• (cs) in reply to Otto
    Otto:
    Agreed. The real WTF is that Phil failed to see an instant market opportunity here. Spend a bit of capital, build a system that doesn't suck, sell it as "Professional Enterprise Marketingspeakhere" grade quality. Make a fortune, retire to an island populated entirely with naked women.

    Seriously, when you see a gap in the market, take advantage of it.

    You know, I haven't seen a lot of deals for islands populated entirely with naked women. That's a gap that could be filled...

  • Ouch... (unregistered)

    Wow. This was the first WTF in weeks to make me cringe... Yeeouch!

  • (cs) in reply to Yanman.be
    Yanman.be:
    What movie was it?
    Well, a not-top-budget hollywood movie with a lot of green screen. That narrows it down to roughly..... 75 percent...
  • G Mo' (unregistered) in reply to dtech
    dtech:
    Yanman.be:
    What movie was it?
    Well, a not-top-budget hollywood movie with a lot of green screen. That narrows it down to roughly..... 75 percent...

    Escape from L.A. -- the scene where Kurt Russell is surfing the tidal wave -- best ... green screen ... ever

  • LEGO (unregistered) in reply to G Mo'
    G Mo':
    Christopher:
    APH:
    Am I the only one who thinks that Phil needs to start his own business?!? He's got the best kind of competition: the kind that puts out a shoddy product that they don't support well.

    I agree completely, yet I know it's incredibly hard to get started with something like that, against 'professional' aura competition. Marketing department = omg they're professional and have years of experience, use them instead of the much cheaper alternative.

    Part of the problem is Phil's pricing structure. Cost to own less than half of the cost to rent the COTS solutions.

    In the minds of many, inexpensive == amateur != professional

    So True! Many years ago, my father started a steel fabrication business. The initial product was boat trailers. He built a few, put them on the front lawn with a For Sale sign and offered them at what he thought was a fair profit. Weeks went by with no sales. Finally he thought "to hell with it, if the business is going to fail, it may as well fail big". He doubled the price and from that point on was not able to make them fast enough. Just goes to show that most people are pretty stupid and price is not always directly related to quality.

    -Lego

  • sf (unregistered) in reply to tezoatlipoca
    tezoatlipoca:
    What I would have done, having had my proposal rejected would have been to mortgage my house and built my solution anyway, and had it available if need be.

    Really? Mortgage your house? This would only work if you have a crystal ball. And then you could just retire a billionaire and not have to work on low budget films.

    I don't blame either Phil or the Producer in this WTF. From the Producer's perspective, why would he want to put his production at risk on a one-off solution that is 1) involving technology he doesn’t understand, and 2) is being proposed by someone who may have been hired on contract and whom he may not have worked with before. Going with a “professional” solution would mitigate that risk and would be the better choice. The fact that the “professional” solution, in hind-sight, was shit is beside the point as far as deciding what to do.

    The only WTF is the DFR solution that was delivered (late) which neither Phil or the Producer had control of.

  • fruey (unregistered) in reply to sf
    sf:
    tezoatlipoca:
    What I would have done, having had my proposal rejected would have been to mortgage my house and built my solution anyway, and had it available if need be.

    ... Going with a “professional” solution would mitigate that risk and would be the better choice. The fact that the “professional” solution, in hind-sight, was shit is beside the point as far as deciding what to do.

    The only WTF is the DFR solution that was delivered (late) which neither Phil or the Producer had control of.

    Exactly. In fact, 80-90% of the cost of such solutions is the support / risk mitigation factor, AKA having some company (rather than someone) to blame. Even small fry like webhosting is a case in point. Standard machine on a pipe with lots of bandwidth, but it's your problem if it doesn't work = $30/month or so. Managed hosting with someone to call 24/7 and shitty bandwidth = $500 or more / month.

    The difference is a bit like insurance. You don't need it until something goes wrong. There's things like completion bonds in the movie industry, and they exist for the same kind of reason too. You have to have a business with a certain profile.

    Hence, big companies can be shit at what they do and get away with it for quite a long time. But they have to be good while they get big. Amazing how many then start to rot though...

