[Todd Terry]

[Mark Suszko] “…reminded me, fondly, of the over-exaggerated lighting effects they used to apply to Captain Kirk’s eye-lighting…”

LOVED the eyelighting on Kirk, which always seemed to me to be thrown in on him (and only him) for no apparent reason whatsoever (maybe to distract from the hairpiece?). Suddenly it was 1940 old Hollywood!!

Ahhh, good times….

T2

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

[Todd Terry]

[Bre Snitchler] ” I’m slightly embarrassed to ask how much they intended on paying me…”

Get over the slight embarrassment, and ask them.

You don’t have to phrase it like “How much are you going to pay me?” but something softer like “What’s your motion graphics budget on this project?” might be an easier way to ask.

Numbers are always hard, because we don’t know your exact skill level, the company’s expectations, or general budget levels, so the best I can do is guess.

Based on your $200/day, that rate would be $52,000 a year for a full-time real employee. That might be ok (considering they would also pay a lot of benefits, probably), but they should expect to pay a heckuva lot higher rate for a freelancer… since they hire you only as needed, aren’t laying out anything for vacation, benefits, insurance, and (likely) certain taxes. That’s why freelancers’ rates are a lot higher (and there is the expectation that a freelancer is working at a higher level and can do better work than someone on staff).

I don’t really have any experience with a situation like that where you are woking in someone else’s shop, on all their own gear, and using their resources. If you were working in your own company in your own facility with all your own stuff, and at a very high skill/proficiency level… then that rate would be ridiculously low (it’s right at a tenth of what we charge for those things, and we’re a mid-level company in a small market). But as a pure freelancer working out of their place, my only slightly-educated guess is that your rates are about half what they should be.

Of course on the flip side, you don’t want to price yourself out of a job… so tread lightly. But don’t give your work away, either.

Just my guesses of course… your mileage may vary.

T2

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

[Todd Terry]

Hmmm that’s a tough one. I can’t think of anything that would cause “flickering” especially when no artificial light sources are used… nor could I really see any flickering on the Vimeo clip. It looked pretty clean on this end.

A few questions that might help track it down, or at least find the point where this starts happening….

Are you able to see the flickering while shooting live?…either in the viewfinder, LCD screen, or an attached external monitor?

For footage that you know has flicker issues, do you see the flickering if the same camera raw files are viewed straight from the camera on an external monitor? Or is it only when you get to the post stage that it shows up?

You might also do an upload of a short original camera raw file that others and I might be able to download so we can take a better look at the real deal.

Not much help, I know, but I was not able to see the flickering here, so my ideas are limited….

T2

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

[Todd Terry]

Your Vimeo link is dead.

T2

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

[Todd Terry]

I might be confused (likely am), but are you talking about utilizing the two ports (labeled EXT1 and EXT2) on the camera body that connect to the LCD/control unit?… and using those to power another/different external monitor?

If so… those are not LEMO connectors. Yes, they sort of resemble LEMOs, but they are not… they are proprietary Canon connectors. As far as I know they are not available either as a part or for use for anything else. I wish the connectors were available, actually, as I would like to build some extension cables so the LCD and control unit could be used away from the camera.

If that is not what you are talking about, my apologies….

T2

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

[Todd Terry]

Well it all just goes back to “You get what you pay for”… it’s just having to convince people of that.

My biz partner Phil had one of the best quips about that a couple of days ago. He was pitching a new client, a jewelry store, that was wanting better advertising.

The store owner said “For some reason, we’ve just not been happy with the commercials produced by the cable company.”

Phil’s response… “For some reason, I’ve just not been happy with the jewelry out of the gumball machine.”

Sadly, he didn’t think of that comeback until he was driving back to the studio… a George Costanza missed opportunity.

T2

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

[Todd Terry]

Yeah, the door definitely has to be closed.

On the C300, you’ll get a warning in the LCD screen and the viewfinder if one of the doors is open. I’m assuming that’s the same for the C100 too, so keep an eye out for it.

As for the card, it plays ok in the camera, but you can’t do anything with it otherwise? Is that right?

