Welcome to my Nightmare

MagicCat said:
Thanks Man. I appreciate that more than you know.
The one thing that I noticed throughout this thread is that very few would take on a job like this. But more importantly is, the reasons they wouldn't. They were afraid of blow-back in the end, not the actual work it would take to make something up that the client would accept. That is commendable that so many could see a do-able product through the smoke of challenges.
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MagicCat, first off, great job on pulling that project through.

I think that most people approached this from the idea that this would have been a first-time client for them. You had an ace up your sleeve, i.e. you had worked with this client before and had footage from those shoots to use for the commercial.

Had you not had any previous experience/footage from this client, and only had the footage that she had given you (with no time for reshoots), the result would have been quite different, and I think that is the situation from which most of the comments on this thread have stemmed from.
 
Wow, honestly I don't know what I would've done... You seem to have pulled it off the best anyone really could with that peace of sh*t green screen (if you can even call it that)
I want to know where these wankers went to film school
 
MagicCat you did a great job of saving your client from a failure and turned it into a decent commercial. Lets hope that they have the moxy to call you first from now on.

I had to edit a video for a website for a friend of mine that deals with inventors and this home made video has to be the worst of all time. He shoots himself at the kitchen table and the phone rings and he answers it and leaves it in the video and it was over a minute long.

Now thats funny.
 
What is it with all this pussiness? What if Neil Armstrong decided “I don’t feel like walking on the moon, let’s just fly over Georgia and see what it looks like from 10,000 feet”? What if Lincoln decided he didn’t want to get his hands dirty in a little war? What if Ike decided not to cross the channel because it looked rainy and he didn’t think the French really deserved rescuing?

This is America, we can do anything. That’s what our forefathers founded this country on. You don’t use “can’t” when being a film maker. There is no “can’t” in this business. Nothing is impossible. You press on, you keep keying and never give up. Now get out there and give us a finished product that would make Lieutenant Dan wet his pants.
 
While I understand the sentiment, there are things that are "impossible" in this business (after all, Kennedy promised to get to the moon before the decade was out, not by next Tuesday). A lot of things are less impossible when you have money and/or time to throw at a project, but Magic Cat had an ace up his sleeve: namely that he had lots of footage from previous projects. If you watched what he came up with, there are only two shots from that entire shoot (that I remember). In another situation, where no previous footage existed, it would be quite the chore to make a commercial that wasn't completely laughable.
 
Time spent pussying around with bad footage is time NOT spent on a paying project. That's the concern most of us face when these types of projects come up.

And even worse, no matter how much time you spend on it you can never use it on your reel, no matter how much you salvage it because it will always look a bit off and the last thing a potential client wants to hear is an excuse like, "You should have seen what the original footage looked like!"
 
You did a great job fixing up that horrible crap that the 2 "film school" guys ruined for your client. I hope that the client has learned a lesson from this and calls you first next time.

Although things turned out good for you this time because of the extra footage you shot for the client previously, you should sit the client down before the next shoot and explain to them how to do it right and what it actually will cost them.

If after this experience they don't see the value in doing it the right way, because it cost too much, than the client is not worth the $16 an hour you earned on this nightmare.

If they are willing to do things the correct way from here on out then you have a good client who will be a loyal customer for life. I would say you earned it.
 
Wierd idea - if budget and rendering were no object (ha!) - forget the "green screen" in the camera originals, just animate some match-move FPOs of the dancers in Maya or even in a consumer 3D product, and then generate your alpha channel from those animations to mask your camera footage of the real dancers.

NO... WAIT... you were looking for possible. This thread sort-of blurred the definition of "possible" in my head for a few seconds. Had a brief lapse into Opposite World.

Sorry.

I'm all better now.

Really.
 
I'd like to add on to that point (if I'm reading the post above me correctly). Sure, you can "fix" anything, but time and expertise are two factors. I'm sure there are plenty of terrific editors here who don't have the skills to use Maya or 3D Studio Max, or who even have the money to purchase them to begin with. It's not that it can't be done, it's that you, in particular, don't have the required skill set to fix a particular problem, while otherwise you're a top editor. Would you spend $10,000 to fix the footage, or just reshoot it? Instead, you have $500 and tell the editor "no reshoots". Choices are limited. For a client who made such a boneheaded move in the first place (and insultingly wanted to skimp on cost after Magic Cat has apparently delivered fine products beforehand), I don't doubt most of us here aren't going to run ourselves into exhaustion trying to fix crappy footage from a client who should have known better in the first place.

And once you start tossing the idea that "nothing is impossible to fix" around, you start giving clients that idea, which is a bad thing.
 
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