  • sf (unregistered) in reply to fzammetti
    fzammetti:
    When you *know* a project is destined to go as badly as this one, and you don't have the guts to say "could you please sign this form that says I warned you about all that can go wrong", you deserve what you get.

    Most of our communication here at work is via eMail, and in fact I've in the past gone out of my way to have specific conversation via eMail just so that I could archive it and point to it later. It's called covering your a**, and it's something this guy needs to learn quickly. If it can't be done via eMail, then a quick little note with a signature will do it.

    And if the person you need to sign it (the producer in this case) won't sign it, then you have to have the guts to leave the situation. Either that or you get what you get and you live with it. I understand, especially now, leaving a situation like that on principal isn't easy... but at some point it's the right answer.

    1. He didn't know the project was destined to go badly until the "professional" DFR showed up, and then it was too late to do anything about it.

    2. Most people working on films are contracted. Asking your contracting employer to sign an "I told you so" letter probable won't help you to get your next job.

    A friendly email, as you say, describing your concerns would be best as far as having a record. Especially since he got blamed for everything afterward. At least he might have something to show the next prospective employer if it came up.

  • (cs) in reply to snoofle
    snoofle:
    I've had an iMac running Leopard for about a year - it's only crashed twice

    I've had a Mac Mini running without crashing for well over a year. Of course, it runs Vista Ultimate :-)

  • (cs) in reply to sf
    sf:
    I don't blame either Phil or the Producer in this WTF. From the Producer's perspective, why would he want to put his production at risk on a one-off solution that is 1) involving technology he doesn’t understand, and 2) is being proposed by someone who may have been hired on contract and whom he may not have worked with before. Going with a “professional” solution would mitigate that risk and would be the better choice. The fact that the “professional” solution, in hind-sight, was shit is beside the point as far as deciding what to do.

    The only WTF is the DFR solution that was delivered (late) which neither Phil or the Producer had control of.

    This is a producer we're talking about - most of the tech is stuff he doesn't understand, and most people on a film are contract. The professional is hired for his expertise, so you may as well listen to him.

  • (cs) in reply to Matt
    Matt:
    Umm, yeah, you need to get out more. Its been 7 and a half YEARS since it gave just the bomb. Now, when an application crashes it doesn't take down the whole enchilada. And when it does, the panic log is available (just like the application crash is available too).
    Is there a cronic inability to read on this board or something? I fully admit that I have not used a Mac in a long time. Like I said, last time I actually used a Mac was in high school.

    How is using a Mac "getting out more"? "Getting out more" would be not using computers at all. My work is on the Playstation 3 and PC. That's the hardware I'm familiar with. When I "get out" (as far as computers go) it's to a LAN party. Guess what? Most computer games that are run in LAN parties tend to be Windows based, some with Linux servers, but preciously few that allow Mac without major issues. So when one "gets out more", one tends to see PCs, PS3s, and X-Box 360s, not Macs. Even when I see a Mac, and I do, I never actually use them. I have heard people crash, but have never seen an actual crash.

    It's good to hear that Apple decided on something a little more sane. I just recall someone in High school asking me to fix their computer. I took a look at it, and I said, "It shows a bomb. WTF do you want me to do with that? It's a bomb, no information to look up or anything. So I see here two options: 1) find someone who can actually work with Macs, or 2) get a PC so that I might actually be able to help you."

    Today, "I see only one option: Get a PC, because the Mac vs PC commercials lie so much, Apple must be hiding something. Do you really want to risk it? DO you?" :-)

  • (cs) in reply to hamster
    hamster:
    Good lord man, if you are going to bash the Mac, at least bash a current one.

    You might as well be complaining that Windows 95 still runs on DOS.

    Which, like I said in my post, is EXACTLY what the Mac vs PC commercials do. They compare their Macs to old PC cliches that haven't been true in a decade.

    And I freely admitted that my Mac experience is outdated and asked what happens in current iterations. You did not answer, you merely jumped to conclusions, making yourself look like a fool.

