[Todd Terry]

1. Depends on your room/space/ambient lighting. If you can get the instrument relatively close to the subject, I’d definitely go with the Diva. If you have a big space, can’t put your key very close to the subject, or have a lot of ambient light that you can’t kill but have to overcome, then the 4 bank might be better in that situation…. but generally for interview setups, a Diva works well. And yes a 4×4 white foamcore bounce card is a good fill.

2. Well it just depends on the look you are going for. Egg crate and diffusion material are two very different modifiers, and do very different things. Diffusion is, obviously, going to soften the light. The egg crate doesn’t soften light, but limits its direction (although the Diva is going to be fairly soft anyway). If you need to be concerned with spill, preventing as much of your key as possible from hitting your background environment, that’s what the egg crate is needed to control. If you are not worried about spill so much but want a softer wraparound key for your subject, then yes, diffusion is the way to go. For that you are probably looking at Lee 250, some kind of existing silk you already have, frosted shower curtain material (my go-to modifier, couldn’t live without it), or in a pinch, a white garbage bag.

If you want something akin to classic portraiture lighting for your interview you’ll probably want a backlight (or bit of a sidelight), too… a small fresnel would be sufficient.

T2

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

[Todd Terry]

I JUST noticed Rich asked me a specific question… didn’t mean to ignore him, but I didn’t see it until now….

[Rich Rubasch] “Todd, did you pony up for the C300 Mark II?”

No, not yet… I’m still shooting with the original C300. We’ve had it for, oh what, five years now, or almost? We got it very early on shortly after they came out, I think it was about then.

I haven’t gone to the Mark II for a couple of different reasons… mostly because it didn’t give me a whole lot of benefit to do so. For one, It seems to have some pretty impressive focusing tools… but that doesn’t do me any good, since it’s just for EF lenses. My version is the C300PL, and I use PL mount cine primes… so I have to focus with my bare hand like an animal (which actually I prefer, it’s the real “Hollywood” way and if I didn’t have my hand on a focus wheel I’m not sure I’d know what to do).

To get that benefit from the Mark II I’d have to go EF and ditch my primes for a whole ‘nother set of lenses. I really love my lenses, they are my babies and frankly they are worth many times more than the camera bodies, so I’m sticking with the PL glass. I almost only shoot primes… although Canon does have a pretty darn nice zoom that I’d consider if I went EF mount… but it’s gigantic and heavy, and pushing 50 grand so there’s not a lot of incentive to do that.

The other benefit to the Mark II is obviously 4K. That hasn’t really been an issue or a real need here… but is becoming more of one. Like most people we don’t have any need to do 4K output yet, but it would be nice to be able to shoot and use 4K footage. We learned though that our editing suites, which have the biggest and most badass computers that you could get three years ago struggled a bit with 4K footage (we started doing a little bit of 4K handheld footage with the DJI Osmo stabilizer and Zenmuse X5 camera). Even though the computers are only a couple of years old, that’s an eternity in the computer world… so we just had one of them upgraded (bigger SSD system drive, crammed as much RAM in as possible, and added an additional processor). That machine now handles 4K just fine. That wasn’t my personal suite (it was my senior editor Joey’s), so I was using his as a guinea pig… I’ll do my own next. So now that we can handle 4K much better that makes the Mark II a lot more attractive.

If I had to buy one today the C300 Mark II would definitely be my next camera. I suspect we’ll get one sometime this year.

T2

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

[Todd Terry]

I feel ya, and am intimately familiar with what you are up against there.

I’ll also (rarely) differ a little bit with Mark on the “what to do” opinion….

We too hire tons of actors, deal with several dozen talent agencies throughout our region, and scads of individual actors, too… and yes, they want our stuff for their reels. We are always happy to make it accessible, free and unrestricted.

You are in a different boat with your company and your legal team. I’m ALL for helping people, and try to do that… but in this case I think the far easier solution would simply be to tell actors footage isn’t available for reel use.

Why the harsh stance? Well, because I think it would be making a lot of work for yourself, for something that would have little value to the people you are trying to help…

I look at tons and tons of reels directly from actors, from agencies, from breakdown services, etc…. I don’t know of any “real” actors, except maybe those the very lowest of the lowest rung on the ladder trying to gain experience, that would ever even use a watermarked clip. Well, at least not a heavily watermarked clip (you’ll see a small corner network bug sometimes, and those are fine). I know of several agencies that refuse to build reels with timecodes on them as well.

Limiting the number of seconds isn’t super practical either… since you said “seconds” that makes me think your legal people are thinking something very short. As a director when I watch reels I hate to see compilations with very short clips, I like longer segments in order to really be able to see what a talent can do. You’ll really only see those when an actor has done a ton of work and might include a montage of a number of different short things, just to show they are out there working and have done a lot of projects. If someone is willing to use watermarked or timecoded footage, then they probably haven’t done a lot of work, so very short clips aren’t likely to be useful.

As to indicating where the clips can and cannot be posted… well of course you can tell an actor that, but once the horse it out of the barn there’s no bringing it back it, once you hand off a clip to an actor it’s going to be out of your hands and you will have zero control over where it ends up getting posted.

