Todd Terry
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COW Coin
Forum Replies Created
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Thanks Erik…
Yes, the only downside I’ve really heard about them was the plasticy-ness of the build.
Here’s a video though of a guy who is pretty darn rough on it and the instrument was none the worse for wear, which made me feel a little better about it…
I’ll note though that in each of these drops, it did look like the instrument landed pretty much perfectly flat on its face. I’m not sure they would have the same results if it landed on its side, or on a corner.
And yes, it looks like size is definitely an issue. Weight won’t be, as I think they are pretty lightweight and I’ll be taking the power supplies off for location use (we go with batteries for everything now… outside the occasional HMI I can’t even remember the last time I plugged an instrument into AC). Of course that doesn’t cut down on the size.
I’m probably buying them today…
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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Very good, maybe you will get a better idea of what you are facing when you get to a practical setting and see all of the goings-on. The church might be helpful, but I’d expect the TV station trip to be much more useful.
And yep, LEDs will definitely help your power consumption… but just as (or even more) importantly, it will help with heat issues (which in turn help with air conditioning issues).
Unless things have radically changed in the last year or so, virtually all TV environments are tungsten balanced. I think some that has to do with the fact that that’s simply how it has been done since the beginning of television. While the three types of instruments that can be 5600K (LEDs, flos, HMIs) are used in studio environments, that’s rarely all you’ll see used… there are almost always some tungsten instruments peppered throughout a lighting plot. Most TV stations simply still have a boatload of them around, and they will do some things that other kinds of instruments simply will not do (such as, if you needed a tiny focusable instrument with a long throw for a little splash on a set piece somewhere). And since it is a great deal easier to turn “daylight” into “tungsten” than it is the other way around, on most stages you’ll predominately see a 3200K plot.
And yes, you can gel and LED just as you would a tungsten instrument. You just don’t have to worry about the gel melting.
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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[Bob Cole] ” I got to drive around Scotland for a week in a new Mercedes Benz, for the price of the Focus.”
Nice!! I’ll one up you though… once on a shoot in Vegas the casino hotel was overbooked and gave our room away in error. We had to make do with the “chairman’s” penthouse suite, Frank’s old digs. Probably 3000 square feet, full tacky Old Vegas so anything that wasn’t mirrored was gold plated… several bedrooms, a half dozen baths, living room, bar, balcony jacuzzi… I kept imagining Sammy playing at the grand piano that was in the living room. Ahhhh…. Sadly they only put us up there for one day/night before sorting out their mistake 🙁
As for Scotland, looks like everything is worked out there for next week’s shoot, thanks to fellow bovine Tom Sefton and his assistance there. The COW rules!
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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Keith…
There are some really smart and helpful people here on the COW, and you’ll probably get a lot of suggestions… but here’s mine…
There’s tons of knowledge needed about several different areas of expertise here in order to do this right… and no one could reasonable expect you or anyone in your position to become an expert (or even really well informed) about it all overnight. Especially admitting “I am new to this and I need help.” Of course no one is faulting you for being new or not knowing all the ins and outs of this.
I’d say you definitely need some professional on-site consulting… someone who is used to working in (and in a perfect world, designing) studio environments who can come in and see your space, assess what you need, and give you some good advice. You have three very disparate areas there (lighting, audio, video/switching), and even that person will probably ask for advice from experts in those three different fields.
If you don’t have the budget to bring in a pro to handle that, maybe you could make a call and beg some advice from a local television station in your town (especially if you are in a sizable enough market and have a really good station). You’d need to talk with the “production manager” there, and since it is for a school I’m betting he or she would be glad to at least give you a site visit and help you begin to understand all what you need.
I could start spouting off advice, but the last thing I’d want to do is start recommending things that aren’t actually what you really need, because we don’t know what all you are dealing with there.
And yes, it’s a good problem to have…
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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[Daniel Hoffman] ” I guess I just wonder why so many different disciplines (acting, music, photo, etc.) have rights agreements, but graphic artists don’t.”
Well, your rights are are what you decide for them to be, and you can certainly craft future agreements with that in mind and only license specific works for specific projects and require fees for re-use… that is certainly totally doable.
You might get some blowback from your clients, though, they’re just not used to doing it that way.