    Also, I've never managed to crash a OSX-based Mac unless it is due to buggy hardware drivers.
    Yeah, so? I have never had Windows Vista crash except due to faulty hardware. Not hardware drivers, hardware. Sure I've had applications screw up, but it's never taken down the system.
  • G Mo' (unregistered) in reply to Erzengel
    Erzengel:
    hamster:
    Good lord man, if you are going to bash the Mac, at least bash a current one.

    You might as well be complaining that Windows 95 still runs on DOS.

    Which, like I said in my post, is EXACTLY what the Mac vs PC commercials do. They compare their Macs to old PC cliches that haven't been true in a decade.

    And I freely admitted that my Mac experience is outdated and asked what happens in current iterations. You did not answer, you merely jumped to conclusions, making yourself look like a fool.

    Also, I've never managed to crash a OSX-based Mac unless it is due to buggy hardware drivers.
    Yeah, so? I have never had Windows Vista crash except due to faulty hardware. Not hardware drivers, hardware. Sure I've had applications screw up, but it's never taken down the system.

    Meow

  • (cs)

    This scenario is like telling your boss everyone should run Linux instead of Windows. It's cheaper, faster, better, more stable, etc. But people always feel more secure when there is an external entity to blame.

  • (cs) in reply to SomeCoder
    SomeCoder:
    The Wilhelm scream is soooo much better than the silver scream.
    And both are waaay preferable to the blue scream of death ... particularly on XP homo habilis.
  • (cs)

    The only thing sillier than an operating system war is the soldiers who fight it.

  • Glow-in-the-dark (unregistered) in reply to RB
    RB:
    It doesn't matter how big the company is or how much money they have to throw at it - management ignorance will still screw it all up.

    Amen to that. Why do you think we have to run Windows on servers? That's a lesson a certain stock exchange learned the hard way..

    It irritated the life out of me that I had to document all such stupidity to cover my back. 75% of my time was spent saying "this is a more efficient/economical/safer/resilient (delete where appropriate) solution", only to be told by someone with nil expertise in the matter that another solution was better (driven by politics/family relations/brochureware/golfing weekends/job offers by the vendor). When it predictably went wrong these people would be the first to come try yelling at me.

    Not with this guy. I had a couple of people commit political seppuku by trying that. It's very entertaining to watch them deflate when you very calmly feed them their own words after they spend 10 minutes shouting at you for the failure, naturally in public, but I eventually got bored with it and joined a startup.

    Sure, that's stressful too, but at least I can take a decision once and look forward instead of watching my back.

  • Slappy Jones (unregistered)

    You hit the nail on the head. Ignorance in management can kill an entire project in no time flat.

    Slappy www.anonymize.us.tc

  • reiynscape (unregistered) in reply to Erzengel

    dood, you are clearly a dinosaur when it comes to the 21st century Mac. bless your heart.

  • Ken B (unregistered)

    Two words: paper trail.

    TRWTF is that Phil didn't put his proposal, along with the rejection, followed by the problems that the "professional" solution caused, in writing. (Don't forget to cc the financial backers.)

  • JD (unregistered)

    The real WTF is that this is probably the result of what most of us have come to accept as "the way it is"... which is that the guy didn't do enough to educate his superiors about the problems before/during/after they occurred, and then feels the wrath when they occur because the superiors have no comprehension of the underlying problems and the source therein. Generally we see a point where education of the user/superior becomes too burdensome, and we take the easy route - which then burns us like it did this guy. Persistence and well targeted, credible information presented in the correct manner to the correct people in the correct light would normally avoid these misunderstandings, but normally it becomes such a terrific task for the subordinate to accomplish that he gives up and gets what this fellow got... it's unfortunate, but sometimes it's still worth it in the short term :/

  • Dude (unregistered) in reply to G Mo'
    G Mo':
    bsaksida:
    I Have written software that coppies fieles. It is the fastest. 10 s/MB. it works on DOS. With FAT filesystem. Program crashes, freezes, no graphical interface. And it cost $99. This software is verry proffesioan.

    notice: Author of this software is no responsible in any damage. e.g. File losses, curruptions.

    Now who dares to try it?

    Plz send me teh codez. URGENT!!!

    ME TOO, PLEZE!!

  • Patrick (unregistered)

    Was it an Uwe Boll movie?

