[Todd Terry]

The old joke in the advertising world is that is you are completely out of ideas… write a jingle or hire a celebrity (along with “For extra impact, put type on a slant,” and the rule that a billboard should be seven words or less).

I think celebrity endorsements are okay, but I can’t stand the ones that seem so completely random. The late Fred Thomson did spots for a reverse mortgage company. That made some sense, he was not only an actor but a retired senator with some gravitas, and was also exactly in the age bracket as the target audience.

On the flip side, there’s a series of PSAs about brain health and brainhealth.gov featuring actress Marcia Gay Harden… who keeps magically appearing in scenes to talk to people about their brains (usually accompanied by something like “Aren’t you Marcia Gay Harden?” or “Wow it’s Marcia Gay Harden!”). These I totally don’t get at all. I mean, no disrecspect to her at all, but she’s hardly an A-list actor and I don’t think the average person would recognize her on the street, and she has no known connection to the subject. Maybe it’s a personal cause to her, and if so, more power to her… but we certainly don’t know that from the spots.

If a celebrity doesn’t have a real tangible connection to the subject… you run the risk of this…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MXry-cXybG0&feature=youtu.be

T2

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

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[Todd Terry]

It all depends on the look you are going for. 24p is going to give you the most cinematic, filmic look. 60i is going to give you the most instant live “videoy” look. 30fps is going to be somewhere in the middle, although closer to the 24p progressive side than the 30, since it is also progressive.

Yes, you can certainly shoot 24p and distribute on broadcast television or DVD, we do that all the time. I shoot everything at 24p (23.976), yet virtually everything I do winds up on traditional 60i broadcast television. This is accomplished by taking my 24p master and outputting a 60i version just for TV. This all has to do with the “3:2 pulldown”… which is a pretty complex thing to explain, a little above what I can do in a quick forum post. Do a search for that term here or give it a Google and you’ll find lots of info about it. It’s really all just about the math that is required to convert a second’s worth of 24 progressive frames to 60 interlaced fields.

As for DVDs, you can do that the same way, outputting a 60i version of your 24p project for DVD mastering. We don’t usually do that, though… in the rare event that we make DVDs (usually just because a client wants one), we just make a 24p DVD, because virtually all DVD players now can handle 24p discs.

I would usually say do not change horses in mid stream, and if you have started a project with certain specs then you should stick to those specs for the entire project. However, sounds like you have only shot one interview at 30fps and 1/30th. In this case, since a talking head is the least likely thing to give away the fact that you’ve used a slower-then-normal shutter speed, then I think in this case I’d recommend that you bump up to 1/60th for the rest of the footage. They will intercut fine, and if you end up with scenes with more movement or action than a talking head then the 1/60th will look much much more appropriate for that.

What I would not probably do though is switch from 30fps to 24fps. You could, but you’d have to conform or reinterpret your 30fps footage in editing to 24fps, and I couldn’t guarantee that you’d be happy with the results. If you want to shoot 24p for the rest of the project, it’s probably worth a quick test to see if your 30fps footage looks acceptable inserted into a 24p project. It might, and if it does then you might want to continue the rest of your project at 24p (at 1/48th shutter!) to complete it (assuming that’s the look you want), since it’s just the one interview at 30fps.

The safest route though would be to continue the project at 30fps (although at 1/60th), and save the more cinematic-looking 24p for your next project.

Hope this helps….

T2

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

[Todd Terry]

Well “weird” is a subjective description.

If your documentary contained primarily, say, talking heads, or other scenes where there was not a lot of action or movement within the frame, then the unusually slow shutter speed might not have been evident.

Typically, a “normal” frame rate is “one over twice the frame rate.” That is, for 24fps shooting you’d typically see 1/48th of a second as “normal,” for the 30fps in your case that’d be 1/60th.

