[Todd Terry]

[Bill Davis] ” I got bunches of 5 star top ratings, But I also got other ratings all over the place including 1, 2 and 3 stars. At first it baffled me. I didn’t expect all 5 stars at all, but there seemed to be NO objective relationship between the ratings I was getting and the the quality of the work I was submitting.”

Eh… yeah, that’s not surprising, Bill. You have to remember that a producer will rank with their “stars” system not at how good or bad a talent sounds, or how much potential they have, but how appropriate or likely they are to cast someone for this job. Nothing else. So don’t let that reflect on you. I’ve done exactly that… I tend to NOT hire “announcery” types because almost always I prefer a natural “guy next door” type. BUT, I still get lots of auditions from Voice of God type guys. In that instance they’d all get one star (if I bothered to rank them at all), even though some of them are terrific VoG type voices. It’s just in that case I’m looking for Don Cheadle or even a Don Knotts, not a Don Lafontaine. No reflection on their talent. The only mistake they made was not reading my project details closely enough where I likely specified “NO announcer-types.”

Here’s where it gets even crazier. For a looooong time I used the stars system for completely something else, not for ranking. I’d click two stars if I’d heard them already and wanted to listen again, three if my producer partner had already heard them, four if I had sent them to the client, etc… I was just using them sort of as check-box organizers because (and here’s the dumb-on-my part part) I had NO IDEA THAT TALENT COULD SEE THE RANKINGS. I thought those were just for producers’ use. It wasn’t until a talent (that I didn’t cast) contacted me and said “I know I wasn’t chosen but I saw you gave me four stars and was wondering in the future….” I was like “Whhhhhhhhhaaa?” They can SEE that? I had no idea. And some people were getting rankings that were in no way reflective of what I thought their talent was, or their cast-ability for a project. I felt like a complete horse’s rear… and we don’t do that anymore.

[Bill Davis] “If the internet is good at anything is screwing up the supply and demand curve.”

That is very true. It is not unusual at all for me to get 200+ auditions for a single job… and there will be plenty of bad ones but also plenty of great ones. There’s one guy who I LOVE (and have since used several times) and I asked him why he’d never auditioned for me before. He said “I never bother with projects where there are already 50 auditions or more.” In that case, he took a chance and did audition, and he got the gig over about 150 other guys… and we’ve since used him lots.

If I were a voice talent I’d hate the system with a passion… but as a producer it’s absolutely fantastic.

T2

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

[Todd Terry]

Oh on the contrary, we’ve hired many many voice actors through their agents.

We’ve also hired many directly, too.

And… I’m going to guess that the vast vast majority of those we hired directly (maybe even all of them), do have agents… but they submitted to me directly in a casting call, not through their agents. So… I hire them directly. If they choose to give their agents a cut (to which I always ask “For what? Doing nothing?”), well that’s their business.

And sometimes things change over time. We’ve used one particular voice guy many times though the years who is probably the top narrator in the country, and has been for many years. After booking him quite a few times and getting to know him very well, one day after it took a little wrangling to get him through his agent he said “Ehhh… just call me at the house. Forget the suits in New York.” And that’s what we do… we hire him directly, and pay him directly. I doubt his Madison Avenue agent would be happy about it, but this guy’s enough of a bigshot to get away with it.

There’s another national talent we’ve used a few times, who SORTA works through his agent. I do call him up directly, book the job, get it done… AND THEN call his agent to let her know that it is happening (or has happened, often the case). That agent is making money (and good money) from literally answering the phone once, and nothing else. She didn’t get him the job, or anything else on our end. But she still gets paid.

I have no problem hiring even represented talent directly. I am also happy to pay an agent if they get their client the job or negotiate the deal, which is what they are being paid to do. But when I’m doing that myself when artists choose to approach me themselves directly, I have no qualms about not paying someone for not doing anything.

T2

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

[Todd Terry]

It’s a changing landscape, for sure, thanks to both audio technology and the ol’ world wide interweb.

