Sometimes in the creative process there is no moment like the one when you are throwing paint at the canvas, drawing the bead on a weld, chipping at the wax with a little chisel…

Most of the time I create content using tools like After Effects which is necessarily an iterative process: I try something, I preview it, I tweak it, I try it again, I find my way to what I’m looking for.

I’ve spent the last few days taking myself out of that creative comfort zone, and using tools that create in the moment. Sometimes there is magic in that all or nothing moment. It’s there to be mined, if you have the heart, art, and courage to join with it.

To that end I have been using Livid Instruments Union software to create content very fast, and very much in the moment. It inspired me to go out and do more in the moment stuff… I used my phone today while waiting for a lunch date to shoot a whole wad of pictures of peoples feet on the sidewalk as they passed me. When stitched together, showing up for maybe 9 frames a piece, I got an amazing, kinetic yet stopped montage of sidewalk traffic.

I brought this into my clip bin for Union, which is essentially a dual channel video mixer with effects banks and live input. It’s been targeted at the VJ and live video performance market, and it does “in the moment” extremely well. With some great tunes dialed in, I’ve taken my foot traffic piece and whacked it around, applied effects, mixed and mashed it. One great aspect of Union is the ability to record your output. So all of this experimentation has quickly led to about 30 different, wickedly cool clips, each affected remarkably differently, each an expression of what I was grabbing and tweaking in the moment, without a lot of conscience thought.

I think that choosing to create this way has an analogy in musical jamming. Sitting down and jamming is a great visceral experience. There is definitely a part of our brains that is wired to do this, and may I add it comes with the reward of extraordinary endorphin rushes when you are really nailing it. One could also create music by composing, which is the other side of the analogy: a process much closer to that try, tweak, and try again process I mentioned before.

But today I am jamming, and loving it.

Today we were busy running numbers on some upcoming projects. Once again I was forced to see the absolute necessity of this process. It’s not something that’s intuitive for me…

When we first started designing projection (10 years ago now !) I’d listen to the producer or director explain what was desired. Then Colleen and I would try to grab a number out of space that seemed appropriate. We always tried to keep it really cheap (we thought this was critical to getting hired), and we’d try to think it through and wing an estimation. Yeah, let’s see… We’ll take some pictures, grab the DV and film that little thing… Hmmm, some time in compositing…. Then encoding. Being in the theatre of course…. Uh, how about, uh, $15k ? How ridiculous it is in retrospect.

We work in a BUSINESS. And if you think for a moment that any producer outside of the non-profit arena is doing it for love of his art, then you are charmingly naive ! Same for the vendors. I know plenty of people who occupy those positions who are passionate about this business, don’t get me wrong, but ultimately it’s business.

As designers, it’s not always intuitive to apply good business practices. There is scant instructions on this aspect in most MFA programs. After all we are artists right ? The focus is on creativity.

It gradually dawned on Colleen and I that we were losing money on most gigs. The cost of equipment, of freelance help, of studio space rental, of business insurance, of health insurance, of travel, of attorneys, of accountants, of, of, of… it was eating up everything. The important word is accounting. We weren’t accounting for our expenses against what we were charging. If you total up all those factors I mentioned (at least) for a monthly period, and then divided by 160 (the average hours in a work month), then you begin to see what your COB is… Cost of Business. This forms the basic level.

The next step for us was to try to develop a formalized budget process for gigs. Our process would be to sit down and fill in all the cells in a spreadsheet to total the cost of doing the work on a gig.

There are a variety of commercially available project tracking and budgeting spreadsheets. None of them is perfect for our business. Some of the one’s that are close include MovieMagic’s budgeting app, or even the classic film producer’s budget, known as an “A to K”.

But as I said, these weren’t exactly right… they weren’t ideal. SO we set out to build our own budgeting spreadsheet tool, which we dubbed the estimator.

