Film incentives the right and the wrong

This is actually in both Blogs because well, it's important.
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Seems OT but it either goes here or in the sound BLOG and since it's a VERY hot item here in the big D here is where it goes.

Michigan may do away (essentially) with it's film incentives. California got a touch but it's getting fought so?

Since I have moved to MI I'll focus on the logistics here but this really applies to all states.

There are two papers that get dragged out and held up to prove film incentives cost money.

The first is this one Film Incentives Report

It's by the "Tax Foundation" which used to be reputable but then got bought by the Heritage foundation. They fired all the economists and it now is used to churn out what ever report they want to support their causes.

The second one is State film subsidies

A report by a supposedly OK outfit named Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

However it reads like a rewrite of the first and and uses the same erroneous arguments. So?

There are a few points that the folks supporting the incentives can't seem to get across to the general public. The anti incentives folks have set the argument and the pro folks are doing what the dems have done for years, defend against stupid accusations.

It seems to be a right wing thing to go after film incentives and the only reason I can think of is it's easy press to link them to.

Hollywood "liberals", which becomes a kind of code for all of "those people".

The arguments all come down to:

And how "we" should not be paying "them" all this money.
And all the best jobs go out of state.

The implication is that the state is giving money out of it's treasury to subsides the film industry.

The thing is EVEN IF the incentives all went to "those people" the states still make a bunch of money.

But we are talking TAX incentives.
The production pays a stack of cash in taxes to the state and when all the bookkeeping is done (a year or two down the pike) the production gets a refund.

It's not a subsidy it's a tax refund.

The "money" the state pays to the production is a slice of what the production payed to the state in the first place.

The only way this ends up costing the state anything is if you assume that all the films would have shot there anyway. Judging by the number of projects that pulled out of Michigan on the threat of the incentives getting curtailed that is an obviously wrong assumption for just about any state.

And lets get back to "those people". Yes "those Hollywood" types are going to be the headliners but they are also a drop in the bucket of film jobs.

I have news for you the majority of people in the film biz are not any of "those people". Hollywood power is smack in the middle of Orange County. One of the most conservative areas in the US. Hollywood was home to Charlton Heston and Ronald Reagan.

What is very ironic is that most of the jobs on a film are trades jobs. Carpenters, painters, electricians, metal workers, Teamsters, etc. A lot of these folks are very blue collar and pretty conservative. Many of the "flaming liberals" that get dragged out are actors. Actors are generally 1%-5% of the people working on a film. I have met more NRA members in film than ACLU members.

It's cracking me up the spell checker keeps wanting to change Charlton into Charlatan. But I digress.

For a state with incentives this could mean hundreds of jobs hired locally. And true IF you don't have local talent in the "best job" category then your not going to get many of those jobs.

But that is exactly why the state gives out "tax credits" to all kinds of businesses and even out right subsides. To grow your local talent pool and to keep businesses in your state.

And with out the incentives you don't even get the "worst jobs" (which in film generally pay pretty darn good).

Lets take a look at Michigan's budget. Now it has been claimed that Michigan "paid out" $100,000,000 in incentives. If that is true then they collected $238,095,238 in taxes, hung on to them for a year or so and then kept $138,095,238.

i.e. Michigan MADE 138,095,238, it didn't loose $100,000,000.

Look at it this way if you pay me a dollar and eventually I have to give you 42 cents back who is benefiting? I mean if the state wants to make the reverse deal with me I'm game. You can use the comments to tell me who to send the bill to.

But lets look at the bigger picture. Since we are outraged that those liberals are taking all that money to create jobs, who else might be sucking at the public teat? How much does Michigan actually pay out in "tax credits"?

Well it looks like that number is $1,351,500,000.

Here is the budget report.
Budget Report

So the state of Michigan is subsidizing companies to the tune of over one and a third Billion dollars and the only money the want to cut is one hundred mill that brings in film jobs.

I don't know where all the credits go. I'm sure none of it goes to companies that out sourced jobs to other countries. Right, and I just bought a hunk of the Brooklyn bridge.

If you think about it film production is one of the few businesses that can't out source, unless it moves the whole shebang.

OK I'm done. If someone is trying to kill incentives where you live use this info and shove it where it counts.

