Todd Terry
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COW Coin
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That’s just a plain ol’ zoom, probably done in camera (although it could have been done in post).
And yep, in that case, I think it “works”… largely because it was a hectic scene with a moving camera.
I think camera movement is part of the key, zooms today seem to work better during handheld shots, I think, and much less so during “supported” shots.
And yes, although it is fairly rare I do break my own rule and use zooms, especially for political spots since those are pretty much the only ones I direct where I do a lot of handheld.
You can find two examples on these pages, spots I directed where I did use zooms….
https://fantasticplastic.com/portfolio/news013.html
https://fantasticplastic.com/portfolio/news001.htmlIf you watch those you’ll notice that (with one exception) all the tripod and dolly-based camera moves used primes… whereas the zooms only happened during handheld shots.
It’s all aesthetics, not math so there are no right and wrong answers… but I just think that the organic quality of a handheld camera just seems to lend itself to allowing one to get away with zooms. Maybe it’s because those shots look more “documentaryish” than ones with a supported camera.
There are no hard and fast rules that always work. Sometimes you might find a zoom that works in a particular situation, and it doesn’t in another even though they may be very similar.
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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This is TOTALLY not what our original subject was (and don’t you love when people hijack threads?), but….
Since Rick continued my mentioning of zooms, this discussion of zooms is the perfect opportunity for me to get on my “Anti Zooms Soapbox” that I climb up on about once a year and annoy the bejeepers out of people with… so here goes…
If you want to use a zoom lens, all fine and good. BUT DON’T ZOOM WITH IT. That is, do not change the focal length, zooming in and out, during a shot. You’ll be much better served to just think of it as a varifocal lens, that lets you use a 35mm or 50mm or 80mm or whatever, just without changing the glass.
Now, of course you can break this rule, and there are sometimes reasons to do so (I’ve done it plenty myself), and on top of that there are ways to hide a zoom by combining it with another camera move. But in general, using a zoom in a shot is one of the quickest ways to look like a rank amateur… or to convince people you have Mr. Peabody’s Wayback Machine and it is 1979 again.
Why are zooms frowned on in modern-day shooting?
Because they are unnatural.
A zoom is the only camera move that the human eye cannot reproduce. With our eyes (and heads and bodies) we can pan, tilt, dolly, truck, crane, dutch, arc, and do a bunch of other camera moves… EXCEPT ZOOM (unless you are Steve Austin, The Six Million Dollar Man).
If you zoom into a subject rather than dollying in to a subject, the results are radically different. With both, your subject gets bigger in the frame. But with zooming, everything grows in the frame, locked together, just as if you moved closer to a still photograph. When the camera physically moves like in a dolly, the perspective on all the objects in the frame is constantly changing in relation to each other, a much more dynamic shot. And much more natural, exactly as your eye would see it, if you were physically in the scene.
Again, you can definitely break this rule, but if you do… have a legitimate reason for doing it.
Sorry… and now back to your regularly-scheduled discussion of mixing-and-matching lenses.
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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I had a minute so I threw together this quick example from a commercial shoot I directed last week.
There are two camera setups from the same scene. For one shot in each I used my 80mm Leitz superspeed prime wide open at f/1.3. The other shots were with my Russian Foton zoom at 140mm wide open at f/3.5.
Here’s a comparison, before and after color grading…
We are talking about radically different glass here. The Foton is a cheap thousand-buck zoom whereas the Leitz is a very high-end superspeed cine prime… a much superior lens to the Foton. The Leitz is very sharp, cool, and contrasty (all the things most DPs want), whereas the Foton is very warm and flat. I normally wouldn’t like to mix these two lenses but I really needed those particular focal lengths for this scene. Fortunately we were able to get good enough color grading in post that the lenses match. Well… they match close enough. Definitely not perfect, but good enough for quick two second shots in a commercial. If we had wrestled with it longer we might have gotten a better match, but that was more than adequate for what was needed.
Just a sample to show you that, no, lenses do not have to match. It’s really great when they do, but not an insurmountable problem when they don’t.
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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Ehhhh… hard to say… does the verbage of your contract basically say they can cancel the project with no money owed as long as they do that prior to 48 hours of the shoot time?
If that’s the case, they may have a gigantic loophole that they are exercising… and they might be owed their deposit back.
It’s hard to say without reading it. Might be time to lawyer up, if the job is big enough to warrant it and you don’t want to walk away.
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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It’s hard to say, Greg, with out seeing your actual agreement.
If it is a true real contract with the verbage necessary to make it a contract… and if all parties have agreed to it, then they can’t just back out of it unless it contains some provisions for them doing so. That’s what the contract is there for… to protect them by making sure you do the work and to protect you by making sure they pay you the money. If either party has the leeway to say at any time “Ehhh, I don’t think we want to play anymore,” well then it’s useless to even have the contract.
You keep using the word “agreement” so I don’t know if it is a real contract or not. Ours too all say “Agreement” at the top, because the word “Contract” is a bit scary and off-putting… but actually ours are contracts… because they contain the three things that legally make them a contract: offer, acceptance, and consideration. If yours has those three things, and all parties have agreed to it in writing (or legally, even a handshake or verbal agreement) you have a contract and they can’t just decide on a whim they don’t want to play anymore.
So, if you do have a legal and binding contract… no, you don’t owe them the deposit back. And they owe you the rest of the money, as well. Just depends on what exactly it says… and how much you want to fight to get it.
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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Of course it is ok to use different lenses, that’s the way it is usually done… I typically travel with and use as many as five different lenses.
