Todd Terry
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COW Coin
Forum Replies Created
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This is my second try, an earlier post had some accidently-jumbled paragraphs and sentences (that’s why it was deleted).
Anamorphics are cool. BUT… my question would be, WHY do you want to shoot anamorphic? I’m guessing that your stuff appears on the boob tube or on computer screens… and unless it actually appears in a real movie theatre on the big screen I’ve never been able to think of even one reason to justify shooting anamorphic over spherical lenses.
If it is simply because you want the 2.35:1 screen ratio of the anamorphic look, rather than the 16:9 ratio of HD (which is roughly the film equivalent of 1.66:1 widescreen)… then by far the easiest/fastest/cheapest way to do that is simply letterbox the images in post. I think the C100 should allow you to set 2.35:1 crop marks in the viewfinder, which will help you when shooting (I said I think it will, because the C300 will and so I think the C100 should, too).
Anamorphics are clunky, somewhat difficult to use, and tend to be very expensive. As I said, they are great for widescreen when shooting an actual film negative or for projects destined for a real movie theatre screen, but if what you are doing is winding up on a 16:9 screen then there’s not much point in doing it.
I know a number of people who shoot anamorphics, and frankly if you pressed most of them as to the “Why?” question, most of them would have to admit that they do it simply because they think it’s cool to do so (I know one guy who shoots them simply because he likes the oval-shaped bokeh highlights because he thinks that looks “expensive”…ha) . There are very few practical reasons to do so for non big-widescreen presentations. Spherical lenses are much easier, faster, and cheaper, and with letterboxing you can get the same result.
Since you are shooting the C100 you are stuck with the EF mount… I can’t say they don’t exist, but I’ve never heard of an anamorphic cine lens with an EF mount. They are predominately going to be PL mount. There are front-of-lens anamorphic adapters that will accomplish the squeezing, but that’s not quite the same as a true anamorphic lens. That’s the only way I can think of to do it with an EF lens.
If you really want to shoot real anamorphics (and don’t want to drop six figures on lenses), then the go-to lenses are the vintage Russian LOMO anamorphics. The cold-war LOMO factory churned out REALLY great lenses back in the day (I’ve used many LOMO primes and zooms, and they are awesome). They used to be plentiful and relatively inexpensive, but in the last 10 years when people started putting real cine lenses on electronic cameras, it has really sapped the market. You can still find them, but they are more pricey and it takes a bit of digging to find great ones.
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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So glad you are back in gear, Nick!
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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Oh it’s definitely a dolly shot… the foreground and central planes move at different rates, so that shows you it is a dolly.
Actually, as it is side-to-side motion, technically it is a truck rather than a dolly… but yes, a dolly move.
Yes that’s a slider move, but it is a very VERY tiny move as you might imagine. There are little basically “micro sliders” that are made just for this type of photography… they are usually geared so that you have good control over the move. It’s not something that we really ever do so I can’t point you to a specific brand/make/model/vendor, but that technology is in place and it works exact as how you imagined.
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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Dang… Mark is very inventive, but that sure sounds like a lot of work (and when you get right down to it I’m really soooo lazy).
For the last one we built, the mirror not only needed to be a very specific size but a very specific shape as well, as it was an oddball shape (I designed it to fit inside our existing matte box, so that I didn’t have to assemble or disassemble anything), so it needed a custom shape with funky corners to fit just right….
We designed the exact shape needed and ordered it from these people…
https://www.telepromptermirror.com/
It arrived in just a couple of days and wasn’t expensive at all… I don’t remember exactly but I think it was in the $70-75 range. Not bad at all for real beamsplitter glass with a custom cut shape and polished edges and all that jazz. I really should have bought a spare, but I didn’t. I think they keep the templates on file.
Ok, my quick personal story… 20+ years ago when I worked in broadcast television I was a promotions producer for an NBC station. For afternoon news teases we would actually wheel one of the big BIG full-size studio cameras (remember those?) from the studio into the adjacent control room and one of our anchors would record teases. I cooked this up to give us a different look than the usual “on set” teases. Well this meant wheeling the camera (and dragging its umbilical) about 75 feet from the stage out into a hallway and into the control room (passing through two regular-size doors along the way). One day I crashed it into a door jam and broke the prompter glass. And this was in the days of the BIG prompters with a big-and-heavy CRT tube and everything. This was 3pm… between then and the 5pm newscast I ran to a glass company and had a piece of plain ol’ picture frame glass cut of the right size and shape and installed it myself (not non-glare glass of course). I never even told the engineering department. NO one was the wiser. That glass stayed in place… a $7 piece of glass on a $200,000 camera… until I left that job years later. Shhhhh!
