behind the scenes

It’s a quiet morning here at FLF, aside from Jamie’s (our freelance animator’s) iTunes playing over the office sound system.  Jerry’s in New York City today, Mike the Intern isn’t in on Tuesdays, and it’s a perfect opportunity to catch up on some work.

As I type, I’m actually listening in on a voiceover session.  Jerry’s on the call too, directing the talent from New York City.  Our client is listening in from Malibu, our sound engineer Matt Smith is recording the session in Las Vegas, and the talent, Kevin Lockhart, is reading his heart out from Colorado.  He’s actually shouting different versions of the word “Unstoppable!” into the phone right now… so fun to listen to.  Here’s the last commercial he voiced for us:

We have a pretty streamlined system for all of this…  Here’s how we select and record voiceovers for our commercial productions at FLF Films:

1. First, I send out the script to a few different sources and solicit auditions.
2. Once we have auditions, we pick our favorites.  If we can’t choose between our favorites, we’ll send the various auditions to the client and let them choose.  In other cases, we’ll just put our favorite voice in the rough cut and seek our client’s approval for it.
3. Once we’re all agreed on a voice, I schedule a recording session.  We always have to have the talent, the ad agency or client, Jerry, myself, and our sound engineer on the phone for it.  I usually just conference everyone through the magic of my iPhone.
4. I send out the final script to everyone involved, then we all get on the phone and record the session. We usually do a few full reads, and then get into line-by-line readings.  Jerry directs the talent.  Sound engineer Matt times the talent and keeps notes on which takes everyone likes.  The agency or client chimes in as much or as little as they like.

And that’s pretty much it… that’s how the announcer voice ends up in commercials!

Sometimes when we’re in the rough cutting process, we need placeholder footage for material we either haven’t shot or haven’t purchased yet.  It allows our clients to envision what the final cut will be like once all the right pieces are there, and we collect these placeholder pieces from sources all over the internet.  

Over the past year, our favorite footage-finders, “the Ryans,” had been using a program called Snapz Pro X to capture footage from the web.  Based on their description, you simply set your little selector tool (kind of like a crop tool) around any video frame on the internet… Hit record and it would screen capture everything happening inside the little box you set.  Pretty cool, no?  

Actually… not as cool as we initially thought.  It’s possible we didn’t delve deep enough into the settings and options Snapz Pro X offers, or perhaps we weren’t using it how it’s intended to be used, but editing with those screen captures was a nightmare!   There was no good way to get a consistent size/ frame rate of the videos we would capture, making it incredibly hard to use those videos on a timeline in a Final Cut project.  We had all sorts of issues with crashes, render errors, “slipping” of clip selections, etc.  Again, we probably weren’t using the software for its intended purpose.  I’d just caution anyone else considering using this software for the same goal. 

And then, a new discovery… just this week, Jerry  (a big believer in always having the right tools for the job) set out to find a new and better solution for a project we’re working on at the moment.  The project is a fundraising video for a large dinner that will benefit Nevada student scholarships and the Economic Development Authority of Western Nevada.  The script calls for us to intercut shots of a local community leader with some funny b-roll.  Jerry decided that, before we started collecting placeholder footage for the funny b-roll, we needed a better system.  He found a program called  TubeSock.  The program costs only $15 for an individual license, or $50 for a “family pack” of 5, and it allows you to download videos from YouTube, DailyMotion, and other sites, and saves them to your video iPod, Mac, or PlayStation Portable.  All you do is enter in the URL, and it does the rest for you… And most importantly for us, it saves the files in an FCP-friendly format (like m4v, mp4, etc), with consistent sizing and frame rate (no more render errors!).

Not sure if it’s the perfect solution — we haven’t tried it yet on other sites like Vimeo — but it seems to be our silver bullet for the moment.