The Big D, Redux - moved

Since this blog is really supposed to be about sound... I've moved the Big D posts to a new blog called.
Bug'n out of Babylon

http://bugnoutofbabylon.blogspot.com/

Three roads to the End

An issue that has come up on a number of forums I'm on is the problem with answers to questions coming from very different perspectives.
I'm going to break down the "community" into three broad categories.
Commercial - public
Commercial - private
Non-Commercial

Those are kind of broad but I think they are valid.
Commercial - Public are those film and media projects that are aimed at selling to the public at large. You are going to have a product good enough that folks who know nothing about your project except the "buzz" are willing to pay to see it.

Commercial - private are projects that are pre sold. That would be industrials, even videography, documentaries that are grant funded (though this becomes one of the problem crossover situations, since you do eventually want people to come and see your film).

Non-Commercial are projects like in house films, home movies, student films, etc. This is a category that has a lot of crossover (well more like wanta be crossover) projects.

The problem that comes up is someone needs help with X and three different people give opposing advice and then start to argue over the merits of it leaving the OP in the dark. Many times they are all correct, but only from their orientation.

This comes up a lot in post sound questions because of the different routes the three take to final delivery.

In the Commercial - Public world tasks are all divided up and specialists do everything. It's really the only way to get to the polish of what Hollywood puts out. I did say "Polish" not "Quality". A high polish not so great quality film will out sell a low polish high quality film every time. It's very hard to see quality if it's just not well put together. You wouldn't hire an electrician to do your plumbing, unless you had to.

In the Commercial - Private world your selling before you shoot. You know what is important to the client and what isn't. Your focus is much more selective and your "public" is paying up front so if they are not willing to pay for X it's not going to cost you at the box office. These tend to be small tight crews with a lot of mixed of roles. This is not generally a category of many crossovers to the "big screen" Commercial - Public category.

In the Non- Commercial world there is chaos right now. It was a category that had just about a zero crossover ratio and now has a lot of crossover potential. The workflow used to be kind of a stripped down version of the Commercial - Private one with Very small crews. With the new cameras and the power of modern computers this category has the potential to make the move. BUT it generally doesn't have the orientation. If you want to compete with the big boys you need to bring polish to your projects. And that means you need to start bringing in specialists.

It gets very tricky because you can't afford to do it the "Hollywood" way,but you need to get a "Hollywood" polish. It can be done and I have posted about this before. On the visual side you can read Stu Maskowitz's blog/ books etc. The big hurdle is your orientation. You need to set some high standards and get over the fact that your making a movie. I know it's cool but gloat when it's done. Right now you need to be hypercritical of your polish. I'm going to assume you have the quality because there is no point polishing a turd. If you botched it up chalk it up as a learning tool and start your next film. When your rich and famous you can revisit and release your "directors cut", but right now you need to get a quality polished film out there.

So when I say you need to replace all the sounds and scrub your dialog and it's going to take you at least 40 tracks of sound... I'm talking from my orientation which is pretty firmly in the Commercial - Public world.

If your doing a student film that is more of a test out the camera thing or a learning how to direct short, you most certainly don't need all that. If your shooting a wedding video you, as picture editor, should go ahead and clean up the tracks and do whatever makes it work. You are not sending this to audio post, do what works for where you are.

But if your a crossover want to be, don't ask what plugin is going to make your film sound like a Hollywood blockbuster. There isn't one. You need to bring in the pro's or at least pro's of the future. You need to set your bar very high on the polish and that means sound also.

Mini-Indi, I want residuals!

I came up with this term the other day and I think I'm the first. It's hard to tell but if I am and it catches on I want residuals...

I started using it because there is a whole class of films that have no name. You have major films with budgets in the $100 mil + category. And what Hollywood calls ow budget (under $30 mil. Then there are the "Indi's" at somewhere from say $3 mil to $40-$50 mil. And then you have "no-budget" films, that all have some budget but generally not enough to pay people.
But in between there are a LOT of films being made. They have a budget usually in the $30K to $150K range and occasionally get close to "Indi" range. They are not student films (usually), they are by folks who have some experience (often) and are designed to be potentially commercial. The idea generally is to use it as a calling card. Some are shorts and some are features but the thing they have over most "no budget" films is that they have a focus on quality. Now all to often that focus is way off, they usually don't have "enough" experience to aim correctly. But the idea is to produce a professional film that would not be embarrassing if shown to a paying audience (that is not relatives and friends and crew).

The technology has come down in price and made it possible to make a film that looks great on a big screen for a small fraction of what it took to make a crappy looking/ sounding 16mm film. For all you 16mm fans, 16mm can look good but not when blown up to a full sized movie theatre screen. And it always sounds crappy. Mono, non noise reduced optical track. It's noisy has very limited range and no bass.

