Commercials in the USA

I've been coming to the States since I was a little boy.

I have strong memories of American television. Endless cartoons, the Adams Family, Batman! It was children's heaven. The commercials also made a big impression because you couldn't escape them; every few minutes the program would interrupt with advertisements for cereals, toys, dog food, to name just a few...

My memories of these commercials are of positive, dynamic and naieve images of a Disney-reality. They represented a fantasy world of happy, wealthy families with big houses, cars and dogs. Pictures of the American Dream.

Today I am here and see that commercials have not really changed in more than 30 years. They still have that goofy optimism. But for the first time I also notice how simple many of them are made: people shouting in your face with harsh lighting and unattractive scenery. Like cheap soap operas. American filmmakers have changed the world with their creativity and craftmanship but in TV-commercials very little of that talent is reflected. And I can't help but wonder: why?

Dust and fingerprints nearly killed me...

SONY EX1-R/AUTOCUE COMBINATION

So I had kind of a bad start yesterday: our soundguy had gallstones and there was no time to replace him. My client rented an autocue (a device that scrolls text before your eyes so you don't have to memorize text) and spent the evening before assembling it and preparing the text. Working with an autocue was new to him -and me, for that matter. We had 12.000 words of presentation to pack in a single day of shooting. And four locations in a beautifully renovated farm to do so. The talent was a Dutch speaker doing commentary in English on philosophical debate. This was no 60 second weather forecast...
I had a lot to consider: a wireless lavalier mic, a wired mic on a stand, directing, lighting and operating the camera. We were shooting with heavy sunlight pouring into dark interiors. The neighbours were screaming at their horses and riding motorcycles. The autocue broke down several times, for no apparent reason.

The 10.000 viewer challenge

Numbers can be fascinating, but they aren't everything. Actually, they can be quite silly. The highest ratings don't necessarily represent the best quality- they usually represent average taste. It's the power of the masses. Take the News of the World: one of the best selling newspapers in England. But it's pulp (non-)fiction.

If you want to make something extraordinary, it's best not to think about money or big numbers. Many great projects would have never been made if the motive was high ratings or commercial succes. On the other hand, because something is a succes, it doesn't make it bad or tasteless. Quality and popularity can live in the same house...

Ok, so far a few thoughts on succes, numbers and quality...

I want to start an experiment: I challenge myself (and you, if you'd like to join in) to produce a video that can generate 1.000 viewers in a month, 10.000 in six months. Vimeo and YouTube views combined. I will be a total slut for numbers. The ratings are the objective- not the content. Anything goes. (except for porn and violence, that's too easy) In my case, I have limited capacity/time to produce popular video. I am nearly consumed by my work, family, documentary and blog. How can I produce something that doesn't take up heaps of time and will generate a lot of traffic? I have a few ideas. As the blogger says: I'll keep you posted!

No sleep, no shot

Yesterday I had a job shooting a timelapse of a huge party tent being set up. I had to be somewhere 130 kilometers away at 7 AM. Which meant that I had to leave the house at 5.30 AM. Not my best time of the day...
So I go to bed early and at 11.45 PM, just after I fall asleep, I am awakened by a phonecall. The tent guy calls to say things are moving faster than expected. Could I be there at 5 AM?
So suddenly I have only 3,5 hours of sleep left and that idea keeps me wide awake. The more I look at the clock, the more awake I become. This stresses me out so much that sleep is completely out of the question. At 3.15 I get up and arrive at the place at exactly 5.01 AM. And what do I see? A big white, nearly completed tent! They started at 4 but didn't bother to tell me... All I can do is set up my camera and film them raising the last post of the tent. I feel utterly useless and am cold and hungry. And just as I think it can't get any worse than this, a giant shower pours from the sky over me and my camera. I have arrived in videoproduction hell...

ALL THAT'S LEFT FOR MY TIMELAPSE

7UP in the USSR

I'd like to mention a documentary series that ranks high in top documentaries of all times: the 7-up series. The idea is simple: follow a group of children from the age of 7 and revisit them every 7 years. Take children from various social backgrounds and from different parts of the country and ask them about their dreams, their fears, their passions, struggles and daily lives.
What you get is a extremely personal and confronting portrait of a people and a nation. With every 7 years added to the series, the project becomes more interesting because all the (unfulfilled) dreams and (unexpected) developments have a history we know of. Once we meet people as children, you understand and sympathize with them as grownups.

