2 Scarlets on set - upgrading to Epics & Dragon… Then client references iPhone 5s...

[Glen Powell]

2 Scarlets on set - upgrading to Epics & Dragon… Then client references iPhone 5s...

So yesterday I'm in the studio with client, agency, & production company producer. We're going through a pre-pre-pro for an upcoming shoot; discussing types of shots, movement, & how to show off their product. There is a stunt product on set, I have two Scarlets set-up and we're switching out lenses to try and figure out what the client / agency are looking for...

One of the agency guys asks why we need to use such complicated gear, when he could just buy an iPhone 5s and shoot this in his kitchen at home - then he whips out his iPad and shows us this Burberry video:

He was serious…

Not the first time I've heard this - and it makes it harder and harder to increase rates for better equipment when clients don't understand. If they believe that their content can be shot on a $500 cell phone - they don't care that I need to recoup investment in gear that costs so much more. Sometimes the aspect of selling what I do becomes so frustrating.

 

[Christopher Mills]

and it looks like it was shot with a phone

and it looks like it was shot with a phone

lots of low res shots.. and I bet the macro ones were not shot with a phone..
and of course, that Ipad is the biggest screen it'll look ok on..

 

[Glen Powell]

I know - total gimmick; yet people fall for it. Even those who come up with the gimmicks in the first place.

 

[Christopher Mills]

and of course.. needs same size studio, lighting package, post, vfx as your shoot with 2 scarlets

 

[paul schefz]

i think that the iphone 5s would be more expensive then 2 scarlets...today
but seriously: how much cheaper would the same production be? like christopher just said....everything but the camera is the same....
also: video looks great, feels great and most importantly gets the views....because of what it is shot with....let's see in 3 weeks....nobody is interested in shooting with a phone everybody has...

 

[Peter Strietmann]

Try watching it without the music.

 

[Glen Powell]

I think my beef is really with the idea that some clients have - that you could shoot this (every project) with a phone, (any phone) without support, and it will still look great. Totally flawed, but it is something that I hear over and over.

 

[C. Miersch]

He was serious…

It is a legitimate question for outsiders.

We had sometimes the same problem, explaining the cost of CG. People see how you "render out an image" or see on TV some movie-scenes inside Maya and think this goes all automatically. We then usually explained the process and after that everybody indeed did understand us. The key really is to consider it a legitimate question and to welcome it. I cant expect that my clients understand me, I have to make my position clear, everytime. One must make sure the client appreciates the own effort and knows how much work involved. And if in this situation after an explanation the agency guy still had his opinion I'd let him have it.

I know you know all this, in and out, and YES I understand that it might sometimes be frustrating, explaining it over and over again

 

[Ryan Hamblin]

I have alot of clients like that as well. They just dont get the reasoning for paying for Epic. They are happy with 4k stills pulled from video... happy with 1080 delivery (Blah) Even though we offer a 4k master and keep one for ourselves. It has me completly on the fence for upgrading my camera to Dragon, or epic dragon... even though I really want it

 

[Brian Merlen]

Ask him how hes going to hook his PL lenses to the phone so you can actually pull on it lol! I'd love to see a 3 foot PL zoom lens hooked to a phone!

My photographer buddy warned me a while ago when he saw me spending a ton of cash on how phones had really hurt his industry. I suppose for stills that is accurate. But for decent looking motion with tracked focus, tripods/stabilization a phones form factor just kind of sucks. Not to mention unless you could run a high end off board recorder to it, what is the point if it shoots some super compressed codec? I personally don't think phones will ever be realistic competitors for Alexas, or Epics ( or Dragons).

The form factor of those things makes them like dslrs, only worse. By the time you could realistically kit one to a tripid and throw a pl lens on it, its going to be a stupidly weird form factor between your sticks, glass, off board recorder, and whatever else you need to run, audio, etc.

So I think clients who realistically see this as an option for shooting motion are out of their minds. If they want to go for cheap buy a DSLR, at the very least it comes ready for glass and sticks! LOL!

 

[Stephen Williams]

I see a lot of worse videos than that! Stop selling 'what it was shot on' anybody can buy a camera but not so many can light.

 

[Noel R.]

Was the commercial a series of quick blurry montages intentionally designed to hide detail and clipped highlights? Who does he think actually paid for the commercial? Burberry or iPhone?