The estimator, simply put, is an excel spreadsheet that we fill out on a per project basis. We break any project down into it’s sub parts. For concerts or musicals, that often means musical numbers. For installation or architectural it might mean the different spaces involved. For each one of these columns we then go down through the rows. Will we buy some stock footage ? How much ? Estimated cost ? How many hours of editorial ? How many hours of compositing ? Animation ? These things all need to have an established rate for your estimation. Will you shoot elements ? For us, this opens a whole page within the spreadsheet. How much will the location cost ? Grip package ? Camera rental ? Makeup artist ? Director of Photography ? Generator ? Permit fee ? Transportation ? Catering or food ? Talent costs ? This just touches on it. Once this page is filled out, it yields a total number for the shoot for that particular part/scene/song. We repeat this process for all the various musical numbers or locations, or whatever the logical parts are. The total is our costs. Add a reasonable profit margin. Add a contingency (for the unknown things that are going to pop up). Often the contingency should be as much as 10% of the whole budget number. If you don’t use it, you can make the producer happy later with a little reduction in budget as the process plays out. But if you DO need it, it’s already there. You aren’t going back, hat in hand, to explain how you didn’t foresee something, and now you need more money. Boy that’s ALWAYS fun, right?

This spreadsheet has taken us years to work out. We discover new things that cost money all the time ! But we also find what we call “Profit Pockets”. For instance, it might be much less expensive to animate a partifular thing using 3D CG, rather than shoot practical objects, in terms of hard costs. You could probably charge the client much the same fee though, as the service is more valuable. But your cost is lower. This is a profit pocket. It allows us to think about shows, making sound economic decisions right alongside the aesthetic ones.

The first result when you adopt this process is a bit of shock. Man it can be expensive to do what we do. But the other end result is that after so much carfeul estimation and analysis you have a real road map to completing the gig, AND you have good solid information to share with the client that shows them exactly what they are getting for their money.

The secondary, and critical part of this spreadsheet is a twin space for what the numbers ACTUALLY turned out to be. This allows us to analyze a gig after it’s done, and see where we were estimating wrong, so we know where to look in the future.

I know math isn’t always fun. And spreadsheets can make you dizzy. But a one time investment in bringing in somebody who does know how to build one, and having them help you build your own estimator can make the difference between having to work non-stop just to maintain a hand to mouth existence, or doing your work and getting paid for what it is worth.

Here’s something that makes me uneasy: The idea that some vendors in the Broadway market have been providing content ’services’ (in addition to the gear package) to shows that don’t really have a defined Projection Designer.

Hasn’t there always been a sort of wall between renting gear and also providing design, specifically in the theatrical market ? I own a Hippotizer, but I don’t rent it to clients out of respect for the relationships I have with my favorite vendors. As a designer, what am I supposed to think when I find that some vendors are going ahead and providing content ?

Let me be clear: A corporate event, a party, a little advertising thing, any of these I can see the vendor stepping up for the complete package. There’s clear precedent. But when the vendors suddenly become the competitors to some of their biggest clients (i.e. the designers) on Broadway level shows, or big tours… That makes me nervous. Is it every man for himself now ? Isn’t theatre the province of a collaboration between artists ?

Certainly the flip side exists… There are programmers and projection designers out there who rent their own servers to the same people hiring them for programming or content. But this tends to take place in the world of one-off events, corporate stuff or broadcast. It’s not something Colleen and I have done up to now. And on the concert side, there are a number of LD’s who provide the rental of the gear to the client and then subrent it… It seems to be the way that those designers construct on-going compensation for a gig, sort of building a royalty sensibility into an industry that doesn’t do royalties for design.

And on reflection, it’s fairly common on the sound side of things. But in those cases, at least it’s acknowledged and named. If the show is designed by Richard Fitzgerald, I’ll expect to see Sound Associates boxes everywhere. But the sort of situations I’m talking about don’t fit that. Vendors are just ‘throwing in’ the content… or maybe billing it out by the hour. It feels like a model that blows away the market standards for fees vs. work produced that the designers have been struggling to define. And does it undermine designers as artists ?

What do all of you think ? Is this just part of our changing world ? I really welcome the comments. I’m not entrenched here… I’m wondering, is the market changing ? And if it is, how do we as designers, figure out how to remain competitive.

Just got done reading the anniversary issue. Man, what a confluence of amazing minds, opinions, recollections, prognostications, and predictions.

