[Todd Terry]

We’ve done it both ways, it just depends on the project and the circumstances.

Most of what we produce are television commercials. Generally with those they are buy-out, and the client is welcome to use them for as long as they like. With TV commercials they usually have a shelf life of their own, and most clients do not use them after a while (although we have one law firm client that ran the same spots for YEARS).

There are some exceptions though. Maybe we use an actor that is only contracted for a period of time, or a SAG narrator that is only hired for a 13-week run, or such. In those cases we will license a project only for a specific period of time. If the client wants to use it after that time, they have to re-up.

Sometimes that way is to a great benefit. Quite a while back we did a statewide TV campaign for community colleges. It was very successful, and two other states wanted to use the commercials customized for them as well. We did that, and licensed it to each of them for a year (we couldn’t do a buyout offer because of the actors involved). That turned out to be a good move, as one of the states has re-upped their licensing of the campaign year after year, for several years now. We’ve actually made a whole lot more money off of the re-licensing than we did on the initial production.

The other limitation that we put on productions (although you didn’t ask about this precisely), is that for buyout projects a client may use them in perpetuity, as a whole. But they cannot alter them… edit them… change anything about them… and definitely NOT take any of the elements (such as footage) and use them in any other productions. If they want that, they have to come back to us. Only once has that been an issue, I saw a commercial for a former client on the air, using a shot we had created for a previous commercial. We put a stop to that promptly.

T2

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

[Todd Terry]

Thanks guys… I will definitely give Fotokem a look.

As long as their rates are in line with the industry (such that still exists) it should be ok. Since this is a personal in-house thing, I don’t have to deal with a client complaining about nickles and dimes on this one.

Sadly, there is still a huge (and I mean gigantic) Technicolor facility about five minutes from our studio, but they only do Blu-ray and video game fulfillment there.

And Rick, so glad to know your students are still shooting film. I think every cinematographer should. If you can shoot a film neg and shoot it well, you can shoot digital with one eyeball tied behind your back. The other way around, not so much.

I sadly haven’t shot film in years… I sold what little bit of 16mm gear I had probably 10 years ago, and sold all the 35mm gear not too long after that (kept my lenses though!… my babies). There’s still about a half dozen (maybe 10) cans of 35mm in the fridge (I think probably mostly 5203, though probably some 5219 which I always hated)… I’d gladly give it away but no one wants it these days. It’s waaaaaaaaaay out of date anyway (although I once shot with film that was 10+ years expired, and it looked great).

I sometimes still get the itch… there’s a very nice Moviecam Compact on eBay right now… and there’s always bunches of SuperAmericas going dirt cheap. Arri’s, too. I’ll resist, though.

Thanks guys!

T2

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

[Todd Terry]

Good luck… VP often has some weird/unusual stuff that they don’t advertise, so it’s worth giving them a shout. They also respond to emails relatively quickly.

You must be flying a pretty heavy load to use a U-Bangi. I haven’t used (or even seen) one since we got rid of our big crab dolly… that thing would lift an engine block, and we really don’t need to do that anymore.

Hope you find one!

T2

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

[Todd Terry]

You might try Visual Products (visualproducts.com) to see if they have anything previously-owned. It’s probably worth a call, I doubt they’d post that on their website if they have one.

I’m guessing you could still post a “wanted” classified at mandy.com. I know they’ve revamped like crazy and are now more talent/crew than “hardware wanted or for sale,” but they might still do that. I haven’t visited there in a long time.

T2

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

[Todd Terry]

Polarizing filters can do interesting things, yeah.

Recently on location when stopping at a fast food restaurant, a crew member said “Hey, I can’t see the menus.” This place had TV screens that were the menus, as you’ll often see… but they were mounted at a 90° angle so they were vertical screens, not horizontal. Well, because these were obviously plain ol’ TV monitors that weren’t intended to be mounted in that direction, their built in polarization was at cross purposes with the polarization in this crew member’s sunglasses… so the menus that were perfectly readable to everyone else were completely black to him. Well, until he took off the shades, of course.

Glad you found a solution.

T2

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

[Todd Terry]

[Mark Suszko] “Posting the images does work here, I do it alltime.”

Actually, image upload is a little bit spotty of late… there was a week long stretch not too long ago when it wasn’t working. I shot an email and pointed it out to Tim who said yes, they had been having some trouble with it, but he thought it had been fixed… he’d look into it. And it later was. It might have developed a bug again, but it does look like it’s working at the moment of this writing.

T2

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

[Todd Terry]

If a producer is creating something for broadcast, they will determine where breaks go and build those in, exactly as they want.

If the initial producer is no longer involved (say, originally it was a theatrical doc, and is has now been sold and will be appearing on television), then typically the broadcaster will create their own master for broadcast, putting breaks in appropriate places.

Way back when the dinosaurs roamed and I worked in broadcast television, sometimes on the weekends we would run movies. We only got the theatrical versions, so it fell to me on one or two occasions to take those and create broadcast versions…. cutting them for time and content to fit the program slot, deciding where/how to insert breaks and all that jazz.

But if a production is created for TV, obviously that is done at the initial production stage.

T2

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

[Todd Terry]

Well, you’ll probably not find a better example than the Old Spice commercials. The very first one especially just knocked my socks off, I loved it so much. The following couple of commercials, not as much because they had a lot of CGI and other voodoo in them. The original one was about 99% practical… I think only the bottle/diamonds were CGI, and removal of the horse’s handler.