We used to regularly record VOs at our place, either using local talent or bringing people in. We still have a voiceover booth in the studio. It hasn’t even had a mic in the cradle for years, because we just don’t use it anymore.

The technology change has certainly hurt a lot of VO artists. Just as it as helped producers like me… so naturally, I’m for it.

In the “olden days” I was limited to the narrators that I knew or could find easily. If I were to watch a reel from our place from 15 years ago, you’d hear a lot of the same voices over and over. Today, I can get anyone in the world… almost instantly.

If I put out a cattle call for a specific VO project in the morning (with Voice123, or whomever), and as long as I offer a decent rate (say, $300-$400 for a :30), I will have a hundred auditions or more within 24 hours. Many will be mediocre, a few will be terrible (and make me wonder if they actually do that for a living), but some of them will be great. We’ve hired some awesome talent that way. And if you look at the last 50 spots I produced, you’ll probably hear 40 different voices… we’re no longer locked into hearing the same people over and over again.

Even for ultra low dollar stuff it works, which just shows where the payment floor is now. A short while back we had a long-time client with a tiny project, just updating their phone answering system. They had literally no money for this… I put out a casting call with a job that was, if I recall, less than a hundred bucks ($75, maybe? Don’t remember). Within four hours I had almost 50 custom auditions waiting to be heard. Amazing.

I just think it depends on what a project deserves. I’ve never exactly counted, but by my best guess in my career I’ve directed, produced, or in some way been responsible for about 6,000 commercials. And let me tell ya, they weren’t all winners, that’s for sure. Some barely deserved that hundred-dollar track, so it’s good to have options.

But on the flip side, if I have a great project with a decent budget and find myself thinking “Stew Herrera would be great for this” or “This seems like a Rino Romano spot,” then we certainly don’t mind paying what those guys get (and jumping through the union hoops… although don’t get me started on that). Sometimes it’s worth it.

T2

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

[Todd Terry]

No it was not broadcast, I believe it was a training presentation (we didn’t produce that, our only job was to get the narration recorded and delivered).

I didn’t think $1,500 was bad at all (it was inline with what others had recommended), especially considering it was almost a 90-minute script.

It’s not unheard of for us to pay even that much or more for a :30 broadcast commercial track from one of the top known voiceover artists like Beau Weaver or Peter Thomas, etc. They get what they get, and some of them command a lot (and are worth it). I think the last time we hired Don LaFontaine (back when he was alive, of course) we paid a fair bit more than that for commercial work. Although on the surface it seems wildly expensive for fast and easy work with no heavy lifting at all, when you look at the big picture and consider that can be a relatively small percentage of a project’s total budget sometimes it’s worth getting exactly who you want.

T2

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

[Todd Terry]

Thanks, appreciate the info, good to have.

In this case we completed this project a couple of months ago, though… so we got it all settled.

If anyone is curious, I think we ended up paying the guy something in the $1500 neighborhood.

I thought that was a really good rate considering the painfully-long length of the script. Plus, the guy we got was really good. He’s an actor in Mexico City whose more-usual job is doing Spanish-language dubbing for films. He provides the big-screen (and TV) Spanish voices for Mark Wahlberg, Jackie Chan, Michael J. Fox, Jon Cryer, and about 20 other actors.

We had about 30 guys audition. It’s tough though (at least for me) to determine if a voice actor is really good in another language. It probably sounds xenophobic of me, but to me they really all sounded the same. It’s similar to when I watch a foreign film… I really can’t tell if an actor’s performance is great if they are speaking another language. Sad, I know.

T2

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

[Todd Terry]

Stems and Seeds was also the name of a head shop in one episode of King of the Hill….

I miss that show….

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SR6BVuJpEuA

T2

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

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[Todd Terry]

This year has been very very weird.

Usually we are anywhere from moderately to extremely busy most of the year… except summers…. which can be anywhere from “fairly slow” to “deadly.” A couple of years ago our summer business was almost non-existent. I did try to stay “glass half full” about it and take advantage of what I called the “Summer of Me” where I worked a four-day week, and have to tell ya except for the actual money part it was fantastic.

