Animation Contest
10 messages in this thread
Just A reminder.
The deadline for the second Amiga World Animation contest is mid
November….and entries are pouring in. If you have questions of the rules
or prizes, see any recent issue of Amiga World (the prizes are pretty
nice).
If you have any other questions, you can call me at the office –
603-924-9471 x 107 or post your questions here.
-Lou Wallace
Lou
Do the anims have to be on disk or can we send in a videotape (3/4" ok?)
with or without music? We do a lot of anims (especially Pagerender 3-d and
we have been adding music as we put them on video……
Thx
-SAM
Yes, you can submit entries on video tape, as long as you
1) Send a master (1st generation) on 3/4" or 1" tape 2) Send a copy on
VHS 3) Send enough of the anim on disk to PROVE it is Amiga
generated. If you don't send enough on disk we
may ask for more (if we arn't sure) if you are
a prize winner.
Good Luck!
BTW – Get those entries in soon – the deadline is November!
-LOu
Have you found an 'easy' to pay royalties on the music you're adding? When
we tried that at the club a year ago, we went nuts (the royalties were
going to be in the $7/tape (30 minutes of video)) which we couldn't afford.
Victor A. Wagner, Jr.
Um, we use our own music in our videos and anims……..it works out best
that way. Either I record on 4-trak or go into my roommate's studio (a
full-blown affair) or I use the Amiga to generate the music and record it
on tape. M is very good and easy to create simple cyclical music that you
can layer easily. Especially with a 4-trak, you can generate one
percussive part and record on one trak, then generate completely unrelated
other music and add it to the first and sometimes you get some really wild
stuff…..
-Then people might end up paying YOU royalties, no?
-Scott
Unfortunately, we don't have any musicians in the club who volunteered
their stuff. We 'simply' wanted to put some music (from CDs) on the sound
tracks to make the video more pleasing. A couple of things got in the way
(although we were using mostly a single 'artist'). First, it turns out
that the albums were published by several different companies, so we had to
deal with them separately. Then there was a 'synchronization license' or
something like that which we NEVER did try to get because the person who
handled that said we needed release from the (C) holders AND (P) holders
for the performances we wished to copy. Things wouldn't have been too bad,
except that we planned on making maybe (only) 100 copies. This caused some
consternation with the record companies who had been willing to 'sell' the
rights for around US$.05 / per minute…until they heard that our run was
going to be so small….and their TOTAL income from this wouldn't cover
their paperwork costs and, in effect, raised their royalties to around
US$.25/minute. For a 35 minute tape, that comes to $7.75/copy. We'd sorta
been hoping to sell them for around $15 and make a little money for the
club, but with royalties alone coming to almost $8 it wasn't gonna work too
well. The _final_ straw was CBS Records who _refused_ to let us put 2
minutes 30 seconds of "Jeff Wayne's War of the World" on the tape. Since
the animation (a work in progress, the author/artist plans on doing the
ENTIRE piece) had been made specifically to synch to this piece I chose to
'call it quits' on the soundtrack. It was a VERY disappointing experience.
It is my opinion, that if the music industry wants to lower piracy, they
ought to make it a bit easier to get 'legal' copies of music onto other
media. It is absolutely clear that this video would have 'promoted' the
music on the soundtrack (we had one public performance of it (at the club
meeting) and were deluged with requests for the names of the pieces on it).
Victor A. Wagner, Jr.
Vic:
Sorry it took so long to respond to your explaination of what you were
trying to do with the music. Now that I see you were trying to take
commercial CD music performances and put them over the tape, I understand
your problem. This is not a good way to go for small run projects, as you
found out.
For future reference, you should consider a couple of alternatives if you
ever decide to do this sort of thing again:
a) If someone in your group plays music, or if someone has some musical
ability and has something like DMCS, you can take a lead sheet (i.e. the
melody line of a piece of music in notation form) and either play it in via
midi, or enter it with DMCS (or Sonix), and then do your own arrangement
with various harmonies, percussion, etc. That way you can use existing
tunes, but NOT the commerical performance. The royalties are fairly
inexpensive under this scenario! (< 5 cents per cut, I believe). I do
this all the time for my own use, and have not tried to distribute, so I
can't absolutely guarantee that the royalty thing is easier. But, I have
been involved with folks who put out records that occasionally contain
"covers" of songs written by others, and have worked with folks who play
"cover" music in performance. That's where my impression about covering
songs with your own arrangements comes from (as opposed to using another
artist's actual performance).
b) There is an entire industry surrounding soundtrack music. If you know
anyone in the advertising or radio business, they might be able to get you
access to a library of tunes for just this purpose. Generally, the music
is pretty good, comes in all kinds of flavors, and is available for
reasonable royalties. I've used this quite a bit in the past for
industrial slide and tape shows (tho I don't do that sort of thing anymore,
and don't live in the same city anymore, or I'd get you some names of
sources — some other folks around here might be current on sources and
rates, tho.)
[ MORE ]
Vic:
Look for the ASCAP or BMI office in a city near you and ask them. (BTW
-this is strictly a personal experience, limited to an experience I had in
Dallas, but based on that, I'd trust a local BMI rep before I'd trust ASCAP
— I had an ASCAP local rep down there try to rip off a club owner, not by
lying, but by "playing dumb" about the rules)
Anyway, I could be wrong about this, but, if you are doing the arranging
and performance (i.e. through MIDI or using something like DMCA or Sonix),
then the regular author's royalties for a BMI or ASCAP piece shouldn't be
more than < 5 cents per cut per unit.
?|^] Ray Lewis
Ray, see my response to Scott Matalon.
Someday, when I cool down about this, I'm gonna write up this tale (which
took place over 2 months) and send it all to my congressman the next time
the 'music industry' asks for protection against the 'rampant piracy'
problem.
Victor A. Wagner, Jr.