not really a stupid comment but a wonderful trick:
Supervisor comes by and looks at an animation, and tells you the timing is quite right and gives you a bunch of things to fix. Just let it sit there, and don’t touch it. Show them the next day. I almost guarantee they will say, “That looks much better.”
Person I am doing work for: “Gee, all you have to do is push a couple buttons… right?”
How about in CAD? A person comes in from the shop and hands you a drawing with revisions. Fine. Shop guy leaves. You then open the file. You start changing the drawing to reflect the changes that the shop guy made- only to discover that the shop guy’s hand-written dimensions don’t add up!.
Chris
Ok… This is something that has happend to me quite a few times…
A client sends me a tiny jpg file of a logo, photo or something like that , and wants me to use it on something really big, like a banner or something…
When I tell him I can´t do that, that I need a bigger file, because of the low quality of the image, he just don´t get it! Then I try to show him what happends, explain it one more time and so on… at that point the client comes with the brightest idea of his life:
“Why don´t you print it on a large paper, and scan it back?”
ARGH!!! And the worst thing is to stare at his face, like he is the smartest person in town!!
I was reading the posts and choked on some biscuits I was eating. Finniest thing
looooool 
I had to change the idea because the tutor was one of the two examiners that’ll give you your grades
True story:
I recently finished a short video for my church. Incorporated into the video were several photos from the church’s past.
Well, the guy who asked me to help out said that he had a bunch of photos for the project. I said that I would scan them (because I know what size they need to be). He said that he would do it. He would get them to me in a few days.
2-3 weeks later, he e-mails them to me. We are talking about photos of different resolutions. We are also talking about half of them being 20% photo, 80% white area. And then he has the nerve to say to me “now that you have them, we need for you to hurry.”
Well gee- if you hasn’t dragged your feet in getting them to me, then we wouldn’t have such a rush job now would we?
Chris
i have been following this thread off an on for a couple years now, and i have to say i LOVE IT! Ballistic needs to look into publishing it as a book 
well lo and behold, i finally have the exprience to post my first worst comment:
I was handed the task of continuing a series of presentations that were originally done in Flash. Very corporate, very generic, flying stretchy logos and that kinda stuff. I decided to take it upon myself to flex my Maya muscle, and do something COMPLETELY different in 3D. After 3 weeks of toiling and tinkering, i present my first draft, and all the client says is,
“I dont know… it’s pretty and all but… can you make it more flashy?” And he goes on to email me attachments of all the previous boring, dry presentations… :shrug:
About a half dozen shots recently came to the VFX hut as a rush for for ‘ass-crack removals’. One of the female actors crack is visible, so instead of noticing on-set, they send it to comp to do a post-pants pullup. Staring at an ass crack zoomed 500% has a way of taking the magic out an otherwise cute bum.
A practical effect for ooze was done that they weren’t too happy with so they wanted CG to take a crack at it. The effects breakdown I was handed simply said: “Can you make this not look like $hit?”
The most recent one : “I know we wont see anything once its blurred and color corrected, but it would just make me feel better knowing effect is in there.”
A lot of people have to deal with the supervisors who want big pictures out of small files. I had a boss who was the opposite. The ONLY thing he understood was that more resolution = better. Of course, this meant he’d have me scanning EVERY single image at 4000 dpi, even the ones that were going to be printed at about 3"x3" Needless to say we went through a lot of hard drives. But hey, not my money!
A place I worked at a while back
A marketing manager came to me to ask if I could give him an image I did at a higher resolution, so he could give it to another artist who did print work.
I said, How big do you want it. He said 300 dpi. I say, okay, but what sized image do you want? He said 300 dpi. I say, well how big are you going to print it. He says 300 dpi. I say are you going to print it on a full cover, or do you just need maybe only a quarter page
300 dpi, 300dpi, 300 dpi.
