New York

Posted on January 22, 2009

Was fun, cold, inspiring, humbling, and big.

So good to be home. Can’t wait to get back.

I left work, after my first day back, yesterday. As I pulled out of the parking lot, I began to cry. I was so happy when I realized where I was driving: home. When I got there, I experienced my favorite two moments of every day: smelling my wife’s cooking and being stampeded by my three kids.

BackPage trailer

Posted on January 8, 2009

BackPage trailer from Hugh Massey on Vimeo.

I finished the trailer for my film, BackPage.

Micro, Macro, or Macross?

Posted on January 7, 2009

Daniel Craig said in Layercake, “Have a plan. Stick to it.”

I know a lot of people in this industry who just show up.

The guy in the box office or concession stand will say ambiguously, “Yeah, but what I really want to do is direct.”

That’s a bigger goal, a better business plan than most I work with. Like I said, they just show up. It’s clear that their business has no vision, direction, target. They just wait for opportunities. But, true opportunities are the ones you make. “See a need, fill a need,” to quote Mel Brooks. There’s a market or demographic not being provided a product or service. It’s right in front of you. You’re the only person in position to see it. You have it within you to create a new product or service by which a new market demand will be created and an entire new support industry will depend.

So, business plan: do you have a product or service that there is a demand for? Your resources, will you structure a vertical or lateral trust, owner-operator, single service or full-service. Target market: local, state, national, or international? What’s the demand for the quality level of the product in your market? Will the market afford you to be a quality boutique or a mass production factory? (One of my favorite market stories involves the comedy troop Four Day Weekend. They had just graduated from Second City in Chicago. They had two choices: join the tour circuit and be a slave to The Man, or start their own venture. They saw Fort Worth as a virgin market: large, diverse demographic, growing urban renewal, expanding downtown entertainment district, no competition. So they proceeded to corner the market. Fish in a barrel.) 

How independant do you want to be? Such freedom requires resources. Facilities, offices, staff, transportation, communication; these capitol infrastructure overhead costs need addressing in your business plan, how much liability can you afford? How much will you assume in house or subcontract out.

It all need to be determined by your business plan.

What exactly is your product or service? I’ve seen companies provide combinations of the following: Post house, graphics house, production studio, print, web, creative, sales, promotion public relations. I’ve seen some ambitious groups try to tackle all.

Downtime, does your income stream generate a capital reserve large enough to float through seasonal doldrums? Is the current economic climate conducive to your model? Do you have a plan for the impending and inevitable economic climate change? In a downturn, you’re forced to contract: expendable in-house dpeartments are closed, and contractors are sought. Conversely, in the upswing, you need to expand:  invest in new infrastructure (capitol expenditures: facilities, equipment, or service providers: employees) to modernize and meet new demand.

By the way, computers and software are practically expendable purchases, not capitol expenditures, since they devalue so quickly. If you’re not completely replacing your electronics every five years, you might as well be shooting with a Knipkow disk and editing on a Steenbeck.

What’s your management philosophy? You can catalyze or castrate your enterprise just through your attitude and interpersonal connections. Will you you be a shouter, loot the coffers, be an absent landlord? Will you be a fascist? (I knew a business owner saw no correlation between rates of pay and quality of service. He saw no relation between increase in workload, with no parallel increase in personnel, and the corresponding result: decrease in quality and increase in errors.) Will you promote from inside, subsidize training and education of your employees, or will you resent proximity and familiarity and be seduced by the foreign, new, and exotic. Will you hold your freelancers hostage? Generate blacklists? Are you allowing employees freedom to utilize the company’s resources (at least, at a discount) during downtime to produce their own work (which ultimately promotes yourself, as well.)

How do you promote yourself? You’ll discover that industry clubs, seminars, conventions don’t have potential clients, only more desperate jerks like you. It’s like expecting hot chicks at the math club Christmas party (Danika Mckellar aside.) They only exist to increase tourism at the exotic convention site, and so that widget manufacturers can get you to drool over the next new accessory or adapter.

Remember to regularly turn you efforts inward. Are you so busy filling your customers’ orders that you neglect producing materials to promote yourself? You need to show off.It attracts the attention and buzz of your peers and competitors, and especially potential clients.