Back to the point.
Indi's are usually shot on 35mm, now probably more are shot on RED cameras. Either way your looking at $30K+ of camera and a lot of support gear. Mini-Indi's were born in HD video, one could argue the case for DVX-100's really being the start. But are growing up with HDSLR cameras.

My guess is that it is THE growth area in filmmaking. And what is great is that these cameras force the filmmaker to work in the traditional way. Shorter takes, double system sound, etc. Their fantastic low light capabilities means you can save a fortune in lighting and the fact that they use high quality 35mm lenses and have about the same frame size as a 35mm film means that all the creativity with focus and framing that you didn't have with "video" cameras is at your disposal.

You can make an excellent film that CAN look really good on a big screen. Of course it takes more than a camera to make a great movie, but it's a start. And because of the quality of the shots other weak areas are more apparent. I've already seen a general improvement if films coming through. The weakness of video, for narrative films, was it's strength for doc's. It was dead easy to pick one up and "just shoot". You have to think about what your shooting and how much more with HDSLR cameras and making the director think before "action" is a good thing.

So long live the Mini-Indi.

And when Sundance makes it a category I want a check!

Doobie, Doobie, Do

Just finished posting and mixing a short film that will be included with the new Doobie Brothers Album. Another really good film from Daron Ker (Water Buffalo Pictures). Now this is FUN. Even Monty (the sound dog) wanted to hangout and listen. And no, I'm not posting samples! Go buy the album.

Sometimes this gig is a grind and sometimes I have to laugh that I get to do this for a living ;~)

To Motown or not to Motown - moved

Since this blog is really supposed to be about sound... I've moved the Big D posts to a new blog called.
Bug'n out of Babylon

http://bugnoutofbabylon.blogspot.com/

Music VS Music and the Coen Brothers VS low budget films

[QUOTE]... what i don't get is No Country for Old Men. i thought that was an excellent movie, but i distinctly remember that it didn't have music in it. i thought the lack of music was one of its strong points (i.e. they CHOSE not have music in it). however, the wikipedia article states "Music By Carter Burwell", did i miss something in the movie?[/QUOTE]

No Country had no "score", it did have music, but it was all practical.

The other thing to remember is that the composed music is a balancing act with the "sound'. A good sound track plays almost like scored music. In a perfect world the composer and the sound supervisor and or designer would work closely with the director early on. Unfortunately that rarely happens. Low budget films often make the mistake of over scoring the film. An audience doesn't like to be beaten over the head every minute telling then how they should feel about every moment. And as a replacement for a decent sound track music generally sucks. The music only seq in a big film is pretty rare. Even the biggest "score moments" generally have a fair amount of "sound" to anchor the audience IN the story.

Which is why the sound folks and the composer ought to be working together. The two big questions are, "What does the audience WANT to hear now?", and "What does the audience NEED to hear now?". Some times it's score, some times it's the FX (I'm assuming they always want and need to hear the dialog), and sometimes it's both.

Lets take a big Knights in armor battle sequence.
Prep for the battle Knights getting on horses, sharpening swords etc. Probably all sound. WE need and want to be involved in this prep.
THey ride out. Probably more of the same but music may start to creep in.

We see the massed army at a distance moving toward battle. Perfect score moment. We can't hear them anyway and we want to get geared up for the battle.

The armies approach each other. Generally a big score moment that builds (and has sound start to come in more) till. THe battle explodes. At this point a lot of films will cheap out and put heavy score over big parts of the battle. This is almost always a mistake. It pulls the audience out of the world on the screen and we WANT to hear and be apart of the action. So as long as the camera is in the thick of it I think it should be all or at least 90% FX. If you pull out to a god view then you going back in to score land.

Aftermath. Often effective to start with just the quiet aftermath sounds but the right score can also work really well here.

Low budget films will usually slather music over the whole thing and often music that wasn't composed specifically for that scene so the beats aren't even on the money. They do it because even a picture editor can drop in some music the director has found but it takes a sound editor and a library and a bunch of Foley and time to really cover the battle. But it's not nearly as effective and often outright distracting to just slather music on.

As always just my 2¢

Craigs list and Flagging

This is only tangentially related to sound...