  • (cs) in reply to Ken B
    Ken B:
    Two words: paper trail.

    TRWTF is that Phil didn't put his proposal, along with the rejection, followed by the problems that the "professional" solution caused, in writing. (Don't forget to cc the financial backers.)

    Why? Financial backers don't do any hiring. If he alienates his producer he will never work with him again. In Hollywood, if you have a producer that hires you, you bend over backwards to make him happy, so he will continue to hire you. There are about 20,000 guys waiting in the wings to take Phil's job.

    If I were Phil, I would have made the best of the situation. I'd have bought a big UPS and a huge extension cord. I'd put the laptop, the server, and the UPS on a cart to move around and only shut down the server when it was absolutely necessary. Let it run on battery while I wheel the cart to the new location if the extension cord won't reach a power outlet.

  • (cs) in reply to Bappi
    Bappi:
    The only thing sillier than an operating system war is the soldiers who fight it.
    I couldn't agree more. I just use whatever works for the job that I'm trying to do.

    I find it really amusing (and kind of pathetic) that people would rather spend all of their time arguing about the virtues of their system rather than actually using it.

  • John (unregistered)
    Because of all the unnecessary software running on the Red Hat box, it took a minimum of three minutes from plugging in to being ready to record. It wouldn't take long for that time to add up.

    I call bull****. Ever been on a movie set? Nobody walks out and says "roll film" in under 3 minutes. My ass. Try 3 hours.

  • Cybercat (unregistered)

    Phil is an idiot and a pansy who should have had the balls to tell the director the problem was in the shitty equipment they thought was "professional" and then the brains to leave before it even started so he didn't get the brunt of the complaints, which it was obvious he would. Working on a crappy movie with a crappy budget, with crappy equipment, getting blamed for everything going wrong is NOT going to launch your career, it's going to make you CRASH AND BURN BITCH.

  • joc (unregistered)

    Hmm, pretend for a moment you are a producer on a tight budget.

    It would be nice to get your people together, have some 'free' experimentation time in the studio to figure out how you can best angle/setup shots given your space.

    You find out there is a really shitty recording technology that will pay you back for lost studio time as a part of the leasing agreement....

    Genius.

  • (cs) in reply to EatenByAGrue

    Wrong. It's either:

    1. the "presumably professional person that you hired and interact with regularly" was unable to communicate effectively with the director that he knew what he was talking about.

    or 2. the "presumably professional person that you hired and interact with regularly" wasn't professional and his solution wasn't really all that great.

    When you've got a lot of money to burn, you need to make sure that the burning gets done once. Unfortunately, for the director, the chosen solution was lame.

    I've put up with crap like this when my predecessor didn't know how to communicate, or when the vendor lied about the capabilities of their product. Get them in to demo the product. Learn to call BS on them. Argue with the arrogant twits.

  • Rob (unregistered)

    No, the REAL RWTF is everyone's comments here...

    The guy had no way of knowing that the professional system would be better, or worse, than his own. All he knew is that he could put together a system for about half the cost of the rental.

    The people he pitched his idea to also, had no way of knowing which system would be better. All they knew is that one was cheaper and pitched by an employee and another was more expensive and backed by a team (presumably) of professionals who make a living putting these systems together.

    They thanked the guy and politely told him that, while his pitch was good, they wanted to go with the professional company to lower their risk.

    At that time, given what they knew - they made the right choice.

    It turns out that the professional company failed big time. Nobody knew that they would suck that bad. At that point, to turn around and start CC'ing people how much the people who made the choice sucked is a sure fire way to get everyone to hate you. Nobody can see the future, and from the article, there is no reason to think that the homebrew solution would be more stable/perform better.

    If he knew, in advance, that the professional company would fail to deliver a decent product; then yes, he could have fought harder and even gotten them to sign some paper. But if they guy can see the future he'd just quit his job and become the world's greatest gambler/investor/lotto player.

  • anatak (unregistered)

    I just love it when management hires specialist and then ignore the specialists advice and recommendations. But when something goes wrong it is still the specialist's fault.

    Phil should have had covered his ass by letting his producer sign a paper that said that the producer ignored the advice of his specialist for the single reason that he did not trust his specialist to be a specialist.