This year though, I am clueless as to what’s going on. We’ve had the busiest summer ever… it’s not only busy for summertime but it’s busy compared to anytime, and I can’t figure out why. There doesn’t seem to be one thing or one fact that is different in what’s going on, or in the type of business we are doing… but it has definitely been a balls-to-the-wall summer.

NOT that I’m either bragging or complaining… I’m grateful for it, and I’m sure the slow times will come around again.

Our business is just so darn cyclical… and except for the things we can readily point our fingers at (such as political seasons) there seems to be no rhyme or reason to it… without any regard to calenders, economies, or anything else. It’s just wildly up and down for no reason.

We’d be doing really great if we could just get it to even the heck out… but looks like that ain’t happening.

T2

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

[Todd Terry]

I’m with Mads….

I think you do a pretty terrific job on these. They are very nicely cut and extremely watchable… which is almost unheard of. Great work.

But… I have no idea how you’d ever get away with doing this as a paying job for a paying client. Technically you can’t be doing it just for fun as you are, but so many people do it (and you do such a nice job with it) that studios look the other way. They won’t look the other way when it’s a paying gig where you are making money off the intellectual property that they own.

It could work if you have one copy of the project that you personally maintain physical care/custody/control of for presentation at the event, and that’s the last that’s seen of it. But… you know that won’t happen. As soon as you hand it to the bride it will be on YouTube, Facebook, and wherever else she chooses to blast it… and then the horse is out of the barn.

T2

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

[Todd Terry]

Sure thing… and I meant to address this….

“So I heard the secret sauce to help maintain a Motion Picture look to any film is by using a 28mm and a 50mm lens.”

I don’t know who said that, but it’s a load of bunk…haha.

In fact, I’d say more likely the opposite is true… I think longer lenses look more cinematic than shorter lenses.

Take a 28mm lens, even if you have a fast one and shoot wide open with it, it’s still going to have a very deep depth of field, which is just the nature of a lens that wide. And that, depending on a lot of factors (like lighting, camera moves, fps), can in fact look very “videoy.”

It’s going a bit against film trends (which do change over time), but more cinematic looks these days favor longer lenses. Sure, Woody Allen will shoot an entire long scene with only a 28mm or a 35mm, but that’s not the norm (and most people credit him with works that are great storytelling, writing, and direction, not necessarily for the cinematic quality).

I usually have on hand 18mm, 28mm, 35mm, 50mm, 80mm, 120mm, and a 37-140mm zoom…. but the 50 and 80 are by far my go-to lenses.

T2

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

[Todd Terry]

Your 50mm lens will act/look and have the exact same field of view as a 50mm lens… on a S35mm cine camera. And the 28mm will be exactly the same as that lens on a cine camera.

I wish the camera manufacturers had never started using terms like “full frame” because it is massively misleading. They are forcing a comparison between traditional still-image and motion-image sizes, which is really comparing apples and oranges. The made-up term “full-frame” to one type of camera isn’t the same as full-frame to another… more specifically, full-frame is not the same to a still camera as it is to a motion picture camera. The frame sizes are very different.

Why? That’s because, if you’ll remember back to the dark ages when you took snapshots with actual celluloid in your camera, a motion picture camera takes images with the film running vertically, whereas a still camera takes pictures with the film running horizontally. Ergo, the image size for a 35mm still camera is much larger than a 35mm motion picture camera.

Ergo, you have lots of people thinking that their 35mm-sensor cameras are “less than full frame,” when actually they are completely full frame for a cine camera and exactly the same as they have been for more than 100 years.

There are still some larger-format photographers around (shooting 6×6, 6×7, etc., those Hasselblads aren’t dead yet) that are shooting images a lot larger than either of those. I guess you’d have to call those Even-Fuller-Than-Full-Frame cameras.

T2

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