Speaking of side projects, I don’t understand why so few are not generating their own product to market, in order to advance to the next business plateau, the next class. That’s what the ultimate goal is in this industry: to graduate from service provider (beholden to clients’ whims), into a product producer (creating and feeding demand.) If you’ve paid off your overhead and infrastructure, it’s time to expand into a new venture: your own product. It’s the only option considering the alternative. (It’s an interesting debate: Growth, how do you define it? Increase in volume, or quality? Increase in profit or profile? Do you expand your capacity, getting a larger factory floor, personnel, shifts? Or increase what your customers pay? They only way to do that is to court premium clients. But those are high maintenance divas and you have to ruthlessly fight your bloodthirsty competition for access to them.) So, If the market is driven by growth, not profit, what else can you do? You can only squeeze the margins so much until you’re forced into cooking the books and hiding debt in your subsidiaries, or you restructure into a pyramid Ponzi model. So, once you’ve reached a certain plateau (that is, saturated your market and monopolized the service sector), your choices are clear: either spin off all your departments and subsidiaries into separate companies and reap a tidy IPO profit, or make the transformation. It’s evolution. You can choose to be the more fit and survive.

All of these questions and issues regarding your business plan are rhetorical and abstract. They’re broad and general, sure. But, pondering them, asking them out-loud, brainstorming and sound-boarding with your comrades will bring opportunities and challenges into specific relief. That way, you can confront them.

Who’s the more foolish: the fool, or the fool who follows him?

Posted on January 6, 2009

There’s a classic practical joke seasoned crew members will play on green freshmen grips and PA’s. You simply look them in the eye, place you arm around their shoulder, wing them on in close and say earnestly, “Go to the truck and get me that box of f-stops.”

I was fortunate enough not be suckered into such social pitfalls. But, I was sent on numerous fool’s errands.

But that’s all in good fun and doesn’t misappropriate valuable production resources and time.

What surprises me is all of the unintentional dead ends that a production can run into.

In Chicago, I spent all morning on the phone, internet, and email tracking down images from the graphics department back in Texas and finding a local print shop to make labels for our mic flags. After interrupting the graphics department’s work to find and adapt, and approve, and email the files, the director decided we were out of time to go to the print shop. We had ordered the labels, we just stood the print shop up. You hardly ever saw the mic in out man on the street segments.

I can’t imagine the number of times I’ve set up camera, management courtesy seats and shade, camera assist, dolly with track, jib arm, and grip, light, or camara department headquarters only to be told (just after unpacking) that the location was wrong. The shot doesn’t have enough coverage. Management isn’t viewing this shot.

I spent three days of pre-production time to build and packed a co2 and oil smoke and propane flame sfx kit for a shoot. It was never used.

When I used to AC eng 16mm shoots I was constantly without the gear the director needed. Short sticks, tall sticks, lens hood, wide angle lens, matte box, filters, doublers, diopters, the fourth magazine, change tent, batteries, etc. Most of these locations wouldn’t allow us a HQ in close proximity. I would always have to run down several flights of stairs and across many city blocks back to the van to get the demanded item. By the time I got back, they had always completed the shot, deemed it unnecessary or stupid and abandoned it, or improvised a MacGyver solution. Later, when I attempted to carry all necessary accessories, or cart them around on the magliner, I was the slow one in the party who everyone was pissed off at, or I put out my back, knees, or ankles.

For video tele-conference meetings we would host for bi-coastal audio recording session, I was asked to spend a couple hundred dollars on craft services to impress the clients (even though the were in house members of our company.) They didn’t touch a morsel.

For satellite broadcasts, we’d set up line of site teleprompters that crowded the set and none of the talent would use.

The fool’s errand. I was sent on so many that I swore that one day, when I became a director, I would never…

That’s the promise every kid makes to themselves: not to be as bad a parent as theirs was.

Well, that’s exactly what happened.

I managed to get us out the door and setup on location. We had successfully left early enough to avoid traffic and had camera, dolly, lights, hq, sound, script, and craft services all setup. In a few more minutes, we’d take advantage of the dawn golden hour. The perfect start to a productive day.

But, I had the outrageously stupid idea that I would provide my script notes and continuity personnel with a wireless monitor. I had it all arranged: plenty of charged batteries for the eng monitor to run all day, a 2.4 GHz transmitter for the camera, the counterpart receiver for the monitor, and plenty of batteries for the transceiver kit to work all day. What I forgot was the BNC composite to RCA composite barrel adapter. That, combined with the wireless TC clipboard (yes, I had plenty of batteries for the transmitter and receiver) would make the job pristine and accurate.

We had already set up, it was too much trouble to pack up and return to the studio. Home base was only about a mile away. So, I sent my DP and Script notes back to the studio to dig up two adapters.

It doesn’t matter that the engineers decided to be obstinate and feign ignorance over the location of the reserve stock they stored. It doesn’t matter that the freelancers I’d hired wouldn’t know where to look in equipment storage. It was my fault for sending them on a useless fool’s errand. We lost the dawn golden hour and the following hour for setting up the next shot. Script didn’t need a monitor, had never used one. It wasn’t necessary.