If they hadn’t switched to much smaller HD cameras and LCD prompters since then it would probably still be there.
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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A functional teleprompter is very easy to build. I need to make a video of the one that I have… which was built for less than a hundred bucks (the prompter mirror was the only real cost), if you don’t count the two tablets we use to run it. It can literally be assembled and mounted in less than five seconds… no exaggeration. It’s much less clunky than the previous “store bought” laptop-based prompter system we used to use.
Ear prompting does work, and can work well. BUT… your talent must be very proficient at doing it. Not everyone is. If you cast a lot of actors, as we do, you’ll notice in the “skills” section of their resumes that about a third of them will say “Ear Prompter Proficient”… usually right under “Can ride a bicycle” (why do actors list this and think it’s a unique skill??). I’d say that about half those that claim ear prompter proficiency are actually good and natural at it. Conversely, we’ve seen many people who didn’t even know what a teleprompter was that were pretty darn natural with it right out of the gate, first try.
Plus, with an ear prompter it’s a lot more difficult to make a script change on the fly (as well as speed, delivery, or pacing adjustments), whereas with a visual prompter it’s easy breezy.
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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You deserve absolutely zero percent of the blame. Don’t take any of it, no matter how much of it they throw your way. You are completely and totally 100% in the right, and in the clear.
I don’t know where I heard the term “nuisance client” (it might have been in here, maybe even from Mark), but sometimes the term certainly fits.
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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Others may have differing opinions than mine, and I’d be eager to hear them…..
But as for me… um, no. You don’t owe them the project files, and even if you still had them, I wouldn’t give them to them.
The parameters of the job may have been different than I’m assuming, but to me it sounds like your original contract with this client specified that you were to deliver a finished product… which you did. Done. End. Finished. You gave them what you owed them and they (I assume) paid for it.
Unless your agreement with them stipulated they were also entitled to all the production elements that went into the project as well as the project itself, then you don’t owe them anything else. I’m assuming they did not pay an archival fee either, so it was not your responsibility to even keep the files for future use.
Now… that’s the technical side of things. There’s also the emotion and client side of things. If this is a good client… say an agency that you have a long-time relationship with and one that pays you a great deal of money on a regular basis, then that’s another thing. In that case it’s up to your judgment as to how much to bend and what to give them, or offer to discount to them (which it sounds like that is what you are doing). In some cases, it pays in the long term to help them get what they need.
I recently directed and my company produced a series of commercials for a local attorney (a job through his ad agency). It was a pretty smallish job, definitely not big money… but of course he was absolutely THE biggest pain-in-the-ass client ever (at least so far, in our 18 years in business). And it took us something like five months to get paid. He loved his spots though… but now he wants some alternate versions. We’re too expensive for him though (and so is his ad agency, apparently), so he directly went out and found someone else to post them… but he still asked us for our raw footage. Well, he can’t have it… or at least certainly not for free. To start with, our job was to produced finished commercials… which we did. Also, he wasn’t even our direct client, his ad agency hired us… we had absolutely no on-paper direct business or financial arrangement with him. I did quote him though our usual reasonable-and-fair rates for getting him the footage in the file formats he needs, and rights to use it. I believe his return comment was “That seems pretty expensive.” Sorry, you don’t get it for free.
Use your judgment as to what to give them, and don’t burn any important bridges. But as for “The agency seem annoyed…” well, unless they are a cash cow to you, let ’em be annoyed. It won’t kill them.
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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Yep, one quick Google of this post’s text showed virtually the same identical verbage popping up on numerous forums, both from “Beth Rivers” and from another name.
Sadly, the source/company/site might be perfectly useful, but now I will never ever so much as even click on the link because I don’t trust their methods.
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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[Beth Rivers] “I think https://www.b-rollstock.com is offering better deals with their concept of B-roll packages.”
You think that? Or you know that, because you are associated with that company?
Sorry to be a skeptic (and it may be unfounded), but the COW as of late seems to have a lot of people raving about some new product, gadget or service that they’ve “just heard about” or “been meaning to check out” or that “a friend has tried,” etc… and when you look at the poster they are invariably brand-new, with no personal or company details, and have just joined the COW that day. I mean, it’s possible, but why would someone brand new bother to sign up just to make a recommendation or a positive follow-up post about something they “think” they know about (“think” being the poster’s word) on an almost year-old thread that hasn’t had any activity since its first week? Hmmmmmm….. it’s just so painfully transparent.
If people would just be upfront….
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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Hmmm sadly no, not really.
Would it be possible to shoot something else that demonstrates this anomaly (other than your secret object) and post the actual footage?
Also, what is your ISO setting? And color temp setting? And what is the type and color temperature of your lighting instruments?
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