 

[Vadim Bobkovsky]

Oh boy, had the pleasure to meet a couple of those. Sometimes I wonder if some folks are legally blind or just lack any kind of taste. iPhone? Jeez...

 

[Glen Powell]

Hey I know all of this - I shoot with cameras other than my RED's, I sell my talent and not my equipment… The frustration is with clients who sometimes don't even understand the talent.

 

[Gavin Greenwalt]

We are working on a big 6 figure budget project right now and there are quite a few shots that were captured with the Nokia Lumia phone's camera. The client is right. You most certainly could use the iphone as a crash cam and it would probably be about as good as any other. The big difference though is reliability. I have Lumia footage and I have Epic footage. Of the epic footage about 50% is of a usable high quality. Of the Lumia footage it's more like 5-10%. Focus is extremely inconsistent. You have to toss about half of all shots due to focus problems right out the gate. Exposure is the second leading cause of failure with about half of those shots being unusable. And then you just have to evaluate quality. Of the half that are in focus properly and of the half that are exposed properly only about half of those were sharp and noise free enough for our uses. Those are generally pretty good and totally usable. Not as good as the epic plates but definitely good enough.

It's only a matter of time before phones though are sufficiently good for 90% of shots. Focus is perfected and dynamic range ends any exposure concerns. In 5-7 years you'll have the near equivalent of an epic in your pocket. And it's going to be awesome! But the epics of the world will still be around. You'll get features that make production move quicker and more smoothly like real-time offloading over wireless so that you can preview your greenscreen in real-time. Hell for that matter you'll have monitoring for the director and client to see while filming (good luck convincing apple they need to stream in real time to a remote display while recording.) They can already shoot on a 5D, and many people do. High end cameras in my experience speed up production. Instead of trying to trick the camera into doing something they weren't intended to do you just use the tool designed for the job. With 30 people sitting around, all of whom probably charge $100+ an hour that time adds up fast and rental rates are a pretty small slice of the pie. Bringing them back because the iphone botched a take subtly is way more expensive than the insurance of an extra $600 per day for a real camera body.

 

[Saumene Mehrdady]

i actually had somebody ask me if their iPad 2 and the filmic pro app was a suitable substitute for a canon t3i dslr

 

[James d Page]

Chips and resolution will improve on phones, but good optics don't shrink and get cheap the same way.

 

[Christopher Mills]

back to the OP's frustration... While on 1 level, this smacks of the DP being told what tools to use, on another, are you booked on the job regardless of camera? DO you understand how to get the best results that the cheap device can do?
If the client had insisted on you using another brand of high quality camera, which you did not own, would you turn down the job?

Advertising work is its own game, and the purpose of it from the vendor side is to make the client happy to write them a check of sufficient size to meet the vendor's financial goals. If they told you they wanted you to draw a flip book and film it with a gopro, and agreed on a fee for it, wouldn't you do it?

If you are sulking about loss of revenue from your personal tool kit not being rented, then you should charge enough for your services (i suggest by including more days of supervision of prep and post to ensure best image results deliverable from whatever camera you do use) to make up the difference..

If this is really about them not wanting to pay the bottom line production costs, then you have a different challenge, and may need to fire this client.
As in.. if you aren't going to turn a profit on this project, then it's the wrong project.

Advertising is also about the premise that it drives profitable commerce for the end client. Thus your fee is theoretically an investment that yields return. If you charge too low of a fee, you have unnecessarily enriched the client at a direct expense to yourself

 

[Mark T Workman]

I have alot of clients like that as well. They just dont get the reasoning for paying for Epic. They are happy with 4k stills pulled from video... happy with 1080 delivery (Blah) Even though we offer a 4k master and keep one for ourselves. It has me completly on the fence for upgrading my camera to Dragon, or epic dragon... even though I really want it

++1 You are so not alone! I would add I am hoping to see some post solution for Dragon that does not involve rental software for life! It is an expense I'm afraid might help to bankrupt me down the line if I let it. The market is so flat right now... I think Adobe should sell the Dragon patch for all of the software it can actually work with, especially CS6. The "Take the money and RUN!" philosophy IS NOT IMPRESSIVE when I'm not making money!

 

[Bob Gilles]

I could easily shot this commercial on a cell phone, you never actually see a shot 100% onscreen, it is just a mess of dissolves and layers. If a client ask me to shoot this on a cell phone, no problem. If a client asked me to shot Prometheus on a cell phone, hell no!