I wish they had taken better behind the scenes footage of that, but here’s one that is not seen too often…

https://youtu.be/rArZl8vh8aY

This “room changing” technique has been used a good bit but I can’t think of too many examples off the top of my head. There’s a current spot for “My Pillow” where the guy starts out talking to camera in a bedroom, and then the set breaks away to reveal him in the pillow factory.

Here we did sort of a “half” version of that for a GED campaign for community colleges in Alabama, Georgia, and Kentucky. It’s not quite what you’re talking about, but a similar idea. Here we started with actors in front of a “portrait” background (the classic gray wrinkly backdrop), which was taken away to reveal a classroom set behind it….

https://fantasticplastic.com/portfolio/news052.html

Actually I’ve been wanting to use the actor that appears in that first spot we did for an Old Spice parody myself. He’s a medium-well-known actor and can sound a lot like Isaiah Mustafa… and shirtless is built like him, too. I’d love to start a spot with him saying “Hello, ladies…” but the Old Spice campaign might be too old now for it to be relevant. Oh well…

T2

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

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[Todd Terry]

I think it just depends on the client, you have to tailor your approach to who they are, how THEY work… and whether you want to work with them again or on a continuing basis.

For example, we do a fair number of political clients (candidates for office). With them, I get the money when their product is delivered, and they know going in that they have to pay me before their project is released to them. There are a few exceptions, most of those being long-standing ad agencies and political strategists that we have worked with for years…. but others, no. I have a meeting tomorrow with a candidate who is running for congress. I’ve never heard of him before, and unlikely never will after the next election, and don’t know his management team. He’ll be paying before he gets his commercial (which is one reason we love doing political… they don’t care how much anything costs, and have to pay quickly since election laws require it).

On the other hand, we do lots of corporate work as well… with a bunch of companies but ONE big company in particular. They take 45 days to process an invoice. That’s a given, going in, and there’s nothing that’s going to change that. This is a international company worth many billions of dollars with offices and employees all over the globe, and they are not about to deviate from their protocols for some penny ante little production company. If I want their business (and I do, very much), then I have to play by their rules. Which I do. I could say “No, I do it this way, and you’ll get your video when I get paid,” but they’d just go somewhere else and I’d lose quite a few tens of thousands of dollars every year doing what is very painfully easy work. But I know that going in… and can budget accordingly (and charge them enough to make the delay worth it). Honestly, they could change their rules to 60 days and I’d still bend over backward to keep them as a client, because they always do pay, and on schedule… it’s just their schedule, not mine.

So, you just have to be flexible enough and weigh the way that a client does things vs. how much you want the businesses.

Sometimes you do have to say “Enough is enough.” We’ve done work for many years for an advertising agency that is famously a bit on the slow-to-pay side. We had done one commercial production that had an invoice that was aging several months. Because their accounting is actually at a different branch in another city there was always “something” holding up the payment. Then they called and had an urgent need for dubs (remember those?) for a different older project. We told them we’d be happy to make those right away, just as soon as they cleared this other invoice. Their managing partner was furious, screeched into the parking lot and stomped into our lobby accusing us of “holding their work hostage,” did hand us a personal check for the outstanding bill, and vowed to never work with us again. We’ve since done numerous additional projects with them… all paid (more or less) on time.

As for finance charges or late fees… that’s ok but there are some caveats. The laws might vary (depending where in the world you are, or in what state), but in most places you can’t legally charge more per month than 1/12th of whatever the maximum yearly legal interest rate is. So, you can’t have a 15% charge for a month’s late payment, as that would be 180% interest per year… which of course are loan shark rates. Also, you can’t impose a late fee after the fact… your contract must spell out in advance what late fees, if any, that you have. You can’t say “Well this client’s bill is getting late, I’m gonna start tacking on a late fee” if their initial contract doesn’t spell out specifically that it’s a possibility.

T2

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

[Todd Terry]

Hi Norman…

Unfortunately there might be a little bit of trial and error involved. I am also a CS6 user… we can’t upgrade our suites to CC because they are Matrox-based machines, and unfortunately Matrox doesn’t support Premiere past CS6.

At first blush most of those codecs should work in CS6. However, should doesn’t necessarily mean will. For example, we primarily use the Canon C300PL, which generates .MXF files. However, on occasion we also use a little XC15 as a B-camera, which also generates .MXF files. While we can import the C300 footage directly into CS6 with no problem, we cannot import the XC15 files, even though they are also .MXF files.

We have to convert those files, and run them all through Handbreak… and then the imports work just fine.

That’s a very long way of saying “It’s impossible to tell… exactly” regarding your questions about the various codecs.

What I’d suggest you doing is once you settle on a camera or two that you are definitely considering, asking people here at the COW and elsewhere on line if anyone can send you a direct-camera-raw file from that camera… that way you can test it with the “real deal.” Just make sure they are sending you the actual camera-generated file (even just a few seconds is fine), and not something that has been processed or converted in any way. I’ve had luck doing this, people are very helpful and generous….assuming they had that particular camera, of course.

Obviously you can always convert footage to make it perfectly usable (as I said, we use Handbreak which is completely free and GREAT and easy to use), but of course being able to directly use the footage is much easier.

Good luck,

T2

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