Putting a lot of complicated restrictions and rules-to-follow is not going to be an easy thing. I say this next part out of love, and because many moons ago before I was a wannabe movie director I was a wannabe actor myself so I think I can say this about my thespian brethren…. actors, typically, are not the sharpest knives in the drawer. I’ve worked with some that were practically Anthony Hopkins on camera, but if you take a break you hope they can find their way from the bathroom back to the stage. Sure there are plenty of super smart actors… but a lot of times it just comes with the territory, a sort of left-brain/right-brain thing… people who are wildly talented and super creative are often not type-A meticulous people who are the best at following complicated rules and restrictions.

So… me, personally in that situation although it sounds harsh I’d probably just let talent know in advance that the client restricts use of this footage and it is not available for personal reels.

Or better yet, can you convince the legal types there to just lighten up? Are the content owners there really genuinely and seriously worried about “losing control of very expensive content” and the fact that it shows up on an actor’s reel really damaging in any way? If they can see that in all likelihood it really isn’t an issue at all, maybe that’d solve the problem for everyone.

T2

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

[Todd Terry]

Ha… that is a funny scenario, Tom… and almost plausible in this day and age.

The Devil’s Advocate position against that though is that the little TM isn’t always exactly the same, appears in various positions and sizes… and is also seen whenever their logo appears electronically, such as on their website.

T2

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

[Todd Terry]

It seems pretty clear to me that this trademark is referring to the smiley face. The TM is right adjacent to the face, appears even when the face is solo (like on the door), and anyway there is a separate and additional TM by the slogan.

I’ve inquired of a friend who is an IP attorney, but haven’t heard back from him.

Also sent a message to the company, asking if there was an email for someone in marketing there.

Spending way too much brainpower on something that doesn’t affect me in any way whatsoever… but I’m curious.

T2

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

[Todd Terry]

Sent you an email.

T2

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

[Todd Terry]

Gosh… I dunno, it’s so hard to say.

I wouldn’t be surprised if some big post or animation house wouldn’t quote a number that was in the several multiples of tens of thousands of dollars (especially last year, or the year before that, or the year….). Then again, these days there are really swift and creative 16yo geeks out there with powerful computers and all the software and ability to do it, too. The problem with those young punks is that they generally don’t have either the marketing/advertising or art direction skills so they end up needing a lot of hand-holding. Couple of years ago we were swamped and had to sub out an animation job, ran across a kid who was a Maya and Cinema4D whiz who didn’t even know what to charge us for some pretty beautiful photo-realistic 3D stuff. We coulda taken him for a ride, but chose to be financially kind to him.

The range is just sooooo wide, it’s really impossible to say.

T2

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

[Todd Terry]

Hard to say, because one question might be “What did they cost to produce?” while another might be “What would you charge to produce these?” They could have spent a great great deal on them…or not. We wouldn’t charge nearly what the big boys would, I’m sure. A really big post/animation house might even spend more on scoring that we would for the whole thing… there’s such a wide range.

The first one was very simple. The second one had a lot more complex moves, particle animation, etc., and would be more costly.

Conceding that I’m totally pulling this out of my ear, without really analyzing the spots or putting any pencil to paper… just my ballpark first guesstimate as to what our budgets for those would be, is probably in the $5k-$15K range for each. The first one would be in the lower end, the second in the upper.

I could be wrong (I might be erring a tad on the low side), but I think that’s a decent starting-point guess…

T2

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

[Todd Terry]

[John Fishback] “Usually, you use CTB gel to warm up 5600K.”

Umm… I know that John knows what he’s talking about, so I think this was just a typo (unless he’s thinking about it backwards from what I am). To warm up your 5000°K LEDs to match the 5600&degK ceiling flos, you’d actually use CTO on the LEDs, not CTB.

If he was talking about putting gel on all the overheads (which is doable, but a lot harder), then yes you’d use CTB on them, but that would be to cool them down (raise the K temperature), not warm them up.

CTB is blue gel, “Color Temperature Blue,” usually used for raising a color temp (cooling it)
CTO is orange gel, “Color Temperature Orange,” usually used to lowering a color temp (warming it)

At any rate, you’re not going to need much to warm your LEDs from 5600K to 5000K… that’s not much of a jump at all… you certainly won’t need full CTO, or even half CTO. My guess is quarter-CTO or even eighth. The easiest cheapest thing would be to buy 1/8 CTO and see if that works. If it’s not enough, just double it up.

T2

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

[Todd Terry]

I’ll jump in with an answer that his honestly not me trying to be flippant or a general smartass:

Ask your CPA.

Those questions are all important enough (and, depending on where you live, different enough) that the really only good/smart/best advice is going to come from a pro in your area.

If you don’t have an accountant, get one. And for simple questions it’s not going to cost a fortune.

We have had the same CPA for 20 years, as of this year. We don’t use him for day-to-day accounting, regular bookkeeping, payroll, or any of that stuff that we do in house… but he is invaluable when it comes to tricky questions that we can’t answer ourselves and for keeping us all in line at tax time.

T2

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