When disaster strikes...

...continue to work and pretend nothing is wrong. Last night had very bad karma. I was suffering from a bad headache that lasted for 2 days and had barely slept the night before. And when you're tired, you slip. I discovered that I forgot my quick releaseplate (at home, attached to my Canon 550D) just before we were about to shoot a group of people interacting. Four hours of panning and zooming without a tripod? Disaster. My partner gave me a roll of duck tape and I taped my EX1 to my tripod. It's a heavy camera so it took a lot of tape! It was sitting all crooked but by turning the Guide Frames on in the LCD screen I was able to level the camera by eye, using the walls and windows in the background to match the horizontal lines. Far from ideal, but it worked.
After about 3,5 hours of non-stop shooting, disaster number 2: my partners Sony A1 broke down. It refused to close when changing tapes... it jammed, blocked and stayed that way whatever we tried. We looked like a battlefield: one crooked, one broke. Disaster never seems to travel alone.

The promised land of tapeless acquisition

Life was supposed to be all good once tape was abolished and we were all going to the promised land of tapeless acquisition. Well, the acquisition part is mostly good and I'm glad I never have to think about buying tape or worry about running out of tape in the last ten minutes of a theatre registration...

But the convenience of handing over a tape at the end of a shoot and writing an invoice is also history. Because handing over your flash memory cards is a no-no unless you can make a copy at the spot. Which means dragging a laptop and a harddrive to the set, make extra time to copy all the files, hand over the drive to the client and hope you get it back. Not very practical.
My last job I chose to send the files to my clients' server. Upload speed was 50 Kb/s so I was 'lucky' it was only 10GB in files. After 50 hours the upload was finished. My client can't see my work because he needs to send it to his editor to import it into a NLE-system first.
I love tapeless acquisition. It's just that life was a lot easier when I could just hand a tape over to my client.

Just another night at the office...

HOW NOT TO USE THE STAGE!!

I spent some weary, non-stop hours last night filming an event (or at least trying to) with 15 speakers and a singing act. The lighting was theatrical (dramatic!) ie loads of light next to complete darkness. I emphasized that all speakers remain in the light during their speech, but many either walked in and out of the dark or chose to remain there 80% of the time...

Can things be worse for a filmer? Yes! Our friendly but inexperienced speakers either didn't use or walked away from the microphone half of the time, leaving me pumping the volume up and down. And to make things a complete disaster: the host of the evening had his own mic and screamed like a chicken, making the contrast with the other speakers even more noticeable.

Wasted

I survived last night, a film/edit session for a large corporation. After a week of soulsearching with an external organization around 20 managers were given the assignment to make a film about leadership.
My task was to help them shape their ideas, give basic camera instructions and edit their footage. We started brainstorming at 9 am, they came back with footage at 4 pm and I had finished my film at midnight. My 3 colleagues were less fortunate and edited untill 5 am. (disaster: my roommate in the hotel had just finished rendering the film at 5 am, was about to go up to the hotelroom when he discovered a text error. It took another hour to re-render...)
The viewing and evaluation took place this morning. My team was extremely happy with the film- as were the others with their films, for that matter.So I'm back home, tired but content. Looking forward to a shave.

Who needs new camera's anyway?

Often we're so caught up in the peripheral stuff that we spend too little time doing what we should be doing: filming. I am the first one to plead guilty. One of these peripheral things is this blog. And the gear, the technical stuff, the gadgets. It gobbles up disproportionate amounts of my time.
And then you see something that was shot on a Canon HV20 (I could have sworn it was a DSLR) and it looks stunning and blows away footage shot with the newest gear 5 times the price. And I think: I still have a HV20 lying around and I have always used it for B-roll. If I would have explored more of this camera, I could have done so much more with it. Many of us have too many options, it distracts from the core. It is is true, it is cliché and it needs to be repeated like a chant: less not only is more, less will bring you more. So here's something shot with the 'obsolete' Canon HV20:

MACRONATURE from monso on Vimeo.

Who needs dvd's, anyway?