I’ll slightly show my ignorance here (in an effort to help), does the C100 have dual card slots like the C300? In the C300 you can put a card in one slot and clone it to the card in the other slot. If you have that option with the C100, that’s worth trying.

Have you tried the Canon XF Utility to import the clips?

T2

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

[Todd Terry]

Yeah I suspected you weren’t trying to film a Showtime Special, just looking for something for archival or booking, or at best YouTube clips, I didn’t get to chime in yet though.

Fortunately your problem is very obvious and likewise the solution is painfully simple…

You are simply overexposing, which is easy to do with a brightly-lit subject in a dark theatre. Your culprit is a camera in “auto” mode. What that is doing is averaging the entire frame (including tons of dark space around you) and calculating an “average” exposure. Ergo the subject, you, is way overexposed.

Any camera you use should have a manual exposure mode (you might have to dig into a camera menu, especially on a lower end camera) and dial it down to an appropriate exposure level. One of the challenges with shooting theatrical productions in a dark theatre is that the light and levels are constantly changing… but in a stand-up show situation that’s rarely the case… usually the light is constant, so you should more-or-less be able to “set it and forget it” and get good exposures.

Additionally some lower-end consumer-level Best Buy handicams will have a “spotlight” exposure setting that is for exactly the situation you describe. If your camera has that feature, give it a try.

But mostly, get out of “auto” mode. That’s your killer.

T2

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

[Todd Terry]

Thanks for the tip, Walter.

Atlanta is definitely close enough to be do-able as a talent source for us, even as “local hires”… we’ve used several different talent agencies from Atlanta for years, as well as a few from Nashville… I’ve probably cast dozens of Atlanta actors through the years, and always been happy with the talent. I’m not familiar with Houghton though, will check them out.

So far for this project we’ve received 372 talent submissions in about 10 hours, which is pretty overwhelming. There are 24 different talent agencies submitting, and 10 of them are from Atlanta.

Houghton wasn’t among them, I’ll send them a message to see if they are interested in requesting the breakdown.

Thanks!

T2

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

[Todd Terry]

Well there’s just not a big enough talent pool of professional actors in our area for CL to work, and I don’t really want to have to post CL ads in all the next nearest few cities (those being Birmingham, Nashville, and Atlanta, for starters) and then wade through what comes in. We did try it once in the past. A handful of losers was all I got. I had somewhat better success with some of the regional casting forums (we’ve used Southern Casting Call), but I still get lots of submissions from people four states away for tiny one-hour-shoot parts.

After 25 years I’m convinced actors are the dumbest batch of folks around (and I can say that as a former screen actor myself)… little things like me harping on NAMING submissions with their name I’ll still get 50 files called headshot.jpg or resume.doc, and I can’t tell you how many times we’ve had emails bounce as undeliverable or call to hear “This user has not set up their voice mailbox.” It’s dumbfounding. Thus… I tend to hire either actors that I personally know, or represented talent. If an actor has an agent, at least they are halfway trying.

Now…

Actually it looks like Breakdown Services is going to work like a dream. I posted the breakdown at about 10am and by noon I had 300 actor submissions from about eight or nine agencies.

Now, I had some trouble with a casting agent who used Breakdown Services before… one of their submissions was an actor I really liked. A quick Google though revealed he was an LA actor with a strong reel and resume. Los Angeles?? Why the heck was the CD submitting an actor from 2000 miles away on the opposite coast for a puny $400 day rate part on a local commercial?? C’mon, people, stop wasting my time. That’s just one example of several with that particular CD.

So anywho, I called one of the talent agencies that had responded and asked for some education and perspective from their end, since I hadn’t used Breakdown Services before…. I was a little afraid my list was just auto-populated with people of at least the approximately correct age range and gender. No, the agency in Atlanta assured me that they hand-selected talent to submit for my particular breakdown, and ONLY submitted talent that fit the specs and that was willing to work in my area for the day rate we posted and all had the correct affiliations for the job.

I was wildly impressed, but I’ll be a skeptic until the job is done. It’s really looking good so far, though.

T2

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