For me it’s the ones that don’t need to be done. I’m currently trying to paint out a sticker that art department put on the product to hide some text. Perfectly normal gig.
The problem is you already can’t see it.
It’s a black sticker on top of an existing black sticker, at an angle, with a bunch of random condensation on it. I had to have the producer red pen it for me and I can still only kind of see it. The problem is the clients know it’s there and there was apparently a whole long conversation on set about this “sticker problem”. So now I am trying to figure out how to make this black sticker look like the other black sticker (and obviously good) while no one on this planet other than our clients would ever know there is a black sticker there that I am sort of removing.
I was about to say I would rather be doing roto, but obviously that would be a lie.
I had one recently where they coloured the logo on a hat, only quite small, without checking if they could have got it cleared. Turns out they could have cleared it but because they changed the colour of it it then needed to be painted out!
I actually find it interesting, and it is really common amongst us, that shots become more painful when something simple could have been done on set.
I’m always thankful that people get it wrong on set because it keeps a large number of us employed. Sure, doing something creative is more fun but this “fix it in post” mentality must actually create a large percentage of the shots we work on?!!
Best is when they use tracking markers as a screenshot played by the phone. 60% of the phone is full of reflections and the actor touches the screen, so the image with the markers moves up to show the detail information due to touching.
I once did a job with old fashioned CRT TV’s, so curved screens, great for reflections, however the supe in his wisdom, put green paper with tracking markers on the screens!