    Phil could have explained this by saying. Hey you want to have a go at the recording system and I ll have a go at directing since I am probably as good at directing a movie as you are as good as evaluating a complex IT system.

    Test from Phil to the Director: identify 1 single point of failure in your camera system and how do you feel about that ?

  • afilmdude (unregistered)

    lol, "professional".

    I'm a professional in the film industry. Trust me... that word is undefinable out here in hollywood.

    Just get a Redcam next time, they're totally awesome, and just what indy films have needed for a long time.

  • (cs)

    I guess if you do a poor job, the thing to do is bad mouth your employer on the DailyWTF? This guy should have been fired for incompetence on that first Wednesday when he could not get the recorder up and running. I would have fired him.

  • (cs)

    I agree that a Mac based solution would work out better in this case. It probably would not have crashed, and would have booted up much faster. And the UI would be so easy to use that it would virtually operate itself. I use a Mac at home, and have taken it into work on days when I want to be more productive, or when we have a guest in the office, so they can see what camp I am in.

  • BeenThere (unregistered)

    Here's what I don't get:

    1. When you go with a professional solution, don't you check their references? Were other clients happy with their solution?

    2. Wasn't the professional solution providing some sort of up-time guarantee, or just saying "trust us, we're professionals" without backing it up in terms of liability?

    Also, I do think it was a wtf for the producers to completely ignore Phil - if you pay someone for their expertise, that you don't have... if you get conflicting information (from vendor, and Phil) shouldn't you at least hire someone for a day to get a third opinion?

    If you pay someone to make sure things (that you don't understand) run smoothly and they tell you they probably won't... ignore it at your own risk.

  • (cs) in reply to Erzengel

    Yes. They stopped showing the little bomb about 7 years ago.

  • Anonymoose (unregistered) in reply to Erzengel
    Erzengel:
    Indeed. Macs crash, I've seen it happen numerous times. The down side is, when a Mac crashes, it just shows just a little bomb giving no useful information. At least a Windows BSOD gives a code I can look up.

    When I finally decided to look up the code in the (many, many) BSODs, I discovered it said "BUY A MAC".

    I don't know what happens when a Mac crashes.

  • Nychuus (unregistered)

    I am reminded of a Zen koan that got modernized:

    What would an Effective Manager do?

    captcha == genitus Genius with a uterus? Genital genius?

  • (cs)

    Some more WTFs I see in the story.

    Spending $55k on rental of gear without paying someone from the for setup/maintenance. Were they really thinking that the vendor would just dump a pile of equipment and our hero would magically know how to install and maintain it?

    Spending $55k on gear with no SLAs. The vendor should be the one paying for the lost productivity.

    I like working in the IT industry. However I really hate the "blame the IT dept" syndrome that seems to be everywhere. We get the crappy reputation regardless of whether or not it is our fault the failure ocurred. The group of people who really should be taking the blame, the cheque-writers (boards of directors, CTS, whatever), always seem to come out fine.

    B

  • Wor (unregistered)

    And now the True WTF. Phil, instead of doing his job (capturing movie to media), sabotaging it, showing his unprofessionalism, incompetence and lack of learning capability.

  • (cs)

    I've seen bomb errors on old Macs, but they were usually accompanied by a nearly half-useful string like "coprocessor not present" or "illegal instruction" (both seen recently on a System 6 LC). I've never actually seen OS X crash, though I hear it's a normal BSD kernel panic.

    Having used XP for the past 5 years, I must say it's good. I only ever got bluescreens when I connected broken hardware or installed bad drivers. One of my few complaints though is, right-click a file and sometimes it takes close to 15 seconds for the context menu to load. Why? I don't even see much disk or processor activity when it does this...

  • BJ Upton (unregistered) in reply to APH
    APH:
    Am I the only one who thinks that Phil needs to start his own business?!? He's got the best kind of competition: the kind that puts out a shoddy product that they don't support well.

    Yeah, that was exactly my first thought.

  • BJ Upton (unregistered) in reply to Felix C.
    Felix C.:
    Yes. They stopped showing the little bomb about 7 years ago.

