Color correction guy turns in unusable work, what would you do?

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Hey guys,

Don't bother, his been very combative. He said his 25. He seemed to know a lot in life already.
He asked a question in his first post. Most here already gave the answer, + advice he can use. But as my old man would say,

YOUR ATTITUDE DETERMINES YOUR ALTITUDE. his attitude is like a 12 year old.

I saw the clip too, i thought it was bad, but as you said it wasn't the worse.
Technically I wanted to know which was the part done by this "colorist" and which was the DP's so we can dissect it and pass judgement on the "colorist's" supposed "unacceptable, unusable work".

Now this 25 year old said I was skimming, he missed to looked at the number posts the people who replied to him has on average.
On age and on posts this 25 year old lacks the numbers, he also lacks on humility and respect. I say we stop this and lock this down before the aggressive pack swarms down on this thread.

We have been too kind. I was surprised Pookie and Doc didnt snap.
 
mr_goodbomb said:
This is a low-budget film, you do things to get by. It's not for a lack of understanding of "how it's done," it's for a lack of ability to do it within that process, because that process assumes you have money. I'm 25. I don't.
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Then you shouldn't be making crappy features, you should be honing your skills and contacts through shorts. In my opinion.
 
I say we stop this and lock this down before the aggressive pack swarms down on this thread.
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I think you are right. As to my snapping, LOL, I have become a reformed DVXUser member. Nice and diplomatic. :Drogar-BigGrin(DBG)
 
Jawa Ex Machina said:
I just wish they'd support independent filmmakers who try to do something different, genre films and films that young people want to see that can also be sold abroad, and first time filmmakers so we'd get some new blood into the system. That's all. So people don't have to self finance feature films after film school...
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I would like to point out that in the late seventies, a young unknown filmmaker and his friends managed to raise about $100,000 (today about $330,000). They did it by bugging friends, family, meetings with businessmen and women, tossing business cards every which way they could. That film was Evil Dead. Wouldn't most people on here be thrilled with that kind of budget? Especially in shooting with the technologically advanced HD cameras we have today, as opposed to the expense of shooting on 16mm.

Not to derail this thread, but just to point it out.
 
Gary Huff said:
I would like to point out that in the late seventies, a young unknown filmmaker and his friends managed to raise about $100,000 (today about $330,000). They did it by bugging friends, family, meetings with businessmen and women, tossing business cards every which way they could. That film was Evil Dead. Wouldn't most people on here be thrilled with that kind of budget? Especially in shooting with the technologically advanced HD cameras we have today, as opposed to the expense of shooting on 16mm.

Not to derail this thread, but just to point it out.
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Yeah, but this is not the norm, by far. I mean, sure, we can look back at currently successful film makers and say "see they managed to get this much money because of X" so you need to do that but there's also a substantial time difference involved, here. At that time period you had far fewer players in the game who had the ability to make a passable product. Now we have a lot more technology that allows more people to make something of higher quality (at least in terms of production values) than Evil Dead.

Similarly there's a lot more high quality music around now that people don't even know about because there's been a huge advancement in what you can do on your own without going to an expensive professional studio which has resulted in lots more competition.

Besides which, Evil Dead is an exception not a norm. If you've got $100,000 in "Evil Dead" you have $100,000 that didn't go to maybe 5-10 lower budget films so it's not like everyone has the ability to get that sum of money. It just doesn't exist for everyone without it being taken from somewhere else.
 
CJMVenter said:
You guys should see the opening credits he chopped together for the movie. He doesn't even have any attention to credit order conventions let alone aesthetics.
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OK I'll bite.

Why is your CC guy editing your film?

Don't you have an editor? Grading and editing are two different areas.

Sounds like quite a mess of organization that no one took control of, but the scape goat appears to be the CC guy.

Looks like you were letting the CC guy put the entire project together, then panicked when you found problems.

As I've already said, consider the whole thing as a learning experience and move on. This won't be your last.
 
I'd like to provide some frame of reference for what color work CAN cost. (Granted, we're mostly low-/no-/indie-budget filmmakers, but I think it's important for people to know what things actually cost in the high-end production world.)

For commercial and film work, one of (if not the) top colorists in the country working in LA has a room rate of $2,000 per hour. Another colorist, probably just as good, at a post house in the Midwest, gets a room rate of $1,500 per hour.

Again, just for reference.
 
Doc Bernard said:
You heard it from him: Pookie Bites!
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Pookie said:
OK I'll bite.

Why is your CC guy editing your film?

Don't you have an editor? Grading and editing are two different areas.

Sounds like quite a mess of organization that no one took control of, but the scape goat appears to be the CC guy.

