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I hate, when they don’t want to pay the price. They always think that computers do these things by themselves. And they start to bitch all the time. Females are the worst. Because my country is male chauvinistic, women often try to get the price down because “Hey I am a woman, so lower me the price” “I am a damsel in distress” like the work that you did was any different.
A friend of mine has a rule, when clients start bitching about the price.
You Have 3 options: Beautiful, Fast and Cheap. You can choose two.
ha ha i once had a client from MTV networks INSISTING i render out the promo sequence with “icons” on as in all the axis displays…she ESPECIALLY loved the camera node!
sigh…ive had everything done in my room.[ not counting approvals ]
clients having sex with their girlfriendsclients bringing their CHILDREn and actually askin em what they think bout the spot after 10 days non stop work on it!!
clients fighting with the agencies [almost physically!]
a korean client calling his boss in seoul for 8hrs with his mobile attached to the charger describing the shot and asking me to move the logos a pixel here and there from 15 ft away.
and quite a few others that are unmentionable
all i can say is welcome to ASIA…
I didn’t know that its just the same worldwide. The things I don’t like:
1. Working at night, because the billionare client watches the spot at 15:00 today, and wants to see his/her revisions tomorrow. The assistants come to you at 17:00, and tell you we have to make the revision for tomorrow. And you work till morning…
2. Making the thing fast!.. When the clients don’t speak eachother, and not talking at the phone, if you work on a shot for more than 10 minutes; some of them start to ask: “Hey, what is your opinion about this shot, how much time will we need to complete this shot?” The more kind ones start to look their watches…
3. Yes, they try to lower the price most of the time.
4. Sometimes they lie to you… They tell that the spot will be broadcasted tomorrow night, so you will have to work till morning. But you see the spot on air, after 2 weeks! And you kindly ask the client, why you had to work till morning for a spot, which had 2 weeks? They lie again, and say that “The boss client went to Paris, and didn’t have the time to approve this, so we waited 2 weeks for him to approve!”… Sometimes agencies lie even to prod. companies like this. But most of the time, the prod. company wants to get rid of the spot, just because they will start a new spot in a few days. That is the major reason…
5. When the directors leave the suite, some of the assistants start to behave like the director. They ask you for things, which will not work. Obviously, it won’t. But if you just tell, it is not a good idea to do so, and if you continue your way, then a cold war starts! You even have to make the assistant of the director happy.
6. Some of younger clients/assistants know a little about desktop compositing softwares. And they start to make suggestions about the techniques of your composition. And they start to tell, “in AfterFX I could make this and this… Isn’t there such a thing in inferno?” And you still have to reply kindly.
oh yeah!!! sounds familiar….the airdate crap is VERY common in asia..now when a producer shows me a storyboard, if ts major comping my first question is “whats the airdate” that gives me an idea of how much the clients are gonna mess around…yup the assistant thingy happens here too though not that often cos of the culture theyre usually to scared to mess with flame artists ! 🙂 i always say…at the end of the day we are providing a service and they are paying for it…its not like its free so they have to follow some rules set down by the post house…sometimes it works sometimes it doesnt…such is life…the after fx / shake comparisons are a bit rare in SE asia at least…i always politely tell the prod house producer that when its 3am and u need a master tape at 6am… u NEED a flame*…THAT ALWAYS WORKS
airdates! now theres a good one ! many, many years ago, I did a commercial that didn’t go on air for about 6 months after our completion date, so long in fact that they’d changed the bottle!
So guess who had to do a pack replacement. This was back in the days of Harry, so no auto tracking, everthing was by eye.
You youngsters don’t know how easy you’ve got it!! 😆Paul
PS not even gonna mention movie deadlines!!worst i ever heard was last year from a pal in bombay …..agency CD [french bloke] messing around…84 offline revisions and a total of 7, 12 hr online [inferno] revisions and it was a direct clone of a garnier hair commercial ..an asia version..so every shot was already locked. 😈
…. then there was the new range of hair products, many huge sessions over a period of a year, then they never released them!!