But, in the heat of the moment I had panicked. I was dedicated with full blinders to a weak and vain idea. Vapor-locked in the brain, I plunged on heedlessly into a stubborn solution that was fruitless. I had committed the sin of myopic inflexibility and it cost me dearly. It was a most valuable lesson.

Sam was a Butcher, not a Producer

Posted on January 5, 2009

Your shoot is not a meat market. 

It’s a disservice to your project, product, reputation, and client to view it so.

I worked with a DP and a director whose sole purpose in production was to troll for companionship.

They would drool over the catalogs sent over from the agencies (this was before the catalogs were on the internet. So they were restricted from stalking the actresses Facebook, Myspace, LinkedIn, of websites in order to evaluate their status of age, proportions, age relationships. But, rest assured, that is exactly what they are doing now.) So, they would only cast actresses they were interested in dating.  they would get enraged when the actress didn’t match their headshot (that is, were a few years more mature.) They would chat them up for the first hour of the shoot until it was discovered that the women were in a relationship (had a life outside the shoot.) After that, there was no more small talk, no flirting. Furthermore, the closeups and featured scenes dried up, as well. They were demoted to extra.

The director was well over 40, much too old to be acting so desperate and immature. The DP was my age (just 30, a few years too old not to have a good excuse why he wasn’t married. He blamed his career, his art. But, we made industrials. Sure, that’s a profitable trade-off.) When the DP would see me speaking with an actress, he would immediately interfere and steer the conversation towards the status of my wife and kids. This was a show for the actress’s sake, it made him seem more family oriented (he never asked me about my family outside of these contexts.) He would feel so dis-confident that he felt the need to c***-block me (someone who was not a threat to his hunting haunts.) This actually would often present a problem for me. The actress would then seek me out to protect her from her pursuers.

I knew another director who pursued an actress for months after the shoot. It was all executed under the pretext of training her for a major role in the film. The staged publicity photo shoots and martial arts training sessions. It was nothing short of obvious and pathetic. The relationship quickly cooled outside the shoot (as it does with all inter-office romances, you really have nothing in common besides that one shared experience) when the following shoot never materialized.

So, if you’re successful in transitioning that working relationship into a physical one, you maybe ready to congratulate yourself. You’re ready to delude yourself into thinking that it’s an emotional connection with a possible future. But, hold off on that self-delivered pat on the back. If you’re capable of even the slightest bit of objective perspective, you may soon realize that you’re in a relationship with someone you’ve hired. And if, like all other professional relationships, the only thing you have in common is the work, that means she’s only with you because you’ve hired her, she’s your employee, she works for you. What does that make her? What does that make you?

Robbing The Donation Plate

Posted on January 4, 2009

Markers, favors, barters, I.O.U.’s, karma, etc. Your account balances with others are an unavoidable currency in any industry. But, in media production, such chits are defined simply as a day’s work. I owe many more people a day than owe me.

The true mark of a valued colleague is when they offer you a crew position on a super-cool project. They trust you enough with a potential opportunity that will benefit you both. The intent is either to share in the profit, the glory, or just the experience. But, there had best be such good times in store, or you won’t be able to call upon your friends again. That’s the warning.

I’ve seen both clients and producers lose their credibility when they abuse close relationships.

I had a producer friend who was courting a local charity for work. Mind you, this was the premiere, national charity that has a Way of Uniting people. Since this is a top-ten major market they work in, they have vast resources, connections, and budgets to be able to easily afford quality work. After winning the big account and delivering a product that was greatly superior than the budget, resources, and especially competitors could deliver, we felt confident that we would her from them next year for the new campaign. They were pleased with our work, the donations rose due to the media production’s inclusion in the campaign. Of course, we expected that the next year’s project to be even bigger. But, they came to use with a proposed budget barely ten percent what it was the previous year. So, with no other choice, we went ahead and gave them discount work in order to foster a closer relationship so that they would continue to consider us their preferred vendor for media production services.  The next year, one of their corporate contributors decided that their donation would not be in cash, but instead would be in service. Media production service. Not knowing any better, the charity’s officers accepted the donation. The company’s department providing the shoot was a corporate theatre, or media presentation department, not a production studio. The resulting fundraising film was less than satisfactory. So, after getting burned, we felt that this client had learned their lesson. The next year, we were happy to hear from them after they had seen our recent results for other charity groups in the area. After several conversations discussing their needs, goals, and planned message for the year, we were sure that any day now they would call to schedule a shoot. They called all right. The managing director called to ask whether the Panasonic AG-DVX100B was an appropriate camera to rent for their shoot and where could they get one? It seems that they had some mass comm major from the local junior college, a friend of a co-worker’s kid, who was going to produce their film that year. calling about this at 4:45PM on a Friday, hmmm… Good luck with that. Oh, and go ahead and (expletive-filled rant deleted.)

