Curse of the Weekend Filmmaker
Everybody watches television, which means that everybody considers themselves a kind of authority on the subject of broadcast design. "I don't know if it's formally sound or validates in the colour-space, but I know what I like!"
These people must think that we kooky producers and art directors have skills that can be essentially boiled to knowing which buttons to press on the magic technology devices that make dreams come true. We are not, obviously, professional storytellers or graphic designers or fonts of creative expertise. We do not have years of experience. We have no technical knowledge of significant value to guide our process. We are merely the biggest scammers in the world, scoring jobs for which we are blithely unqualified.
This must be why it is so easy to know better. Film and video production is very intuitive, after all, and an amateur's gut feeling about how to go about it is probably equal to or greater than the jaded pronouncements of industry veterans. It's just common sense, right?
"I was hoping this would have more of a -- you know -- Hollywood quality."
"Oh yeah? Myself, I was hoping you'd increase your budget by a factor of ten, give us six more months, and have some fucking idea what your content is before the eleventh hour. Also, I'd like a pony."
A client I'm dealing with now has actually described himself as a "weekend filmmaker" and declared his intention to write, storyboard, and shoot a $20,000 video project all by his witto self. He's a banker. He has a vision. He has no interest in my advice, but cries like a baby when it's explained to him that 90% of what he's shot is utterly unusable.
"What do you mean, unusable?"
"I mean it's not clear what's going on in the shot, or the audio's borked, or the lighting is so bad all we can see is compression sparkles. You see what you've done here? You have the low-light setting on in the middle of the day, which renders the shots as nothing but colourful streaks and blurs. We can't use that."
"Fine, there was a technical problem there. But what about this stuff?"
"Er, well -- you see how you've turned the camcorder sideways, as if it were a still camera? We can't use those shots."
"Can't you just rotate them?"
"No, I'm afraid that's beyond the scope of the possible here. You're shooting at a 16 by 9 aspect ratio -- if we rotate that 90 degrees all we get is a 9 by 16 strip running down the centre of the screen."
"Just blow it up, then."
"A 250% scale of NTSC video? You've got to be joking. It would look worse than YouTube."
"That's fine. It could be, like, an effect."
"No, it couldn't."
These people must think that we kooky producers and art directors have skills that can be essentially boiled to knowing which buttons to press on the magic technology devices that make dreams come true. We are not, obviously, professional storytellers or graphic designers or fonts of creative expertise. We do not have years of experience. We have no technical knowledge of significant value to guide our process. We are merely the biggest scammers in the world, scoring jobs for which we are blithely unqualified.
This must be why it is so easy to know better. Film and video production is very intuitive, after all, and an amateur's gut feeling about how to go about it is probably equal to or greater than the jaded pronouncements of industry veterans. It's just common sense, right?
"I was hoping this would have more of a -- you know -- Hollywood quality."
"Oh yeah? Myself, I was hoping you'd increase your budget by a factor of ten, give us six more months, and have some fucking idea what your content is before the eleventh hour. Also, I'd like a pony."
A client I'm dealing with now has actually described himself as a "weekend filmmaker" and declared his intention to write, storyboard, and shoot a $20,000 video project all by his witto self. He's a banker. He has a vision. He has no interest in my advice, but cries like a baby when it's explained to him that 90% of what he's shot is utterly unusable.
"What do you mean, unusable?"
"I mean it's not clear what's going on in the shot, or the audio's borked, or the lighting is so bad all we can see is compression sparkles. You see what you've done here? You have the low-light setting on in the middle of the day, which renders the shots as nothing but colourful streaks and blurs. We can't use that."
"Fine, there was a technical problem there. But what about this stuff?"
"Er, well -- you see how you've turned the camcorder sideways, as if it were a still camera? We can't use those shots."
"Can't you just rotate them?"
"No, I'm afraid that's beyond the scope of the possible here. You're shooting at a 16 by 9 aspect ratio -- if we rotate that 90 degrees all we get is a 9 by 16 strip running down the centre of the screen."
"Just blow it up, then."
"A 250% scale of NTSC video? You've got to be joking. It would look worse than YouTube."
"That's fine. It could be, like, an effect."
"No, it couldn't."
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