    Yes, but when did this film stop screaming?

  • Herman (unregistered)

    I've worked for a department with 12 employees that had 1 guy just to track/document/communicate all retarded decisions that we're made by the upper managament... just to cover our ass when disaster struck. Just to point out that whatever the hell went wrong was foreseen and our department did everything to prevent it, even though upper management ignored our advice and went with the idiot solution.

    Every project... every single project this information came into good use. Every single project there was an absolute disaster, but fortunately we were never blamed (eventually).

  • AdT (unregistered) in reply to Erzengel
    Erzengel:
    I admit, however, I haven't actually used a Mac since I got out of high school. Apparently that's the last time the "Mac vs. PC" commercial writers last used a PC. So has it changed? Do they actually give useful information when a problem inevitably occurs?

    I use Windows every day at work (and I experience a lot of PCs, mostly by Dell and HP), Macs at home, and I can confirm that everything the Mac vs PC commercials are about is true.

    Macs aren't perfect, of course, but drawing the conclusion that they aren't better than Windows PCs is like saying that Cindy Crawford is no prettier than a warthog because of the little mole beside her mouth.

    Just this week I learned that if you thought Windows XP networking and disk performance were sluggish, you should try Vista. Admittedly this was on a Dell business notebook, so it's hard to tell to what degree the OS is to blame, as opposed to the PoS hardware.

  • JoeDamage (unregistered) in reply to John

    I spent 7 years working on film sets doing exactly what Phil does with a variety of digital rigs. Its not only about rolling film... the moment the camera is up, the director wants an image on his monitor so he can see what the camera sees... after that it can take 3 hours, but I promise you, a 3 minute startup time, while everyone waits and the director gets so annoyed he shoves the camera operator aside is very embarrassing...

  • JoeDamage (unregistered) in reply to BeenThere
    BeenThere:
    Here's what I don't get:

    1. When you go with a professional solution, don't you check their references? Were other clients happy with their solution?

    2. Wasn't the professional solution providing some sort of up-time guarantee, or just saying "trust us, we're professionals" without backing it up in terms of liability?

    Also, I do think it was a wtf for the producers to completely ignore Phil - if you pay someone for their expertise, that you don't have... if you get conflicting information (from vendor, and Phil) shouldn't you at least hire someone for a day to get a third opinion?

    If you pay someone to make sure things (that you don't understand) run smoothly and they tell you they probably won't... ignore it at your own risk.

    Producers love the idea that they're doing something for the first time. I can't tell you the exact circumstances, but I can say that producers are just people, and in addition, they aren't always business or organisationally minded people. Sometimes they're someone's brother or have finagled themselves up there... don't by any means believe that producers necessarily know whom to listen to...

    I think you're absolutely right about them ignoring Phil. I have been in similar situations before and the producers tend to believe the equipment rental companies first, unless they trust you.

    Lastly... producers have a million things to deal with and will often just assume/hope the problems get sorted out lower down.

  • Max (unregistered)

    Just the fact that the manager ignores me would make me quit my job. You can't have a boss not listen to you and then get blamed for something that said boss would not listen to in the first place....

  • itsmo (unregistered) in reply to RB
    RB:
    It doesn't matter how big the company is or how much money they have to throw at it - management ignorance will still screw it all up.

    'management ignorance' - a tautology, right?

  • itsmo (unregistered) in reply to Niels
    Niels:
    Erzengel:
    Indeed. Macs crash, I've seen it happen numerous times. The down side is, when a Mac crashes, it just shows just a little bomb giving no useful information. At least a Windows BSOD gives a code I can look up.
    Yes Macs crash, but you need to go back to before OS X to get the error screens you describe.

    On topic, when you see management paving the road to disaster, how about producing a written warning, having someone sign it that they have read and understood that the solution they're pushing through might be problematic? Of course it can also backlash, if it in the end worked fine they'd have paper on you misjudging the situation...

    No, really - you were right the first time. If everything worked fine and the only only consequence was you showed yourself to be over-cautious in the first place, probably no-one would give a sh!t when the movie was in the can. Actually getting them to sign this, however...

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