anybody want to comment on my commercial?

Grazie wrote on 6/9/2005, 11:57 PM

Yoyo?

FAULTLESS! ! . . (gentle enough?)

* Narrative was totally there! Chap giving his experience . .

* Music Spot-On! Understated cuts to beats - excellent!

* Colourways, from one event to another - excellent!

* Superb pro use of pans and lifts! - What rig ARE you using?

The whole thing just worked!

Minor, minor . . . itsy bitsy tiny quibble. I found the type face a bit harsh for the content - maybe a subtler design with a b/g inkeeping with the lower third you did? But, hey that's a limey speaking!

Yoyo, your client SHOULD be very happy with this!

Thanks for sharing . . .. where can I sign up here in the UK? Sounds like a very successful IT course .. . hell, I need it?!?

Best regards,

Grazie

PeterWright wrote on 6/10/2005, 12:00 AM

Very well shot and put together Yoyodyne.

Some nice dolly and crane shots - what gear do you use for that?

Liam_Vegas wrote on 6/10/2005, 12:08 AM

Very... very... excellent!

This did not look in any way "low budget"...

Top of that class!

I really MUST accelerate my move into HDV!!!!

Yoyodyne wrote on 6/10/2005, 12:23 AM

Geez, thanks guys. That means a lot coming form such an esteemed group.

The jib rig is called, or at least we call it, a DV jib - although I guess we now have to call it an HDV jib. It's basically an aluminum square pole with a wheel at both ends connected by a cable and it snaps into the dove tail mount on your tripod. That way you can tilt it remotely - you just grap the pan handle and pull or push it and the cable turns the wheel at the top which the camera is mounted on. The whole thing weighs like 25 pounds or so - very light and small. It's perfect for the HDV cam...speaking of which.

I'm really sold on the HDV stuff - one of the shops I work at got two of them in but people are still pretty leery of them. I got to take the camera out and shoot some test footage and when I looked at it on my Panny HD CRT set I almost soiled my pants!

Fortunately Vegas 6 came out at just the right time so it was HDV here I come. I have not had problems with artifacts, even the audio has been pretty good - at least for voice. My only issue is I wish Sony had gone with a true progressive 24p frame rate. I've noticed some zippering/jaggies on moves with diagonal lines - of course on a CRT set this is barely noticable, especially in HD.

Vegas 6b has been rock solid for the entire edit - some of which consisted of me playing back a lot of raw m2t on a P4 2.4 machine - not a fast experience, but a stable one.

Thanks again so much for the feedback - it is much appreciated.

Yoyodyne

SimonW wrote on 6/10/2005, 1:51 AM

Great spot. Loved the use of the crane/jib.

Though people, can we just remember that this was a very well produced spot, with great lighting and camerawork. HDV did not give him those aspects! Talent did.

Grazie wrote on 6/10/2005, 2:03 AM

"Talent did." . .not lost on me Pal! G

Kula Gabe wrote on 6/10/2005, 3:37 AM

Overall a very nice piece. It didn't seem forced or overly scripted. Great use of camera motion to add production value and interest to otherwise dull shots. Very clean, natural sounding audio.

My only suggestion might be a different text/font treatment, and maybe not having the same text up through most of the spot.

ken c wrote on 6/10/2005, 5:15 AM

Agree the camera work re pans and motion was excellent... great pacing and variety of shot angles, kept momentum going throughout the shots ... kept me watching it.. nice work.

by the way, do you have a link to a photo of the jib rig hardware you used for those shots? looks like some pretty amazing results you achieved... and how'd you do lighting?

ken

Jimmy_W wrote on 6/10/2005, 5:50 AM

Well done, Ken covered it nicely.
Jimmy

Spot|DSE wrote on 6/10/2005, 7:03 AM

Yoyodyne,
Very impressive piece of work. Depending on the time you had vested/budget available, motion lowers might have been nice, but that's just letters on the icing of the cake.
Audio could stand a teenie bit of work, but it *might* be that my speaker monitors aren't being faithful to the compression. Just a touch more bottom end would warm it up, given that you've got a lot of warm colors and a fairly straight ahead/flat audio track.
Thanks for sharing!

GlennChan wrote on 6/10/2005, 8:57 AM

Very good work. It definitely doesn't look low-budget at all.