For the first time in years(!) I have to deliver a video on dvd. Yes, I have burned the occasional dvd but almost all of my work is delivered as webfilm, in quicktime. This client wants 25 dvd's, too small a number to go to the shop so I burn it myself. Real old-fashioned handmade dvd's.
I burn 25 of them and test a few on my standalone dvd-player (which has become obsolete since I got my WD Mediaplayer 2 years ago). I also play them on my Mac and Windows PC. All is well.
I give the dvd's to my client, who gave it to hér boss to view it at home. He returns the dvd saying it doesn't play well: the lower thirds with his name & title are cut off horizontally. I ask for the dvd so I can check if it's bad. I insert it into my dvd-player and it plays fine, as expected. Then I decide to try to recreate the problem and all becomes clear when I set the dvd-player to display 4:3. It cuts off the picture exactly where he told us.

My first Sony: DCR-TRV6

Hij staat een beetje verloren in een hoekje en heel incidenteel wordt ie eruit gehaald: mijn 11 jaar oude Sony TRV6. Dan mag ie een tape-je inladen of een accu opladen voor mijn LED-lampje. Maar verder staat ie een beetje treurig werkloos te zijn.
Mijn vader werd destijds 65 en ging dat met ons vieren op de Britse Maagdeneilanden. Ik besloot hem als cadeau een gefilmd document te geven van die reis. Geen geromantiseerd souvenirtje van 10 dagen op een tropisch eiland, maar een keiharde weergave van 'the stuff families are made of'. Strijd en liefde dus. The beautiful, the nasty and the scary.
Het is een legendarische film geworden -binnen de familie dan, ik heb wel een reputatie te beschermen- en vormde de kiem voor mijn huidige bestaan als onafhankelijk filmmaker.

De perfecte tas

Ik heb er veel gehad en er zullen er ongetwijfeld nog wel een aantal komen: (camera-)tassen. Wat veel vrouwen hebben met handtassen en schoenen, dat heb ik met cameratassen. De harde stof aan de buitenkant en de zachte stof aan de binnenkant, het genoegen van een dikke, goedlopende rits, de vakken en vakjes, hoe de tas in de hand ligt. En niet te vergeten de kleur. Ik ben erg gek op. Het is het verlengstuk van de cameraman: een professionele, goed ogende tas is je visitekaartje.
Ik heb een tijd in Amerika gewoond en daar was ik onder andere fietskoerier. De bijbehorende koerierstas maakte toen z'n entree en ik was er als de kippen bij. Brede, gevoerde tassen met brede schouderriemen. Waterdicht, natuurlijk en onslijtbaar. (voor een jaar...) Het leven was simpel en overzichtelijk als fietskoerier: een man, een fiets, een tas. Die tijden zijn helaas voorbij.

The Art of Getting Paid

Ik heb op het moment van schrijven 4 rekeningen uitstaan voor werk dat ik gedaan heb in oktober en november van vorig jaar. Anders gezegd: ik heb sinds oktober vorig jaar geen inkomsten. Wanneer dat geld binnen zal komen is een groot raadsel. Het zou zomaar tot maart of zelfs april kunnen duren voordat ik alles binnen heb. Ondertussen schraap ik wel de laatste restjes van mijn spaargeld bijeen...

Kleur bekennen

Iedereen die met foto en video werkt, weet dat je kleuren pas kunt beoordelen (en dus betrouwbaar kunt bewerken) op een goede monitor die bovendien nog eens gecalibreerd is. Zo weet je bijvoorbeeld met zekerheid dat ‘wit’ wit is en ‘zwart’ niet donkergrijs omdat je LCD-scherm niet goed staat afgesteld.
Wat me altijd verwonderde aan dit verhaal is dat op het moment dat jouw film of foto de wijde wereld intrekt, hij terechtkomt in een wetteloze monitor- en TV-jungle waar zowat elk beeldscherm anders staat ingesteld.

Column: Camera-verslaving

Onlangs was ik naar een concert en voor m'n neus stond een vrouw geruime tijd met haar telefoon in de lucht de show te filmen. Iets verderop, zowel links als rechts, stonden rood aangelopen mannen met zwaar gepimpte camera's driftig te klikken. In het midden van de zaal stond een kleine cameraman met een grote, professionele digibeta camera. (ipv naar het concert te kijken bleef ik geïntrigeerd kijken hoe hij in godsnaam met zijn lens boven de menigte uit zou komen- beroepsdeformatie...) Linksboven in de tribune stond een man te filmen met een digitale spiegelreflexcamera op een schouderstatief. Op het balkon stonden nog zeker een dozijn mensen met hun telefoons te filmen.