In a similar vein, our commercial production agreements provide a finished production… a client does not own or have the rights to any elements that make it up. Nor do they own raw footage we have shot. We spell that out very explicitly in our contracts. Also, while they own the rights to the finished project, they only have rights to its use as is… they cannot, for example, lift a shot out of a commercial we produced and use it in another one somewhere else (and yes, we’ve had that exact thing happen). But we can really only effectively exercise that right because we spell it out in our agreements in advance… otherwise, it might get ugly.
We recently had a client (an attorney) ask for his raw footage, because he found someone cheaper to do some web commercials for him. Our response was “Certainly,” and gave him a price for the rights to use it. His only response was an email saying “Hmmm that’s kinda expensive” (which it wasn’t), and we never heard from him again. In his case, he wasn’t really our client… he was our client’s client (his ad agency hired us). So not only was this guy trying to get his footage for free, but he was doing an end-run around the very advertising agency he hired to do the whole thing in the first place. He didn’t get very far.
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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Yeah, you’ll get better results from a real greenscreen rather than trying to paint a white cyc with green light, that’s for sure.
It sort of depends on your usage and how often you need it. If this is something that needs to be put up and down on a fairly regular basis, and you don’t need it to be huge, then seamless is probably the way to go. It’s cheap, easy to roll up and down at will (especially if you have a roller system), and fairly trouble free. You are going to be limited in width, though, whereas with a cloth background you can get a really huge one (our green backdrop is 10×20, and I know even much larger ones are available).
If it is a more permanent installation where you can more or less consider your stage the “green studio” and don’t need it for anything else other than infrequent uses where you need the white cyc, I’d probably go with a cloth background, and find some way to stretch it tight.
I’m a little bit of a hypocrite here, as we use a cloth greenscreen but it does go up and own frequently. We have a system that keeps it pretty well stretched tight top-to-bottom and side-to-side. That will eliminate most of the wrinkles. We are also careful that we fold it up (more like a combination of roll and fold) so that it stays in pretty decent shape for the next outing. If it has been stored for a while, we’ll use wrinkle remover on it. Downy makes a product that does that, but it’s kinda a big job (and would get expensive). We found a generic off-brand version at a local dollar store for about a buck a bottle and I bought lots of it and put it in a pump-up garden sprayer. Spray it good, when it dries the wrinkles are gone. It works extremely well, with two caveats… firstly, you have to do it at least the day before a shoot, as it takes a while for the stuff to dry… otherwise, you look like you have a wet drop. Secondly, the stuff is scented… so for a day or two your stage is going to smell a bit like a laundromat. Not bad, but definitely noticeable. It didn’t bother me at all, but some people are more sensitive to smells.
I’ll probably install a seamless one someday, I’ve got some drops in the roller system that are practically never used… I could swap one out for a green one and have the best of both worlds.
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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Yep the music situation is very similar, in fact I meant to include music in my original list.
Virtually all music, except what is available in “buyout” packages, is going to be “rights managed”… individual tracks licensed for individual usage for specific periods of time.
Music rights are going to be among the most complicated (and expensive) rights a producer will have to deal with… probably 10x more complicated than any deal with an actor.
And different kinds of rights cost different amounts, of course. When we produce a television commercial, sometimes well after the fact we’ll get the call “Can I get a file to put on my website, or YouTube?” Well, sure you can, but you may or may not have music rights to do that. And then the client is surprised to find that internet music rights can be a lot more expensive than broadcast rights… sometimes four or five times as much. They’ll say “Just for my little website??”… well yes, their “little” website is potentially viewable by billions of people, whereas their local or regional commercial has a limited geographic audience.
Not to get into the nuts and bolts of it, but there are so many kinds of rights… publishing rights, performance rights, synchronization, mechanical rights… and each means something different and has to be taken into account depending on the situation and usage. It can get very hairy.
One story that I think I’ve told here before… a few years ago I directed a commercial for country music star John Anderson. He was a pretty big star then (not so much anymore), and he was hawking this barbecue sauce that had his name on it. He and his ad agency wanted to use a particular hit song of his in the commercial, an obvious choice. He wrote it, so no problem, right? Very wrong. He wrote it, and owned the publishing rights… but he didn’t own the actual recording, Sony did. Hmmm. So, he thought, I’ll just re-record it. Hmm, well, no… he wrote it, but he wasn’t the SOLE writer, he had a co-writer. So they both owned the publishing rights. But no… the co-writer was now deceased, so his estate was co-owner of the publishing rights. There were a couple of more twists and turns that made it even more complex. In the end, John went and wrote something custom for the commercial sort of in the same vein of the song he wanted to use, and recorded it in his home studio.