Paul
since we are discussing this, here is but a sample of what we go thru in Puerto Rico…
1) Client asks for a solid white background, but he wants it out of focus so it will look soft and not as electronic.
2) Our avid DS editor suggested to a client that they trim a shot 15frames,
client reckons that’s too much, why not half a second?3) during a film to tape xfer session our colorist started playing with the gamma adjust ball on the davinci, as colors shifted the client (local DP) started wondering outloud what was going on (this was an outdoor shoot) resident colorist joking about it said he had phase changes in the lighting, DP started blaming the SUN for changing phase infront of HIS clients…
4) they ask u to move a tittle/logo just a bit, “amost imperceptable please” they say, u move it, they asked if u moved it, of course I did, well they claim they can’t notice it.
5) love that red, can u give it to me but in green???
6) they ask u to do “X” when u are about to go do it, they scream “STOP u got it” and u haven’t touched a key.
I could go on and on, but I am sure most of u could too as well…
OH WAIT, this one is classic.
Local Director now only shoots on video, he reckons that since film is transfered to videotape, once film touches videotape it will look like video, and he likes how digibeta looks, so now he shoots in DV and copies all his material to digibeta to give it the “film look”.
Some funny requests/questions from clients:
1. Client: Could you please add a light over this background?
Me: But the background is fully white?!2. Client: Up to which point can inferno scale the video, without distorting it? We can scale up to 30% in avid..
Me: Let’s scale up to the point, that you don’t feel any distortions.3. Client: Will this text move so slow? I thought you would make a faster move.
Me: No, I was just rendering the setup, I will play it back, after the process finishes…4. Client: What effects do we have in inferno?
Me: Inferno doesn’t have any effects, we just do fx by layering the materials you give me.5. Client: Ohh, you don’t see an image on the tablet. But how do you paint it, without seeing anything on the tablet?
Me: We just get used to working with pen, while looking at the monitor 🙂6. Client: We didn’t bother with the talent, during telecine. We just have concentrated on greenscreen.
Me: So you have done secondaries during grading for the greenscreen shots?7. Client: We have printed our HDCam shoots to film, and transferred it back to video, to get filmlook. Did you like it?
Me: (Could I say something logical?)These are the things I remember for now. Ofcourse there are many other things that I don’t remember. But why don’t you post your ones to this thread?
one of my ALL time favorites is the colour corrector…whenever clients cant decide on a CERTAIN shade of yellow or pink or whatever i very politely tell the art director from the agency that we have over 16 million colours to choose from so…… some times i suddenly rotate the hue 360 deg and bring everything back to where it was and they all shout excitedly ” you got it!! done ! approved!! ” and all i did was refresh their eyes and bring it back to what we already had….
this post almost killed me with laughter…gotta stop smoking sigh!!!
“Local Director now only shoots on video, he reckons that since film is transfered to videotape, once film touches videotape it will look like video, and he likes how digibeta looks, so now he shoots in DV and copies all his material to digibeta to give it the “film look”.
I love the times when I go into paint and use the clone brush…the clients act like it’s the most amazing thing they’ve ever seen.
(Except for the one day I did that and a PA sitting next to my chair said, “Dude…that’s just like Photoshop!)
i once did some breast enhancements with the warp bush in paint while waiting for clients to arrive…the director LOVED it and even had a go and commented on how smooth and soft the brush was…
rohit wrote:i once did some breast enhancements with the warp bush in paint while waiting for clients to arrive…the director LOVED it and even had a go and commented on how smooth and soft the brush was…I usually resort to this when the atmosphere in the room gets uneasy – like waiting for telephone approval from “The Headquarters Overseas”. I take a frame with the company boss and go happy warping until everyone is rolling over the carpet laughing their heads off… Kind of therapy, isn’t it? Shouldn’t we get billed separately for that?
Must find a better agent… 😉
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