Those are the shutter speeds that give the amount of motion blur needed for our brains to interpret the action as smooth and fluid. You don’t often see people using a slower than normal speed, but you see people shooting higher than normal all the time. This gives the “narrow shutter” look where motion has a staccato look, often in an attempt to make action scenes look more “actiony.” Sometimes it is an effect that is used very well (“Saving Private Ryan”) but often it is not (almost every other movie that tries it). Again, it’s not too common to see a slower than normal shutter speed as you used. This of course gives the opposite of the narrow shutter look. Rather than giving the sharp blur-free images of high shutter speeds, this is going to introduce much more motion blur in each frame than normal. With scenes with not much movement you might not notice it that much. In scenes with a lot of movement you might notice a sort of “smeary” look to the action since there is twice as much motion blur.

In the future, I’d stick with the “normal” shutter speeds, unless you purposely choose to use one higher or lower for a specific visual effect.

T2

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

[Todd Terry]

Hmmmm…. never got it, nor in spam.

Appreciate the follow-up though, I’ll check ’em out!

T2

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

[Todd Terry]

Thanks Mike, will check them.

Thanks Ned… I have received no messages from you, though. Did you email?

T2

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

[Todd Terry]

This project has had a bit of a delay… so I thought I’d update on some specs in case anyone was curious.

We still need to do another round of testing, but I think we are going to forego the GoPros and shoot instead with DJI OSMO cameras. They are only a couple hundred bucks more than GoPros, and in side-by-side comparisons (at least to my eye) the OSMO looks infinitely better than the GoPro. It just has a more “legit” and non-GoPro-y look to it, if that makes any sense. Plus, there’s the stabilized gimbal, and we should be able to use them basically as remote heads. But best of all, the OSMO camera has manual control of shutter speed, the one thing that I think the GoPros are sorely lacking… that feature alone is enough to make my decision for me.

True the OSMOs are not as small and easy to tuck away as GoPros, but I think the image trade-off is worth it.

Will report back, if and when this project ever happens. These are actually PSAs (although paid, so technically commercials) funded by government money… and those wheels turn slowly which is what has been holding us up.

T2

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

[Todd Terry]

[Tim Wilson] ” I meant to write you and ask where the heck your reply is.”

Somehow I just overlooked this post and it’s 893 replies. Dunno why, just didn’t see it… but glad I found it, very cool to read.

Last real film project… hmm oh gosh, memory fails me. I literally can’t even remember what the project might have been. It was probably 5+ years ago now, maybe even more. Just no need for it anymore, which does make me a little sad. Film was fun.

I primarily shot 35mm with a Russian Konvas 1KCP-7M, Arri 535B, and Moviecam SuperAmerica. I used the same glass I still use today on those, except the Konvas on which I used Russian LOMO lenses. The LOMOs were unbelievably great lenses, and you used to be able to get them for a song. But then with the advent first of DoF converters and then big-sensor cameras, the demand for 35mm cine primes took off and the prices skyrocketed (and the once-plentiful availability dried up big time). On rare occasions I would shoot 16mm, with my Bolex 16 Pro (a very cool camera that almost no one, even veteran cinematographers, had ever seen… they only made 300 of them).

My primes are sort of a funky hybrid. They started life as Leitz medium format still camera lenses, and then someone somehow got them “Panavised” by a Panavision tech and they were rebarreled and remounted as proper cine lenses. I have 18mm, 35mm, 50mm, and 80mm, all at f/1.3. I sure wish I had a 28mm and maybe a 100mm or 120mm, but alas, I don’t. They are very sharp and contrastly, slightly on the cool side… the pretty much look exactly like Cookes to me (although they are faster, and were a fair bit cheaper than a new set of $100K Cooke S4/I primes). I bought them off a Hollywood DP of some note quite a few years ago. Like everything else in our business equipment depreciates and starts falling like a rock the second you buy it. But semi-interestingly enough, high-end glass is the one exception to the rule… these lenses are probably worth a fair bit more today than when I bought them. Nothing else here is.