And from what I understand from people who do a lot of it, that wasn’t an unusually complex situation… more like par for the course.
This is why we almost always use buyout music, but even that has issues. A few years ago we did a big campaign for a bottled water company. We searched and searched, and finally found the perfect track, and on top of that it was from a fairly obscure source, not from the usual three or four music companies we usually use. The very day that the campaign started airing, NBC began using the same exact track as music for the promotional programming bumpers for all their shows…. so you could hear this same exact track, every half hour, on every NBC station, pretty much 24/7. We were pretty annoyed, but we had no exclusive rights to the track, so there was nothing to be done about it.
Oh well……..
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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[Daniel Hoffman] “Actors get royalties though and animators do not. Though our animations are essentially us acting on screen through our graphics right?”
Well, yep they essentially are.
The difference is, your finished graphic doesn’t have an agent constantly asking for more money nor belong to a union that governs its usage.
It’s also about future marketability. If an actor appears in a commercial for a regional Honda Dealers Association (one of my clients), for example, and doesn’t have any protection as to the length of its usage or geographical usage, that would very likely bar that actor from getting hired for work with any other brand of automotive work anywhere. However, if his commercial was stipulated for a 13-week run only in the state of Florida, that’s unlikely to have any affect on the actor being cast in a job for BMW Association in California. When you put out casting calls for talent through Breakdown Services or any of the other big companies that manage casting calls for talent agents, one of the first things you have to list is “conflicts.” For example, one of our big clients is a large credit union, and we’re constantly casting actors for them… and the conflict we always list is “national financial institutions.” The same pool of actors is constantly going for all the same jobs, big or small. If I didn’t list the conflict it would be entirely possible (likely, even) that I’d get a submission for my southeastern credit union from an actor currently appearing in a national Bank of America ad.
Your graphics work for Company A doesn’t preclude you from also (even simultaneously) doing graphics work for Company B… unless of course there is some kind of exclusivity agreement.
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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By the way, Daniel, you do great work.
Although, I was mildly confused for a moment because the first time I clicked your link it took me to a site in Japanese for an on-line drugstore that specialized in hair care products. Couldn’t say why, I didn’t do anything but click. Tried it in a different browser and it took me to your correct site.
Good stuff.
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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Typically when a client buys a design for something…. a graphic element, logo, color palette design, whatever… then they have usually bought the rights to do with it however they please, for as long as they please.
UNLESS you have specific language in your original agreement with them that limited its usage to a certain thing. You might want to do that in the future if you expect this to come up again and want to be paid for it for each usage… but be forewarned that clients don’t like to hear that, they definitely have a “I paid for it, it’s mine” mentality.
Of course there can be stumbling blocks to that. For example, you might buy a font (or other graphic element) for use in a design. But the rights for that font stipulate that while it is free for use for an ad or whatever, it cannot be used on an item that is to be sold. You see that stipulation all the time. So, lets say a garage band asks you to create a logo for them, and you chose a font or other element like that and only license the most basic usage rights from the vendor. Well, you could use that and create banners and posters and stuff like that all day. But then, they come and ask you to design a tee shirt that they are going to sell at concerts. In that case you would not only bill for your tee-shirt design, but you would also have to re-license them the logo design itself because you would have to go back and pay more for a different (more inclusive) license for the font.
You’ll see similar stipulations in the licenses for stock photography… where rights purchases include some usages but not others.
In our business where we predominately produce television commercials, we mostly run into that with actors’ performances. If a client calls us and wants to re-air a production we did for them a year or two ago, we don’t charge them any kind of re-licensing fee for our work that went into the spot, they’ve already paid for that. But, they might not have the rights to the performances of actors in the spot… maybe we had only contracted with the talent for a 13 or 26-week run (it just depends on what kind of deal we made with the actor and/or their rep). If the time has run out, then they are going to have to pony up and pay the actor again. That is one reason we don’t use union talent unless we just have to, because then we are automatically bound to the specified time periods for usage that was in our original SAG/AFTRA agreement. Almost identical situations exist with narration and music tracks as well.
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