I think one of my favorite articles was the piece by Colin Lowry. I won’t spend a bunch of time re-hashing (you should read the whole issue), but what struck me as super-cool is Colin’s DIY approach. Only once does he refer to media servers. The rest of the time, Colin is stringing together DV decks, DVD players, small switchers, multi-head video adapters for laptops, and the phenomenal new (and FREE) software, Q-Lab. By leveraging what each of these straight forward things can do, he’s solving real challenges like multiple signal paths, cue malleability, and total lack of $$. This kicks serious butt. Add in operators who are REALLY interested in engaging with the show, operating it artistically (i.e. NOT boiling it down to one button) and he’s allowing theatrical productions to achieve amazingly advanced things. On the big shows, these challenges are most often met by turning on the money hose and soaking the problem with cash. Colin is implicitly rejecting this approach… And I think he’s finding something more genuinely artistic and collaborative in the process.

Which is not to say it isn’t happening on the big shows too. Colleen and I were staggered when Willie Williams told us he was using a Playstation controller to trigger and direct video cues on U2’s latest tour. And Justin and the gang at Art Fag are taking a really advanced (but no less DIY) approach in their Control Freak endeavour… For all of these guys the priority is about finding exactly the right tool to do the job. Or even creating a brand new tool.

When we designed video for Barry Humphrey’s (Dame Edna) Australian tour four years ago, we had no options like media servers. But we were creating a show for a comedian. Comedy is anything but predictable. What could we do ? We could have racks full of hard drive based decks, with a kinky show controller and tons of crap in between. This would have been major $$… Instead we explored solutions that aren’t really ‘made’ to do what we needed, but still offered us flexibility in a total gorilla fashion. In that case it was a freakishly heavy gaming laptop equipped with Avid’s brand new DV editing software, and a $1000 dollar DV to RGB signal converter. By putting different cues at different places on the timeline we could jump around at random. It required only a fraction of the cash we would otherwise have spent on the ‘legit’ system. It DID require an operator who was paying close attention and had little fear of tools he’d never seen. fortunately we had that. The audience never knew the difference.

SO the next time your project doesn’t have the $$ to rent a media server, set aside the disappointment and start thinking way outside the box. You might find something even better.

Colleen and I went off to Banff to remount our latest operatic design, Frobisher. It was an interesting lesson at so many levels. At a fundamental gear and logistics level, it had challenges we expected: Having the projectors in different positions, as well as the set. Thus a big adjustment in content. It also had challenges that were unexpected. The power in Banff is strictly, uh, variable in the summer, with so much use of air conditioning and the tourist population, voltage spikes and brownouts were commonplace. Man did that make for unhappy projectors. Particularly when we relamped just prior to opening, it semed as though those power supplies and new bulbs were having an even harder time with the power. And then the air conditioning in the booth gave way leading to a fried graphics card. Ever try to find a really high end graphics card for a Hippotizer in the middle of a national forest ? We DID find one in Calgary, and after some puzzling with device drivers the Hippo was back. A visit from the kindly HVAC gods led to a restoration of cool, both in the booth, and at the production table.

This much is evident… maybe even self evident. Boy does it suck when a projector moves. Or gets replaced totally. Man what a hassle. We lost 4 hours of cueing time, time we could ill afford.

What an amazing opportunity remounts of new works are though… (was that an oxymoron?). The chance to revisit, revise, and extend the first artistic thoughts is just awesome. Coming back to the work with the experience of having done it once; the ability to analyze it and really dig in. Mmmm it was good. Colleen took the lead on this, and she was so precise, so mathematical, and so poetic. Frobisher is naturalistic, lots of representation of tundra, snow, and northern lights , a delicate palette.

We’ve been moving into a good deal of producing events, and that poked it’s head into our process quite a bit. We’re designing/producing a DVD/PBS special with the Boston Pops, John Anderson, and Belinda Carlyle in a rock adaptation of Handel’s Messiah. Worrying about getting broadcast trucks, taking care of seat kills for camera positions, coordinating among the Executive Producers (NETworks, and Half Pint Productions) and the vendors and venue… It seemed like I spent a 1/3 of my time in Banff away from the table, on the phone putting out fires. It’s really rewarding taking responsibility for all that stuff, but it’s also really difficult, and really relentless.

Just life in the Canadian Rockies.