Filed under: Uncategorized
Now and then we get those awkward situations where we have to tell a client that we can’t add something to the project without charging extra. Oftentimes the customer will ask for something in particular, we finish the project to spec but are then told ‘that’s great but let’s try something else’. That’s fine as long as it’s understood that starting over on a whim will cost money. Another misconception is that if we’re being paid for 3 minutes of motion graphics work, for example, that adding an extra minute of live action to the video is simply a creative decision that will not raise the cost of the project. These kind of uncomfortable occurrences and many others like it can be avoided with good preparation prior to the buyer proposal. Below are some good tips to aid this process.
Have something in mind before initiating the project
We have a lot of cases where we’re simply asked to ‘make a promotional video’. Now, while this is obviously a good starting point, we’ll need a bit of extra information before we can begin. What is the video promoting? What style do you like or would you prefer? How long do you wish the video to be? Where will the video be displayed? What is your approximate budget? We fully realize that quite a lot of the time you might need direction with these matters and we’re always more than willing to help out but even if all you have is a youtube video you can show us that is similar to what you would like your video to be, it will be of great help to us in getting the job started.
Price versus product
If we’re approached by an individual or start-up with a low budget, we will do our best to work within that budget. What you need to keep in mind though, is that we’re being paid for our time. Basically, if you’re looking for a 60 second web commercial and you can only pay $300, the chances are that we won’t be able to hire actors or sets to produce the piece. Logically we cannot do this without making a loss. The same goes for revisions, if we’re being paid a minimal, non-negotiable fee to produce a 60 second video you shouldn’t expect to get 3 or 4 revisions of the video to choose from. It just doesn’t work out from a business stand-point (in higher paid work we do provide numerous versions for our clients to pick from). In these cases it’s best to either have a specific idea in mind or to talk to us and throw around some concepts before work begins. More often than not we can quickly render a rough version to let you see how an idea would play out before you give the go-ahead or at least show you some samples from our past work.
Using incorrect terminology
We never expect our clients to know the technical jargon. Part of the reason we get hired is that this line of work is a specialty. Unless you’re in the business of web-orientated media creation, why would you know insider words and slang? There’s rarely ever a problem because a customer doesn’t know what a key frame is or has never heard of an alpha channel. However, problems arise regularly because people tend to drop in words that they don’t fully understand. The most incorrectly used is ‘Flash’. A good example of this is a job we were approached about a few months ago. We were asked to create a ‘Flash Powerpoint presentation’ with slides and ‘flash animations’. We talked this over as far as scripting, voice overs and style. We started some preliminary work on the piece and it wasn’t until we asked the customer about controlling the pace or navigation of the slides that we realized they simply wanted a video presentation and not a slide presentation. The problem here was that the customer had heard some words used in conjunction with web presentations and without knowing what they were asked for a ‘Flash Powerpoint presentation’. In truth, I can’t think of a single video type that we produce that we haven’t had requested as a ‘Flash video/presentation’. The key here is to simply describe to us exactly what you want, where you want to use it and if possible provide a link to something similar.
We do believe that the above tips are good ones but the most important thing to keep in mind is that communication is the key.
Filed under: Uncategorized
We’re taking a quick break from Friday the 24th till Tuesday 28th. You can still reach us via email.
We’re beginning to shift our focus to motion graphics and so thought it appropriate to create a highlight reel of some of our recent motion graphic work.
You can read more information about our motion graphics services here.
Filed under: Production, Tutorials | Tags: filming, green, scene, screen, setup, tips
We get a lot of jobs that involve keying out backgrounds. More often than not, the client had decided to buy a piece of green material from Ikea and shoot it in the basement. Well, there’s nothing wrong with that to be perfectly honest. Setting up the scene is usually where they mess up. Above is a comparison image. On the left is an actual still from footage we received from a client who had no prior knowledge of setting up a green screen shoot while on the right you can see a capture from a well thought out, professional shoot. Simple mistakes make our job of editing the results a hundred times more difficult and thus it takes us longer, the quality suffers and it costs the client more money. With that in mind, here are some hints, tips & tricks to setting up and filming a successful green screen shoot.
- Choose green over blue screening whenever possible. Blue screens often bring out jagged edges in your keying results. Green also reflects less than blue.
- Keep your lighting as even as you can manage. The more solid the color the easier it is to remove in post production.
- Avoid using sunlight to light your scene (even if you have artificial lighting as well as sunlight). Clouds will change the shade of green in your background and you’ll see patches of green return to your keyed out background.
- Light each person in your scene individually to avoid them looking like they’ve been filmed separately.
- A great addition to your lighting setup is a Halo Light, basically, a light that is placed above the subject and positioned slightly behind them.
- You should try to keep the distance between the subject and the green screen approximately equal to the distance between the subject and camera. This helps to dull shadows.
- A simple and obvious one: Use a tripod! If you have motion blurs in your shot it’s going to be a long edit trying to properly remove the green when it’s blurred with the subject.
- Keep your shot clean. No visible cables or monitors and definitely no other people in shot.
- Another obvious one: DON’T wear green! White is also not a good choice as it picks up some measure of the green surroundings. Ditto with reflective surfaces such as belt buckles. Red will produce a bleeding edge where the green and red blends.
- Remember that as good as your scene may appear with your eyes, the way the camera sees it is much more important. Manually set the exposure, white balance and focus. It’s best to set up a monitor or laptop with a firewire cable to view the results as your cameras built in LCD screen often displays inaccurate results. Check that what you see with your eyes matches what you see on your preview screen.
Good luck and happy shooting!
Filed under: Blog posts, Services | Tags: design, durham, flash, lost, marble, media, reed, trevor, twcctw, university, web, williams
Our premier export is video content but we do occasionally create websites, pages and Flash content.
Our strong suit is the design elements of a website. We do not provide ‘back end’ content such as data base driven features (we advise using this company for that). What we do is create headers, logos, design the layout and create interactive Flash presentations & content and most forms of media.
Here are some examples of our work:
Trevor Reed Photography
A Room In The Sky
Durham University Video Player
World Changer Mall Video Player
Williams Creations
You can view more information about our web and Flash design services by visiting our website.
Filed under: Production, Videos | Tags: graphics, lost, mall, marble, media, motion, my, power, Production, twcctw, video
We have recently began working closely with Ginny Dye, CEO of TWCCTW inc. to produce video content and redesign their landing page.
TWCCTW (‘Together We Can Change The World’) is an organization built to make a difference through business opportunities and charitable actions. Ginny has spearheaded an ongoing effort that raises hundreds of millions of dollars for various causes.
We have created 12 videos for the World Changer Mall campaign (graphics & voice over) and we’re also working on changing their home page to create a greater initial impact.
The videos and custom-built Flash video player can be seen here.
We will also contribute motion graphics to their up-coming ‘TV push’ as they launch an infomercial.
Ginny and her team have produced two ‘in-house’ videos for youtube to aid in their campaign. You can see those here.
Welcome to the 1st post on the Lost Marble Media blog. We’ll be posting regularly with hints, tips & tutorials on producing media and we’ll also be sharing our most recent work with you.
Lost Marble Promo 2:
Lee Hall
Lost Marble Media