I eventually got him to say he wanted it printed 5x7 inches. I went ahead and made it larger just to be sure, but the sad part of the story is
I didnt know it but he was furious at me for weeks and ragged me big-time to my boss. Why? Because, he made a print of it, which happened to be exactly 5x7, because I thought to change the settings in Photoshop just incase he did print it. However, all of the images he had ever printed before happened to come out larger, so he thought I didnt give him a 300 dpi image.
I tried for months to get him and a couple of others to understand that dpi means nothing without image size, I even wrote up a little document with pictures and everything, and they never read it.
P.S. Another day, he told me he didnt need me to blow up video frames for him anymore. He would play them in Media Player at full screen, hit <print screen> and paste it into paint.
Ohmanoggin
One that I often get:
Sometimes before sending the art a customer will ask how they should send it. So I tell them it’s best if they can send it in vector format as an .eps or .ai file, if they have it. Or if not, then a jpg.
So what do they do with their jpg? SAVE AS… EPS! Now I have .jpg file in .eps format! So I have to open up corel draw or illustrator just to see the damn jpg.
I’ve been faced with that a few times too. My usual stance is to just be dogged about it until their lack of knowledge overwhelms them and they make themselves look stupid.
What a great thread. I’ve had a few experiences of this sort.
The worst one was an animation of a computer mouse with wheels attached. The ad agency had no idea at all of what to do, but “we’d know it when we see it”. After a month of doing animatic after animatic, which included such comments as “we don’t want a grey box, we want a computer mouse”, it was finally decided that the mouse shouldn’t move, as people can’t concentrate on moving objects (nevermind the fact that 90% of car commercials involve moving cars). Then about a week before it’s to broadcast, we find out they want the mouse to appear as though it’s moving… Since it’s in a white world, I made the wheels rotate, and it’s zooming along 
I was once asked why I didn’t just press the “make airplane button”.
On another project I was making a town square. It had buildings around the edges and a park in the middle. I moved the camera around so that it never went above the buildings to see into the void on the other side. The director comes along one day and asks if I could move the camera up, so that a large part of the city is visible… And this is after several months of working with him and trying to explain 3D.
I have also been asked to “dress the 3D house up spanky.” I’m not quite sure what was meant by that, it sounds a bit inappropriate for children though…
I was doing a director study on Brad Bird for a high school essay and student asked me “How do you direct an animated film” I thought it was pretty stupid.
I was buzy with a model for a tutorial I want to give the students. I was in the work area struggling to get the most out of the least pokygons and someone came up (an adult) and checked out what was on the laptop and said: ‘That looks great! Isn’t the software these days marvelous?’ I shot a kind of wierd look and the speaker looked worried and said: ‘Well its the software doing it right?’ I should have said yes, the more expensive the software the better the stuff looks that comes out the other end!
Today in the teacher study area I had abandoned the low polly figure as too difficult for the class and was down to a critter and while messing with it’s uv’s. A Math professor came up and said. ‘That looks lovely! You build it from standard shapes right? Y’ know tubes and spheres’. I said: ’ It’s worse than that actually,… it comes out of a box!’. I thought he was going to die:).
General consensus is that the reason you make good work is because you have a wacom tablet. Don’t waste 30 years doing art,… just spend $99.99:eek:.
You DO realize you’re now going to get a few PM’s asking where you found a Wacom for $100 right??? 
100$ Wacom… they’re the ones that fell out of a truck, right? The same truck that was opened forcibly, an event entirely unrelatied, right?
I fell out of a truck once 
I now know why truck drives tend to be chubby. It breaks your fall.
Big Budget and lots of work for a new TV Channel Graphics package including all the idents etc. After 8 weeks of hard 3D and compositing work its finished and delivered in PAL resolution. Client calls at 6pm and asks for a 18,000x18,000 pixel resolution still image of the endframe of the main ident for a massive billboard thats gonna go to print the next day.
Oh yes, I forgot about a similar experience I had, still relating to that mouse commercial, they wanted a print render for billboards as well, although not quite as monstrous as yours…