Looks like you were letting the CC guy put the entire project together, then panicked when you found problems.

As I've already said, consider the whole thing as a learning experience and move on. This won't be your last.
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Well that's the thing. The color guy WANTED to put everything together. He insisted on editing stuff when he wasn't supposed to and when told not to did it anyway. Including audio that I was hired to edit, apparently. So what he turned in was largely stuff he wasn't even supposed to be doing.

There was already another credits sequence around so what he did was really more of another option he said he could put together so, why not see what it's like, right?

Again, obviously, I don't think anyone involved in this project will ever "work" with him again.

Fair enough he wasn't getting paid much. We've established that. But it was a rate he agreed to and while proportionally its not much compared to a real professional's rates, you don't expect to get nothing at all for paying someone a few hundred dollars.

I think you'd complain if you went to McDonalds, ordered a 3 dollar meal and were given a tray full of stuff that's completely different from what you ordered. Granted, it's not the $800 meal you could get at a high end Manhattan restaurant, but you'd expect to get something resembling a hamburger if you ordered one and I dare say you'd complain if your hamburger had some bites taken out of it that you didn't ask for.

Sure, it's McDonalds. Compared to a Five Star restaurant it's unprofessional; but that doesn't give them the right to take your money if they can't give you an intact edible hamburger.
 
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maybe when he started noticing all the red flags in this process he should have cut his losses then and get a bit of a refund. "Sorry, but we have a deadline and need you to focus on cc not edits, music, etc. If you are unable to comply to make our deadline maybe we should part ways." It's hard to say though, maybe he gave him the benefit of the doubt. This is what I would take away from this experience.
 
You paid him to CC your film. He did. You aren't happy with the results - what can you do?

1) Take him to small claims court. The time and money you spend to do this will be more than the $250 you may recover.

2) Learn from it, do some more fudnraising, have your film re-graded.

Those are your options.

Michael
 
I think it's becoming clear that you guys have absolutely no organization or oversight, or else things like "working on things he wasn't paid to do" wouldn't happen.
 
I actually enjoyed the music and cutting of the intro scene. Granted, I agree that the names could have been done way better, but the artistic quality of it seemed fun to me, and the music fun on top of it. I've seen A LOT of low budget films where this intro is WAY WAY better because it was different. Of course, I like films like Re-animator and Wild Zero which have some pretty low cost intros :)
 
Also, goodbomb, you need to take a little more responsibility. If you were there looking over his shoulder for months, but nothing was done 3 days before the premiere… what the heck were you doing, and thinking? I find this hard to understand.

And,you need to understand that there are objective amounts you should roughly expect to pay for a professional job, and that paying a lot less is extremely risky at best. Someone who claims to be a professional and works for such a low amount will have problems. You're better off finding a hungry student who gives a crap.

Finally, seems like you had red flag after red flag after red flag, and let them all slide, without that even making you slightly more strict in supervision. You blame this guy, but he practically shouted at you that you'd have problems from the first meeting. You need to judge quickly and decisively who needs to be replaced… and who not to hire in yhe first place.
 
CJMVenter said:
Actually, I am the composer for the film and I don't think your assumption is correct. mr_goodbomb is not a difficult guy to work with in my experience. But, then again, I also haven't given him low quality work because I actually care about the work I do no matter what I get paid. If it's a low budget project I'm going to try my best to make it as good as possible so that my own work looks good, too.

But anyway, this CC guy also wanted to master the audio for the movie and do the final mix of all the different audio tracks because he, based on no evidence, didn't trust that I could mix audio despite my having recorded and mixed the entire soundtrack by myself. Keep in mind he was hired to do Color Correction and my job was to handle audio, so basically he was asking to do my job too because he wanted to have total control over the project for some reason.

I gave goodbomb the individual audio tracks as well as a full mix because it's his movie and he should have that anyway but I made it known that I'd prefer the CC guy not try and take over my job. Luckily we had that audio mix for the small premiere we did because the CC guy wouldn't have had anything ready at all.

You guys should see the opening credits he chopped together for the movie. He doesn't even have any attention to credit order conventions let alone aesthetics.
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You too? C'mon, you guys are making yourselves look really bad, or at least really gullible. WHY IS WHAT THE CC GUY WANTS IF INTEREST TO YOU? If the clerk at staples who sold you the blank DVDs said he wanted to edit your film, would you let him? You're supposed to be the director (and scorer, defending the directors attitude)… direct! Don't let people walk all over you, and don't try to explain why someone else is to blame for ruining your film when you let them do jobs just cause they wanted to, and didn't properly supervise them.
 
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