[Todd Terry]

Received the invite.

Although I consider you a friend, Bob… it was a pleasure to decline your invitation!

Thanks……..

T2

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

[Todd Terry]

THANK YOU, Shane…

T2

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

[Todd Terry]

Aaaarrrghhh. No one is hearing my actual question…which I thought was a simple one. ARRRRGHHH….

I know it’s ok to ignore people. I do it all the time. I’m probably ignoring some emails and phone calls right now. I probably have some unanswered texts I haven’t got to yet, and some I may never get to. I have no problem with that.

What I’m curious about is if I actively and purposely DECLINE a LinkedIn invitation, does the person who sent me the invitation know that?… do they see that I have declined it, somehow? I know if I just ignore the invitation, they see nothing, I’m assuming.

I have no problem declining random strangers, but like a lot of you in here, many of my connections are colleagues in the production industry. But a lot of the invitations I seem to get are from existing clients. I don’t necessarily want to connect with clients that I already do business with, nor do I want them connecting with the other production people that I know. AND… I don’t want them to see that I declined their invitation. Ignoring it could be seen as passingly rude, but that’s easy to cover (“Oh I never used LinkedIn, I don’t even look at those invites.”). But if they see that I actually declined an invitation rather than just ignored it, that goes from passingly rude to blatantly rude… and I don’t want to treat clients that way.

So… simple question… can someone who sends a LinkedIn invitation tell if it has been actually purposely declined.

And now I’m calmed down. Sorry about earlier.

T2

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

[Todd Terry]

You’re aware of course, Mark, that you did not answer my question.

(and now I’m looking forward to declining his LinkedIn invitation)

T2

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

[Todd Terry]

Will give that some thought, John… I sure do like the idea of them…

The thing is, our lighting needs have changed so much over just the past few years, with cameras so much faster now (so much of my lighting now is subractive rather than additive), what I think of as the “bigger” instruments here (1K and above) are pretty much gathering dust a great deal of the time. For what I do now little fresnels are most useful, it’s the little Pepper 100, 200, and 300s that usually get put in play here. My go-to instrument for a lot of uses are the LitePanels Astras, although I keep saying some LED fresnels would be nice.

What would be really nice would be to be able to relamp those little fresnels with LEDs that are 12v. We’ve tried to go with battery powered everything over the last few years and it has been a real game changer here. Except for stuff on stage, the only instruments we ever plug in are HMIs… we don’t even travel with the customary 500lb of stingers anymore.

One can dream… but with lighting having evolved at, well, lightspeed over the last couple of years, who knows what’s coming up….

T2

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

[Todd Terry]

I LOVE the idea of those VisionSmith lamps.

I was looking at the website and got very excited… and then got very unexcited. While they seem to be made for Arri heads they can work in other heads as well. Except mine. With only a couple of exceptions all of my fresnel instruments are LTM Peppers (they’re almost all I’ve ever bought, I just always preferred them to Arri fresnels)… and the site says specifically that the lamps will not not work in Pepper heads… something about the throat being too narrow for the lamp to fit. Grrrrrrr.

If you have heads that they’ll work in though, they seem like a genius solution to me.

T2

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

[Todd Terry]

Well it’s hard to say.

The long instruments are fluorescents, obviously… probably four-foot instruments, possibly Kinos or some other similar brand (such as Videssence or a couple of other brands). Two of the seven are being used to light the talent, though, not wallwashing the greenscreen.

The smaller square instruments are probably LED fixtures, based on the thin profile that you can see on one of them. I count five of those, three on the talent and two on the floor… none of them are used for wallwashing. What are they? It’s really hard to say since most LED fixtures of that size/shape look virtually the same no matter what the brand. I don’t think they are LitePanels because the yokes don’t look quite like those, but what they are I can’t say for sure.

I have no idea what the round instruments are (there are five of those), but none of those are being used for greenscreening, they are all backlighting on the talent.

