was an estate sale) didn’t know an accurate value (and it helped that he didn’t correctly spell “Oconnor” which cut down his viewings)… so it was not the norm… but they do pop up with pretty good frequency.
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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We archive everything including source files, and typically do not charge clients for archival (although we probably should… this post now has me thinking about it).
One of the advantages we have, is that most of our work is NTSC broadcast commercials so our project sizes aren’t gigantic compared to some of you guys… we live in the :30 world. If a project’s acquisition format is 35mm then the project is even smaller since when I shoot film I’m even stingier with shooting. Typically we have been just burning archival discs… our projects usually don’t fill up a data DVD… and rarely if ever more than 2 or 3.
However, we realized about 6 months ago that we were spending too much time burning discs, and so went to harddrive archival. I just bought two plain ‘ol Seagate 750GB drives, and when my editor or me (if I’m the cutter) finishs a project we just drag a copy of it to each drive. When those are full, we just put them on the shelf and whip down to Best Buy and pick up two more (they are so dirt cheap now). These drives are directly attached via firewire to the computer in one of our suites. If we want to archive from one of the other suites, we just drag the files to those drives via the network. That way is kind of slow, but our projects aren’t that huge and we are not in that big of a hurry anyway… we just do it at the end of the day, let it start cookin, and go home.
Our projects are small enough that we can get a fair number of them backed up on a 750GB drive, so we don’t “sell” a client the drive or dedicate a single particular drive to a singular project. So far we haven’t dedicated a single drive to a single project, so we always keep the drives in house. As I said, we haven’t charged for this service as of yet… storage is so cheap that it would be such a tiny part of a project’s total budget, we just eat it as the cost of doing business.
I know that’s a pretty low tech way of doing things… we don’t use any kind of fancy schmantzy automated backup system or anything. It’s low-brow but it works for us.
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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The stuff we use is translucent… you can almost see through it, but not quite. If you were to, say, place a printed page right behind it (flat against it) you could probably sort of read it, but move it back even an inch and you can’t.
Totally clear shower curtain material wouldn’t do you any good.
The stuff we found was at a large fabric store, in the area where they sell stuff like vinyl, canvas for patio furuniture upolstry, even car headliner… that kind of stuff.
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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That’d work in theory.
There was a television station here in town that years ago that would turn their neutral colored set background into a keyable background on the fly by flipping off their normal cyc lights and flipping on wallwashers that were heavily blue gelled. Same theory.
I would say the first issue that comes to mind would be to make sure you have a big enough stage space so that you can put your talent far enough away from the wall so you can totally light them independently (as the good Lord intended). If any spill from your talent lighting gets onto the background it’s going to wash out your projected “key wall” to a degree.
What might be even cooler is if the projected key wall is REAR projected… that way you could line the axis of the projector up correctly so you don’t get any keystoneing and therefore one side brighter than the other. But of course that would take even BIGGER stage space.
Perfect key or matte lighting certainly is an art. I’m constantly amazed at behind-the-scenes footage of big-budget motion pictures where you see a gigantic and high-ceiling stage with everything swathed in blue (or sometimes green)…and the darn thing is absolutely PERFECTLY evenly lit. Then again, those guys have a few more instruments to play with than most of us do.
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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Looks good!… nice and clean.
One thing I did notice in the last day or so, was that the “Read Entire Thread” button didn’t work in a couple of forums… you’d click it and it would just return to the same page (single post) that you were on. Figured it would work itself out in time.
Lookin good…
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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Well, you are on the right track… there are a number of “everyday” materials that can work.
Just be aware that different materials do different types of things.
Mesh-type materials are one such choice. They can be greenhouse mesh, nylon mesh like is used in some screen doors or patio doors, etc., or sometimes you can even find mesh materials at the fabric store. BUT… you said you wanted to DIFFUSE sunlight. Mesh type “rags” are used when you want to cut the QUANTITY of the light, without really affecting the QUALITY. They don’t really diffuse… they are used for example when you still want the QUALITY of sunlight (i.e., harsh or visible shadows) but you want to cut its intensity (such as adjust a foreground subject against a differently-lit background).
If you wish to actually DIFFUSE light (make it softer), you will need to go with a different type of material for your “rag” choice. Parachute material is one idea. I know of one still photographer who just uses bedsheets. You may find that some of these “on the cheap” solutions cut way too much light…they could be 2 stops or better. If you buy real rags (from say Matthews or a company like that) you will have a lot of choices and can specify you need, say, only a 1/2 stop silk. Of course they are kind of pricey and might not fit a limited budget. But you can probably find some material that will work. One of my favorites is this translucent shower curtain material (from the fabric store) that I use all the time. It gives a nice diffused quality to light, and cuts the intensity by only a half stop or less (you still get a bit of soft shadows). Best thing, it’s cheap… like a buck a foot. It is five feet wide so you would have to piece it, but you could fill a 10×10 butterfly frame for like $20.
Keep in mind that a 10x is a pretty sizable overhead. Make SURE you have very strong stands, plenty of sandbags for them, and maybe an assistant just to make sure it doesn’t klunk anyone on the head. It doesn’t take much of a breeze to turn a butterfly that size into an uncontrollable sail.
T2
__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com