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What Would You Have Done?


plochmann
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  I was led on for almost a year to do this simple job.  The clients just kinda never committed to an idea :huh: , and finally when I came in to shoot they didn't want any people in their office.  They asked for a virtual tour.... so this is what I did.  I would love some advice from any veterans or creative types on what they would have done differently.  Thanks a lot.  

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PRP7FcDrEPchttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PRP7FcDrEPc

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you needed to persuade them to include people in shot.  Even if it means you had to hire in some actors.  if they dont want to pay for actors, they need to work with you to give you something to work with.  without people, it just seems strange to even have something like this made.  looks more like an 'office for rent' type walkaround video without any people in there. 

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also, you needed more light in there. 

 

to be honest, this type of business doesnt seem to have any need for a promotional video, and if it did, I would have suggested to shoot in a studio/white room with props and people actions to associate with the text overlays you are using.  The colour scheme in there is horrible.  It looks dirty to me.

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I snicker at this response.  I was looking for a more work with what you got, but I totally agree with your input.  I wanted all of that, but they just strung me on and never committed to anything, this is like literally what they wanted.  2 hours to shoot, and a lot of the rooms you couldn't fit heads into, maybe flo sets.  But it wasn't that job.  Yeah, and the colors are awkward in there, some kind of yellow/brown :P   

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Your clients have no inkling of how persuasion works. People hesitating to undergo any of the advertised treatments need to feel the good vibrations, not fear to be led to the poison death penalty room (cause that was my first impression, and I bet I'm not too different from the rest, just look at the the beheaded skeleton between the beds: weight loss? Oh yeah!). The receipt for a good promotion is simple: Cut away the bad aspects, show only the positive results. Difficult without beautiful, happy people? Impossible.

 

But: I have done the exact same thing for a dentist. I showed him the clip, the rooms were more friendly, with a lot of modern art surrounding the instruments. I told him, I wouldn't recommend to put the video on his homepage, because it still was a torture chamber, and we needed really some relaxed faces to get this impression fixed, but he didn't give in. Next time, I promised myself, I wouldn't commit to anything of that kind.

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Making the light and surfaces a little more pleasing and inviting can be done with a color correction pass.  It really needs that.  I'd maybe see how you like it with the motion text slightly sped up.  It seems like there's a lot of travel time before the letters come to rest.  I get that you want it to look elegant and professional but with so much "air time" there were times my eye was drawn over and watching the letters fall into place, spending processing working it out like a puzzle before the words were finally formed, rather than looking at the footage.  It's a careful balance.

 

It's kinda hard to add people to what you've already got though unless you're going for some really bizarre, stylized commercial with graphic "standee" versions of the therapists or something.  I could see that working in Japan maybe, but local businesses tend to not be very creative (all the while expecting the same-old-shit to bring in new customers).

 

When you know they're wrong and their decisions are going to hurt the final outcome, doing what you can to show them an alternate version can often un-fog their thinking, as long as you have "what they asked for" as well.  You gotta be pretty secure to just do what you know is the "right way" and disregard the client's input when you know it's bad.  That's taking a gamble on knowing, deep down, they just want it to be good and effective and hope they're the type that can put their own ego aside and not flip out because they were ignored, even if you proved them wrong (or in spite of their anger over being proven wrong).  

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Making the light and surfaces a little more pleasing and inviting can be done with a color correction pass.  It really needs that.  I'd maybe see how you like it with the motion text slightly sped up.  It seems like there's a lot of travel time before the letters come to rest.  I get that you want it to look elegant and professional but with so much "air time" there were times my eye was drawn over and watching the letters fall into place, spending processing working it out like a puzzle before the words were finally formed, rather than looking at the footage.  It's a careful balance.

 

It's kinda hard to add people to what you've already got though unless you're going for some really bizarre, stylized commercial with graphic "standee" versions of the therapists or something.  I could see that working in Japan maybe, but local businesses tend to not be very creative (all the while expecting the same-old-shit to bring in new customers).

 

When you know they're wrong and their decisions are going to hurt the final outcome, doing what you can to show them an alternate version can often un-fog their thinking, as long as you have "what they asked for" as well.  You gotta be pretty secure to just do what you know is the "right way" and disregard the client's input when you know it's bad.  That's taking a gamble on knowing, deep down, they just want it to be good and effective and hope they're the type that can put their own ego aside and not flip out because they were ignored, even if you proved them wrong (or in spite of their anger over being proven wrong).  

 

Thanks guys, I also wanted to point out that they never even watched the video.  They never responded to calls or my e-mail to them.  They paid!??? But didn't even bother to watch it, so I posted it on the web just to see what I could gain.  I'm not very good at color correcting, I tried to just make it look natural, used a color card and white balancer and just kinda put a light S-Curve on it.  What would you suggest as a better way to color correct?  

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 What would you suggest as a better way to color correct?  

 

Well, you can get very respectable looking grades with Magic Bullet.  You can even do it on the super-cheap with their Mojo version, but it's very much a black box with only a few options.  I won't ever not recommend Magic Bullet as long as Stu is getting something out of it, because I know he's largely responsible for there even being affordable color grading tools.  DV became not just a viable format for indie filmmakers but one with a meaningful aesthetic possibility mostly because of Magic Bullet.

 

That said, watch this:

 

http://vimeo.com/57325168

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