In terms of video production, what has been the most intimidating aspect for you?

Rylan Zolinski

Rylan Zolinski

Well-known member
Whether it's audio mixing, color grading, shooting, editing, or lighting... What's been the most intimidating aspect of video production for you? For myself, I'd have to go with lighting. It's always scared me. I've always tried to shoot with natural lighting as much as possible but that's always not available. I've been using some LED's I picked up rather recently and have been learning as much as I can. It's been pretty damn fun but it's obvious there is lots to learn. When you're a one man band, having to know just about everything is essential (but very time time consuming).
 
I came up from portrait photography so it's been the opposite for me. Lighting was what I knew best. And manual exposure control.
Digital color correction and encoding science has been the horror story for me.
why the hell did they ever invent so many darn codecs and wrappers?!?
i also have a theater background, so working with actors and staging is second nature for me. I guess I've been lucky.
 
Morox said:
Whether it's audio mixing, color grading, shooting, editing, or lighting... What's been the most intimidating aspect of video production for you? For myself, I'd have to go with lighting. It's always scared me. I've always tried to shoot with natural lighting as much as possible but that's always not available. I've been using some LED's I picked up rather recently and have been learning as much as I can. It's been pretty damn fun but it's obvious there is lots to learn. When you're a one man band, having to know just about everything is essential (but very time time consuming).
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Getting a group to last long enough to get 'my' works filmed... with no money and only weekends available...
 
Perfectly matching the storyboard to a location that has the proper production resources and flexibility to affordably book and shoot....while matching the initial aesthetic of the creative brief.
 
Networking. I'm friendly, knowledgeable, and hard-working, but I'm willfully ignorant of pop culture, dislike small talk, and many of my political views simply aren't commonly popular amongst most media types.
 
That'd be great! hahaha

A baltimore/DMV level meet up would be a really cool thing.

I've definitely seen a thread on it that never went anywhere, but it seems like a good number of forum users from the region.
 
Morox said:
What's been the most intimidating aspect of video production for you?
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Hands down, it's audio. Particularly capture, but also effects, Foley, music, mixing, mastering, etc. It's also the most important aspect of a video production, because it's the least forgiving. People will forgive all kinds of visual sins, but bad audio is what causes people to get up and leave.
 
For me its definately the business side of things. Self Promotion, RFP's, Pricing, paperwork, accounting etc. The doing is what I find fun but its hard to sit down and force yourself to do the non creative stuff. My dream is to build up enough clients that I can hire someone to tackle the business end of things for me.
 
The key is that you don't have to do all of these things yourself. Be a producer -- find the people who already are experts in these fields, and get them to work on your project. Then learn from them as they do their jobs.

My #1 rule as a producer is simple -- "Always hire the best, most talented, most experienced, most highly trained person you can afford for every job." The key being "you can afford", of course.

Which means my biggest headache is finding financing. If I can find the money, then I can hire the right people.

But that doesn't mean that without money, you can't get good people. If you have a great script, you can get great people who are willing to work for deferred pay. Case in point -- my feature 'Afterlife'. Our budget was nanoscopic. All I could offer was meals, credit and copy, plus profit points. No money up front. No budget for transportation or accommodations. A challenging script with a wide range of locations -- from a mansion to a hospital, from a cemetery to a nightclub to a psychiatrist's office to hell itself. And a fairly large cast.

I was blessed to find a good director who was also an artist with lighting, having worked professionally for years as a gaffer with a major TV network in Atlanta. His lighting made a tremendous difference in the production values.

I got really great actors as well, even some SAG actors -- despite the fact that it was a non=union production. Well trained, seasoned and very talented.

It took nearly a year to shoot the movie, working only on weekends around everyone's schedules. But we got it in the can. So it can be done!

Let me stress, however, that every effort should be made to secure proper funding so that everyone who works SO hard is able to be paid for their efforts. "Deferred pay" should always be the very last resort.
 
The legal and accounting stuff. Many people don't bother with it, and it has few consequences because their projects are limited to their clients and/or non-profit. But if the aim is higher, then all that legal and accounting stuff comes into play. And that stuff is not something that can be intuited or common-sensed. There are all sorts of odd but important rules and regulations, and it is super easy to get things wrong. Meanwhile qualified legal and accounting help is expensive and even so not always fool-proof. Mistakes and omissions early in the process can come back to bite you hard when you least expect it, limiting the potential and payoff of your work. Established companies have dedicated departments and resources to take care of all that stuff. But as a solo operator, you're on your own. And you don't know what you don't know, because a lot of that stuff is not something that can be reasoned out or anticipated. There are traps and pitfalls everywhere, starting but not limited to where you can shoot, under what circumstances, what you can and cannot show for copyright and even trademark reasons, and so on down the line. Lawyers dedicate their lives to it, and specialize in the field. You as a solo operator cannot wing that stuff the way you can try to be your own DP or sound person, or acting coach, or any technical or creative role. You could be making mistakes you won't find out about until much later. Getting the stuff in the can is not even the beginning of the battle, because you don't know how legally encumbered the stuff you have is, or is not. And odds are, that you don't happen to have a "friend" who does legal and accounting stuff and whom you can consult free of charge, the way you can for any technical stuff. It's hard to even ask about on message boards - again, often because you don't even know what it is that you don't know.