Keep in mind this although this apparently a shot of one of the stages at Big Apple Studios in New York, it might not be a real photo of a real lighting setup. In fact, it is probably not. It was probably set up, staged, or even Photoshopped to look good for what it is… a marketing photo (basically it’s a stock photo). It’s totally understandable… on my own website there is a shot of the stage that has lights, equipment, and other gear that we would never use that way it real life, but it looks good in a photo for the web, so it was staged that way. In the sample you posted, for example… the grid is totally clean other than the lighting instruments. There is not a single flag, scrim, piece of gel, or any other kind of light modifiers up there, none whatsoever. At the very minimum you’d expect all of those backlights to have barn doors on them… it would be almost inconceivable to see them without at least those. So… just remember this is a staged shot for a photo, and not necessarily a real lighting plot on a working stage.

Don’t be afraid of looking dumb to your DP or gaffer… they know they live in a world of very specialized gear and very specialized names for it that almost no one else knows. Just for example, what a “trombone” or a “squeeze box” is to me is something entirely different to the average guy out in the rest of the world (in the real world both are musical instruments, in the gaffer/grip world a trombone is a special piece of light-hanging gear, and a squeezer is a dimmer), so they can’t fault you for not knowing everything. Or anything. Just hire someone really good, trust them, and let them teach you some of what you need to know. You can’t know everything, though… I’ve done this for a quarter century almost, and I don’t know a tenth of what I’d like to.

Good luck.

T2

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

[Todd Terry]

I don’t mean to pass the buck, but if you are serious about opening high-end stage space, for rental out to pros, are starting from scratch, and don’t know much about lighting… this is not really the best place to do it.

This COW forum is a wonderful resource and full of pros who know a great deal about lighting (some of them a heck of a lot more than me), but what you are needing is a whole lot more than knowing “what kind of lights are in this picture?”

You really need to hire a DP or a professional gaffer, at least for a day, to come in and survey your space in person, talk about your needs, your budgets, your plans for the stage, what kinds of projects are likely to be shot there, and that kind of stuff. Then they can put together a plan and a budget that will get you exactly what you need.

We could give recommendations all day, but nothing will beat having a pro put their eyeballs on the real space and working with you to figure out what you need. In the end you’ll very likely get a better result (probably much better) and might even spend less money by getting exactly what you need (even after paying for the pro’s wisdom), rather than us guessing.

But… welcome to the COW… once you get your space rigged out you will find this forum an invaluable source for tweaking, learning, and improving what you have.

T2

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

[Todd Terry]

[Blaise Douros] “And to address your comments, Todd, yes ISO 2000 does seem high until you know that the FS7 has three built-in physical ND filters:”

I hear ya, Blaise… my C300 has the same three built-in ND filters (so does the C100, although with the C100 you have to manually turn a thumb wheel like an animal, whereas with the C300 it’s just pushing a button). But still, since I like to shoot pretty wide open (it’s not uncommon for me to shoot a whole project at f/1.3), even with the internal ND dialed to the max it’s not uncommon for me to have at least .9 extra ND in the matte box, sometimes more. Oh well.

Good of you to help out D j, I think you gave good info and are definitely on the right track.

T2

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

[Todd Terry]

Good gawd, 2000 as the default?… that is dumbfounding, but of course I believe you, Rick. I’m glad that I prefaced my post with my admission of my lack of knowledge about Sonys these days (I used to shoot Sony, but not in the past 15 years or so)… but apparently I went on to prove my ignorance.

Man I would find that so restrictive, and am now doubly glad I’m still shooting Canons… with the Sony I’d be piling on the ND filters all day (which I hate doing). Frankly I find 850 with the Canon much too high for my taste about 95% of the time as it is. The C300 will go up to 80,000 ISO, but frankly I don’t think I ever push it past about 1250 or so.

I’m thinking about our old 35mm days when shooting 5203 was the go-to filmstock and we just accepted ASA 50 as the “norm”…. and I used to hate shooting 5219 because it was so darn grainy but we would marvel at its ASA 500 as something unbelievably fast. Times certainly change…..

T2

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