And yes, DoF converters were an amazing thing back in their day, they certainly changed the way we did things, for sure. Any use for them anymore? Well, as doorstops, but that’s about it. When we bought the C300 we didn’t have any use for ours any more, so I thought I’d sell it. Ours was (and still is) the Rolls Royce of converters, the P+S Technik Mini35. It was a bit disheartening to see them on eBay for a few hundred bucks (I paid $13,000 for it new). So… it’s still on a shelf behind the studio cyc, gathering dust.

T2

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

[Todd Terry]

I just saw this… wildly interesting to see what other people are doing/using.

We shoot probably 95% of all footage we use. The other 5% is stock that we purchase. Rarely if ever are we given footage by a client or other source.

I shoot almost exclusively with the Canon C300, PL mount version, with Leitz/Panavision superspeed primes. I have a vintage Russian Foton zoom for the times I need a zoom lens, but shoot almost exclusively with primes. We will probably trade up to the C300 Mark II, the camera we us now is the “original” C300. We have completely retired 35mm film shooting, although strangely enough there are still bunches of cans of filmstock in the fridge.

Probably 90-95% of our work is broadcast television commercials. The remaining small amount is corporate/industrial stuff.

About 95% of what we produce winds up on broadcast television. The rest winds up on the web.

We’re an all-PC house, each suite editing with Premiere and the other toys in the Adobe suite, on PCs with Matrox guts (three machines are Matrox MX02, one older one is Matrox AXIO LE).

About half of our clients are advertising agencies, the other half are clients we work directly for.

With direct clients we virtually always do all of the creative on their projects, from concept to delivery. With the ad agencies it’s about half and half…. for about half of them we do the creative, for the other half (one ones that either know television, or more likely think they know television) we are handed scripts and we go from there.

We’re a tiny company, only three of us full time. I’m the company Creative Director and I direct all of our shoots. I also DP and am always my own camera op, so shoots are busy for me. My biz partner is the General Manager, doing all the bean counting and he also serves as producer on most of our projects. Either he or I will handle all the writing duties. We have an editor who handles the majority of our post jobs, but I will edit as well. We have an Art Director (coincidentally, my better half) who works as needed… she is hired when we need extra art direction, production design for bigger jobs, things like that.

I appreciate Tim for posing these questions, very interesting.

T2

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

[Todd Terry]

It’s tough. I’d say Mark’s advice about concentrating on a particular area is very good. People like seeing work from their same realms. Unfortunately, non-creatives tend to not have much vision. We often get the call “Have you ever worked for a ….” with the potential client asking ONLY about their particular line of work, even though from a visual and storyteller sense many others are virtually the same. But virtually the same is not the same as the same, and some people just can’t see it.

Types of clients seem to breed more of the same. We didn’t set out to become a “healthcare production company” but once we started working for one gigantic hospital it seems a bunch of other healthcare stuff followed… doctors, clinics, practices, etc., all just from word of mouth.

The exact same thing has happened to us with financial institutions, legal, automotive, etc.

The last time I did portfolio updates I created special and specific reels for healthcare, financial, automotive, legal, and political. It seems that a great many people don’t give a hoot about seeing work for other types of businesses (even though personally that’s exactly what I often would rather show).

And as Mark said, certainly don’t show anything perceived as “lower end” to high-end companies… not that there’s anything at all wrong with real estate or wedding work (and I know some very good people who do that), but if we did anything like that I wouldn’t even let high-end potential clients know it even happened. It just seems to taint their perceptions.

T2

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

[Todd Terry]

[John Cuevas] ” Does anyone charge for stock footage that they purchased for Client A, and then use it client D’s video?”

Absolutely. We do that all the time. Often it’s not as much as the clip’s full cost the first time around, but we do charge something. And we make sure we don’t use the same footage for competing clients or for airing in the same broadcast markets.

Also, we only do that (or re-use footage period) if we have the rights to do so… it just depends on what usage rights were purchased when initially acquiring the stock. In some cases it is allowed, and in some it is not.

We do exactly the same thing with other rights-purchased assets, such as music tracks.

T2

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