A few minor comments/suggestions:
A- The interviewee looks a little bit stilted/scripted. Ideally he'd be talking like he was talking to a friend. Getting people to talk like that can be tricky, especially if you want them to follow a script. If you are allowed to be flexible, maybe interview them and start off with easy questions to get them comfortable. Then ask questions that get them to say something equivalent to what's in the script.
Avoid yes/no questions, because the answer doesn't work without the question.
B- The script could be written more conversationally. The test for this is easy: read it and ask yourself if anyone talks like that.
C- There's some words in the script which could be trimmed out. Example: "Financial aid is available for those who quality" It doesn't really convey anything because most people would assume the institution has financial aid available.
D- Illegal colors? Whites and blacks may be wrong, although it's hard to tell with WMV compression.
Maximum legal white is 235 235 235 (RGB) within Vegas, blacks should be at 16 16 16. A lot of the defaults in Vegas put whites at 255 255 255, and blacks at 0 0 0. You can fix this in different ways. i.e. add the broadcast safe filter on lenient - 7.5IRE setup (if you aren't in a PAL country)
In your case that would work fine.
Another way is to change your titles to 235 235 235 and add a black generator with 16 16 16 black underneath.
At :23 there's a dissolve to white that may be running into illegal colors.
It doesn't look like you'd have problems with illegal chroma.
It may be ok to have illegal colors on your tape. The station (should) have equipment that will clip illegal values, which is what the broadcast safe filter does. Depending on the station, they may reject your tape (it would be unlikely I would think).
If your project is not destined for NTSC broadcast, then ignore all this.

Honestly though it's very good work in my opinion... it definitely does not appear low-budget at all. If you want to get really fancy, I'd look at:
A- Content: Really effective copy writing. I don't know good resources for learning this. The best I've seen is Ray Welch's 'Copyrighter' (your local library may have it). His website has examples of good advertising.
B- 'Technical': Color grading can make your work look better.
What I've been able to do with Vegas:
http://www.glennchan.info/Proofs/dvinfo/EFP1-CC-comparison.mov

FrigidNDEditing wrote on 6/10/2005, 9:31 AM

Excellent work - the wides got me a little distracted once or twice (wides being the fisheye look that was coming into play, but I like those shots so it's all good :-).

Very nice work

Dave

epirb wrote on 6/10/2005, 2:27 PM

YO, very nice Yoyo
Most of my comments are already stated above.
question what mode did you shoot in? CF30 ?

winrockpost wrote on 6/10/2005, 4:29 PM

Nice work, and if your client liked it ,Great Work.

Trichome wrote on 6/10/2005, 9:48 PM

This is good work! Keep it up!

Avanti wrote on 6/11/2005, 12:57 PM

Very, very well done!
I'm looking for a good jib, is the DV jib you have from Studio 1 at this link?
http://www.studio1productions.com/dv_jib.htm

If not, could you please direct me to the correct one? Thanks.

Yoyodyne wrote on 6/11/2005, 2:25 PM

I think that's it - can't confirm right now.

vicmilt wrote on 6/11/2005, 7:37 PM

1 - excellent work
2 - Thoughts....

I wouldn't keep the website up for the entire spot - the tele number is fine as is. You are giving up a lot of screen space (and killing your beautiful photography) with that giant URL. I'd just bring it on at the end of the spot.

I LOVE your lower third on Ross, but I'd bring it up in two parts. Right now it's too much for a viewer to read, and so you get nothing out of it. I'd first bring up the school logo for about 2 seconds, and then fade on the rest for the rest of the shot.

Photography, lighting, writing excellent. An important copy point is that he now owns the company and has 18 employess working for him. I would have loved to see him talking on camera with the employees at that point. If it was too much to set up, I'd have done a simple greenscreen of him and keyed him in front of the business.

One other thing. I studied your footage and it would be a simple matter to reformat it to a 4:3 by cropping the edges. I still think that while the "look" of 16:9 is very sexy and all, the huge majority of viewers are still in the old school. You are losing too much screen space on a normal tv. I'd reformat it for that reason. If you absolutely love the 16:9, then you could easily put your supers below the video in the black, and give up nothing.

What do you think?

Now, a question about your production. Did you edit via proxy? Which one. And how are you releasing? Is this footage from the HiDef or did you downconvert it for release? If so, what did you use to downcovert. It is quite beautiful. I just shot my first spot in HDV with the Z1, but am currently working off of the simultaneous downcoverted footage out of the Z1. I was thinking the HDV would simply live on a shelf until the release technology caught up.

But your spot is encouraging me to go "back to the tape" and re-edit in HDV, thus I'm interested in your workflow. Thanks in advance, and again - great stuff.

v