I rant on my first piece of contracting work

[Danny]

http://theundergroundslacker.blogspot.com/ ^taken from my blog. Unfortunatly my film about red is on hold as were focusing on class with our respective contracted works, in my case sitting through 7 dv tapes worth of a guy sitting at the back of school classrooms just pressing record. -that is till he gets into his head he's spielberg reshooting the beach scene from saving private ryan and going all mental with the camera, zooming in and out for sod all reason, weaving through the classroom (whilst pointing it at the floor), and, swear to god, filming one kid pick his nose and another sloooowly, reach down his pants, bite his lower lip and widen his eyes. Now what that child may have been doing ill leave it up to your filthy minds to create a scenario but still, whilst ive only filmed 4 shorts this year, which ill get to in a minute, this is the only time ive seen someone elses work and just gone "pfft, amatuer". and dont get me wrong, not in an arogant way, it was just SO bad. ive somehow got to get this 7 hours of crap into 20 minutes of fried gold to be distributed nation friggin' wide as a training video for new teachers. not too much pressure then. and what gets it worse is im given pages and pages of "1:23 - class does note taking, 3:14 practical work" ect. ect. I read this, looked at the tapes, then looked at the prof and asked "ugh.... till what?", and he goes "till what, what?", and i explained how theyd somehow given me a list of start times on paper with no end, just points of interest, thats worse than giving me free reign and no direction at all. if they had the time to sit through 7 hours of footage then you would think that they would have the common sense, if they should be planning a key stratagem of portions of film to edit, that they would add times to start and stop. But no, just points of interest, at least thats all i can think they are, no explanation was given, just a page with times and titles on. I got through an hour an a half, or one tape, for them alst wednesday, but now were done till the spring term in the 2nd week of january, which gives me time to work on my red project, now titled "Epilogue", but still, a foot in the door it may be but id rather do a wedding video than this. at least they would give you an idea of what they want. and somehow i have to liase with this "cameraman" and i use the term very, VERY, loosely adn the 4 secondary schools im contracted to do this for on what they want doing. no. they didnt have the good sense to tell me what they wanted before they let me chop up there big brother wannabe crap in...i dunno im either using adobe premier pro or avid to do this im not quite sure. oh well, you dont get a started in the industry right off the bat with a directorail feature..... well unless your kvein smith or gary ugarek i suppose, but the point is i guess i gotta work with these guys to have something to add to a film makers cv, but still, id rather give ideas for game adaptions to uwe boll than do this. you heard me.

[Danny]

another extract on the subject: -So a dude form the council showed up for the video there contracting me to do and my lecturer was shaking his head in bemused disbelief at this guys demands, im one guy with a mac, not lucas arts, and he was wanting "fully interactive branching menus in real time with the video, like in harry potter dvd's" blu-ray and hd compatible disks, 7.1 sound (???) and all this crap that, considering im doing this for almost nothing he was expecting a massive set up, i said "look dude, youve given me two weeks deadline, what you want is impossible, i can edit a video for you and make a dvd with chapters and stuff but in the timeframe thats the best your going to get" to wich he was quite taken aback since he seemed to just want me to nod and jump how high he said, but like i said it was impossible in 18 hours of time i get in that period i have left on the macs that i could do something like that.

[GingeUK]

That's the council for you. Had the same run in a few years back when I just left Uni with my local council who gave me no guidance as to what they wanted and then got annoyed with what I eventually gave them. I also know of a few other people who got conned when they were hired for a council job when they thought the £6000 they were getting for a job was brilliant. Only when it turned out to be that the job would take nearly a year and the money had to be shared between three of the them that they realised what they had got themselves into.

[Danny]

its gotta be done by february and we get 3 or so hours a week to do it in, i reckon im gonna have to stay after uni closes till 9pm to get any ground work on this, so far im only 5 minidv tapes in out of 9 in 6 hours.