If there’s no reutrn on investment now, maybe it’s an account that can be cashed in Karmically in the next life.

I had a producer/director who was notorious for demanding one more take (up into the double digits) without providing the cast or crew any direction that would solve the problem in order to lead towards a use-able take. Normally, this is fine when your employees are getting market rate for their services and you provide time and a half, and later golden time, in reimbursement for your incompetence. But one time we were out getting street footage of mass transit when we saw the most adorable grandfather and grandson both dressed as cowboys (hats, vests, big buckles, boots, bandannas, boleros, fringe, pearl snap shirts, the works.) We couldn’t pass that up, so we asked them to step off the bus again. Oh, just one more time please. Again, if you would. No, don’t go, I need it again. This is the last time. No, once more… Of course, we didn’t need the bus to make the round trip circumnavigating the entire block for each take. Sure, simply getting the bus to back up ten feet and make the stop just for the exit (which is what we wanted) would have made each take last a mere five percent of its total reset and retake time. But, karma is a foreign word to some people. After for or five takes, this old man and his toddler grandson had invested nearly an hour of their valuable time together in our project. The director, of coures, hadn’t told us, the crew, what the issue was to solve in order to avoid another take. The grandfather was so elderly and the grandson so young, they both had the same immense difficulty getting on and of the bus. It was a miracle neither of them fell down. The punchline is that none of their footage made the cut. The two of them took over twenty seconds to exit the bus. An eternity in commercial time. The director should have seen that coming.

Abusing free resources. That really offends me.

One of my first features I DP’d for required the cast and crew work at reduced pay for the opportunity to work on a supercool project.  After completing the majority of the picture in a two week stretch, we took a break for a few weeks to restore our mental and physical faculties. After those first few weeks, it became disoncerting when the director wouldn’t commit to a restart date. In fact, they wouldn’t return any calls or massages. (Since it took a couple of weeks of planning and negotiating in order to get everyone to agree on new shoot dates, the proccess must be started soon in order to ensure successfull completion of the production.) Yet, they insisted on keeping both cast and crew waiting for months before resuming. Aside from the loss of valuable momentum the project badly needed, there was another cost for this most unprofessional behavior. The cast and crew ended up turning  down other work and social events while they waited on the film. Yet, this practice continued on the promise of “in a couple of weeks, we’ll start up again.” Worse, he wouldn’t let anyone see the film being assembled. The cast andcrew needed clips to promote themselves, none ever came. They had all discounted their services and dedicated months of work and waiting for him on the promise that they would be the first to recieve copies (it’s the independant code: credit or copies or food or alchohol.) Even worse, when the shoot was finally scheduled, we were given less than a week’s notice. A shoot on the other side of the state with no gas stipend, no expeses, crappy accomodations, no per diem, no wrap party. It’s all good. We believed in the project. We had faith. We’re still waiting.

So, you’re banking on your professional and personal reputation when your currency is charity, I.O.U.’s, or markers. When you cash out your aacount’s principal on such a gamble, the return is immense when paid back in full. But, the penalties are permanent when defaulted.

2 In a Row?

Posted on January 2, 2009

I once had a director who would demand two good takes in a row from an actor’s performance before he would consider the shot completed and adequately insured by a back-up safety take.

Mind you, not just two takes: two takes in a row.

Thus, just like any other shoot, after one or two flubs we would capture the first good, complete shot. Then, a few attempts later, we would acquire the second. Two good takes in the can: time to move on?

No. The first good performance was forgotten. It didn’t count until it was immediately followed by another equivalent take (I guess he had a short term memory, like a goldfish.) We had to continue in this repetitive cycle of torturous, Sisiphean misery until the actor had completed two good takes.

What made it worse was that the director was also the writer. He filled the script with the most impossible, dense jargon unimaginable.

So, after thirty or forty-five minutes of repetitive nonsense, the actor’s perky, lively, enthusiastic performance was reduced to an ash-crap load of flat-lined mush. But, that didn’t matter. As long as they got in two good takes in a row, those were the two takes that mattered!

(Thank god he didn’t complicate the shot with extra camera, dolly, jib, or actor blocking.) 

That was the second unfortunate tragedy of this practice. The script notes assistant was instructed to only note the two good takes in a row. Thus, several, perhaps dozens of fabulous performances were ordered ignored by the editor from the script notes instructions.

Thus, we went into over, and often golden, time due to this ignorant and insane OCHD practice.

What a waste.

COPYRIGHT © 2007 RichardMassey.tv • Powered by Wordpress and 555 Theme by eMarc • Original Source By Brian Gardner.