I will say that using your single 16mm for wide, medium, and closeup shots is very unusual. Granted, I have no idea what you are shooting or what your subject is, so it might be entirely appropriate to do it that way. But if you were, for example, shooting a person or a conversation, that is a very unusual way of doing it. It would basically mean moving your camera toward and away from the subject for your three different shots. That might look very very odd, because your perspective to the subject and its relationship to the background will be very different than what people are used to seeing.
Lets say you are shooting a person in a downtown setting, streets and buildings a good distance away. You could shoot the person at eight feet away, five feet away, and three feet away. That would give you your wide, medium, and closeup shots of your subject. But… the view of the background (since it is some distance away) would be largely unchanged. That could (or more like would) look very odd when cut together. The much more conventional way would be to maintain more-or-less the same camera position, and use wide, medium, and close lenses. That’s the way people are used to seeing it done. Now… granted, again I don’t know what you are shooting and it might be appropriate and maybe you are purposely going for this odd and unconventional look for some aesthetic reason… and if so, then of course it is fine.
So yes, you can mix lenses… but in a prefect world you want a matched set of lenses. These are specifically made to be used together. Even two lenses of the same type and manufacturer aren’t necessarily matched, a set is a specific group of lenses made together to work together (they are built at the same time, right down to using the same lot for the coatings, which can vary wildly). You can get around that, though. Of my five lenses, my four Leitz-Panavision primes are matched. But I also use one Russian Foton lens that is not. My Leitz lenses are definitely cooler and more contrasty than the Foton. But… I still mix them all the time, and with the right color grading in post they cut together just fine.
When you mix lenses, it’s usually not a sharpness issue… most lenses are, when used right, sharper than the formats we are shooting on. The usual difference has to do with lens type and the color/contrast differences. These can usually be matched in post… although it is harder to mix zooms with primes. It can be done, though.
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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Well, I couldn’t say because we don’t have any kill fee provisions in our contracts. They do exist in the world, but kill fees are really something that is much more common in the ad agency world than in the production world. Technically with a contract (or, I should say with a good contract), they owe you for the amount of the contract even if they later decide “Ehhh, we changed our minds and don’t want that after all.” That’s among the protections that a contract offers you, of course.
Production projects are generally shorter so you’re generally billing for the full amount… whereas an advertising agency’s work for a client might be a campaign that lasts for a year or two or even more… so therefore kill fees are common.
As for phone calls… yep… we charge for those (call your lawyer and ask a five-second question and see if you don’t get a bill for 10 minutes of his time). But we do it within reason. If we call a client and say “Was that supposed to be blue or green? Ok, thanks.” Well, that’s not a billable phone call. But a thirty-minute or hour-long conference call? That’s not a call, that’s a meeting… and billable as such. As you said, you’re not selling anything but your time… and that’s definitely time.
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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Yeah, bill for whatever time you have invested, return the rest. Although I’m guessing it’s not, if their deposit is small and doesn’t cover the time you’ve already put in, bill for the rest.
I’m sure that you (like we do) have a rate for meetings, phone calls, and all that other admin stuff that falls under the pre-production umbrella. Just figure up the time you’ve spent, and that’s their bill.
OR… I don’t know what your contract says. If it is ironclad, or if it specifies a “kill fee,” or a number of other things, you could legally be entitled to more… maybe even the full amount of the contract if they have cancelled it without a justifiable cause.
But I’d say just cut ’em loose. Bill for the real work already done (and yes meetings and phone calls are real work), and move on.
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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Thank you both… appreciate the suggestions.
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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[Mike Bissonette] “Does this mean if I do $5000 worth of work for the company but their client doesn’t pay them for six months that I have to wait six months for my $5000 payment?”
No, not at all.
It means you have to wait seven months to get paid, because the contract gives them another 30 days to pay after their client pays them.
[Mike Bissonette] “That’s between them and their client. Isn’t it?”
In a perfect world, yes. We have to deal with this all the time, as I’m sure many others in this forum do. Clients would love to have us all “be the bank,” and let bills ride while they are waiting to be paid. For some of us, it gets more complicated than that. For example, in the automotive biz, or other clients that depend on co-op money. Say, we produce a commercial for a car dealer (and we do many of those). Well, the ad agency would prefer not to pay us until they get paid by the car dealer. And the car dealer would prefer not to pay the agency until they they their co-op money from BMW or Porsche or whoever is paying the co-op. And you know each of those don’t write their checks the second the money comes it… they sit on it a while. So, yes, the wait can get lengthy… IF YOU LET IT.
What especially is bothersome to us in the commercial world is being made (or asked) to wait for our money when we know what the media buys are. If I produce a television commercial for a biggish client, I have little sympathy for a client who wants to make me wait before they pay a $12,000 bill for production when I know they’ve already paid television stations $120,000 this month for media buys to air it.
The key is to make sure the client knows that you are not the bank, and can’t let bills ride. True, as you said, your contract is with your client, not with their client. We’ve had to have this conversation with one particular agency more than once… that we don’t care at all when they get paid, whether it’s a week, or a month, a year, or never. Nor do we care if they get paid in advance. Our bill is due when it is due, and one has nothing to do with the other. Or at least it should be that way.
We’ve had to explain to a client more than once that we can’t do to others what they are trying to do to us… we can’t tell the utility company “You’ll get paid when we get paid,” or say that to our health insurance company, or to software companies that we subscribe to, or to my employees, or every single other payment that we have to make.
But… many don’t see it that way. It just depends on what you can and will put up with, your relationships with existing clients, and all that jazz.
But yes, if you sign that contract as is, you won’t get paid until they get paid. And if they never get paid, you never will. I’ve seen that happen, too. That exact scenario drove one of our city’s largest and oldest ad agencies into bankruptcy, and eventually out of business altogether.
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