Craig's list is a decent resource for the low/ no budget category films. BUT there is a group that flags everything that is non paying. Now first off "Gig" does not nec. mean it's a "Paying gig" so chill out. Some of these are scam artists but a lot of them just don't have any money. Now I see the indignation 'we should be paid". But in fact a real credit for some one with none IS a payment.

So two things.
For the posters, include some contact info in the "body" of the post so that news reader folks can contact you, even IF your post is flagged.

For you flaggers, Gig does NOT nec. mean paying. This is why you do hear things like "unpaid gig", and "paid gig". So get over it. We are all adults and can decide for our selves if we want to work for no money.

Cheating your audience, and why a lot indi's fail the rump test

I was asked the other day about Formulas for Dialog EQ, to make it sound professional.

There are no "formulas" for dialog EQ.  As a general rule there isn't much EQ on dialog other than rolling off areas you don't use, generally the high end and probably everything below 120 or so.  It depends a bit on what your delivering for, some formats can't handle bass (16 mm for instance).  Dialog is usually compressed a bit but much of that is done manually with fader moves.  The whole goal of the dialog edit is to get as clean a track as possible (you asked about the "Hollywood" sound) so everything but actual dialog will be cleaned out.  If it's an FX that might be of use in the mix it's put on PFX (production FX) tracks.  Room tone is used to fill the wholes made by all the cleaning.  Old school those tracks get sent to the mix where the mixer does any processing (EQ, compression etc).  New school the Dialog editors may be doing some of the processing.  It really depends on the post workflow and who is mixing and supervising.  The mixers will also use reverb etc to place the dialog in the space if it doesn't fit naturally (sometimes the set doesn't sound anything like what the camera sees) and to get the ADR to blend with the production sound.  Serious noise reduction and dialog surgery is more and more done in editorial because the tools have gotten cheap enough and time in editorial is cheaper than in the mix.

BUT that is only a small part of the "Hollywood" sound, though it certainly helps.  In the ideal post everything you hear in a big film has been thought out and put there for a reason.  Other than indi directors/ producers generally not thinking about sound past intelligibility they also tend to be not into "sound".  They generally have an aversion to anything that deviates from the picture edit.  They often essentially want you to clean up what the picture editor has done.  So even when there are the skills to do a better job a lot of times it is hamstrung by a director who is married to the track they have been hearing for months in the picture edit.  Sometimes it's because they spent a bunch of time "fixing" (working around" a problem that they should have left for sound to do.  Now they are so invested in the "fix" that they can't live with out it.  And sometime they are just super conservative in a strange way.  With most "big time" directors, well the few I have worked with and the many that friends have worked with, if you have some little subtle complexity going on in the track.  Say some TV or crying baby bleeding through the wall from the apartment next door.  Not loud or in the way but just something that shows we are in a real apartment and not a set.  They will be happy and in fact would probably be pissed that nobody had thought to fill in the environment if you didn't do it.  A lot of indi directors will go "there was no baby on the set, it's the city, it's silent".  I actually had a director give me the "silent city" thing because I had put some traffic out the window of this downtown apt.  I live on the outskirts of San Francisco so I asked him to follow me out side for a minute.  I'm about ? 4-5 miles from the heart of Downtown and the traffic was very clear.  I usually try to point out that it is THEIR film and what ever they want I'll try to do but they should do it for a reason because the "that's what it sounds like" is A almost always wrong (most peoples perception of what things sound like is very far off) and B, it's the weakest reason to do something in a film (that is not a doc.).  A film is not a "real" place.  Everything is designed and if it isn't then your failing your audience (unless you doing some Dogma style thing).  A film makes a pact with the audience.  You promise that if they will suspend their disbelief you will take them to a world where your film lives and take them on a journey.  They have put their trust in you to look out for their interests.  It might be a scary world or a warm and fuzzy world but it needs to have an internal logic and you MUST honor the rules of this world.  If you cheat or short change the audience they will feel betrayed and not be happy they saw your film.  This is not a Disney argument.  You can scare the crap out of them, fool them amaze them make them feel good or make them terribly sad.  What you can't do is make them sad and then laugh at them.  You can trick them but you can't cheat them.

Of course expectations also play into things.  If I go to a no budget screening my expectations are totally different from going to a big budget film.  If this were not the case everyone would hate most indi's.  So you can get away with a lot but you still can't cheat.  And most low budget films cheat their audience in terms of sound.

*** “The Rump test” was a term my mother used for when the audience starts squirming in their seats, a sure sign you have lost them and they know they are back in the theatre and have been sitting too long.