TLDR: legal and accounting - hate and fear that stuff, but know it's a necessary evil.
 
The scariest thing for me is saying no. I really love doing narrative work and I'm approached a lot by self-producers who have not funded their projects in realistic ways but they are into it, often friends. They want to make it happen and I want to help them. It has happened that I wind up working way harder than I should for less money than I should. If I could, I'd do it all for free but I have expenses. They're doing the best they can, and I want to help but I have turned down work this year where there wasn't the right budget for a half way decent crew, or sound, or makeup, etc. It's getting better. The projects have definitely improved with the budgets this year.

It's not just the money. If the project is weakly produced then we don't have the resources or the time to do a good job and that's the most frustrating thing. What's the first thing to go? Dolly shots! I love dolly shots! Just getting people to realize that anything more than 6 pages a day, moving company on the day, not having people there to "lock it up" when we're ready to go is going to really compromise the work. My admonition to them is, "when you go to the movies, please, stay for the credits." See all the effort by tens of companies and hundreds of people are involved in getting that "character driven" movie up there on that screen.

Also, I have to improve myself as a businessman. It's about discipline and working hard on those aspects. All my clients are happy with the results of our work, aesthetically and technically. I just have to get the word out better so that I can keep moving up to better produced projects.
 
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hscully said:
The scariest thing for me is saying no. I really love doing narrative work and I'm approached a lot by self-producers who have not funded their projects in realistic ways but they are into it, often friends. They want to make it happen and I want to help them. It has happened that I wind up working way harder than I should for less money than I should. If I could, I'd do it all for free but I have expenses.
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I'm on the other side of this. I hate asking for favors of any kind. I'd love to have the budget/money and pay everyone their full rate - none of that cut rate, deferred, back end, points nonsense. Alas, I don't have the funds. The comeback to that is "well then go get some", which is fine, but not always realistic. But even without $, I still want to shoot stuff. So at that point my options are: 1) ask for favors and freebies, 2) try to do it yourself and with your closest allies, f.ex. wife, family, childhood friend etc., 3) do without. That's where your psychological makeup comes in. Mine is unfortunately not that well suited to the film world, because I pretty much never avail myself of option (1) - I simply cannot bring myself to ask someone to work for free or near-free. So I'm left with options (2) and (3). But with (2) "do it yourself", you really are handicapping yourself, because nobody is going to be great at everything, but more importantly, you simply don't have the physical capacity to take on too many roles - your project will inevitably suffer if you are the director and also the DP and also the lights and sound and grip, and producer, and crafts, and continuity and so on. That's guaranteed. Which is why I often gravitate to option (3), by so structuring the project that I can bring down the complexity as much as possible - limit locations, limit number of actors, limit everything you possibly can, by writing around it, by shooting around it, by improvising and so on. Ultimately, it ends up a combination of trying to do too much myself and putting too many limitations on the material and overall it hurts the project. So there is that side too: while you hate to say no, there are those like me, who hate to ask because we sympathize with your position. A good filmmaker is good at asking people for stuff and motivating them, including motivating them without pay... if you hate to ask, you are going to limit yourself badly. I am aware of this weakness of mine, but don't know how to get around it. We all have our weak points psychologically, and this is mine.
 
On the technical side it is colour grading. Although the veil is starting to lift so that may change in the future but there is a mountain still to climb and it is steep.

Other than that the business and legal side sucks balls. Producing is so difficult and soul destroying it helped funnel me into deciding to focus on camera operation, lighting and the other artistically technical roles I enjoy. In fact any role that is highly technical yet requires a strong artistic bent to do well floats my boat. On the other hand, if you are not in a key role the adage 'hurry up and wait' applies to you. And I prefer to be the guy with too much to do and not enough time to do it in, almost every job I do I get called in at the last minute and am behind the 8-ball before I even start. But I love it, having time to think can be dangerous. Solving problems and putting out fires without losing my cool seems to be my particular talent and what seems to keep my in mind and the offers coming in.
 
To expand on my earlier point, here is a scene from my feature 'Afterlife'.

This was shot in an historic mansion -- location cost = $0.00.

Cast and crew were all on deferred pay contracts, so up-front costs = $0.00. (We fed them, of course.)

This kind of quality -- and better -- can be achieved on small budgets.

https://vimeo.com/91927936
 
It would be an interesting study to send 25 scouts out to 25 historic mansions to see how many of them could get it free. Can it be done...sure...on some rare occasions. Could you build a sustained production strategy off this? Not anything that would have ongoing success.
 
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