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Video tidbits
I’m working on adding some things to my website, and I’m looking for a short sentence/factoid related to video production that would be helpful to corporate clients. Does anyone have one they could share? Thanks.
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21 Replies
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The eternal truth, AKA the golden triangle:
“You can have it FAST”
“You can have it CHEAP”
“You can have it QUALITY”But you only get two… any two, but ONLY two…
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I’ll second that for a standard slogan. In the race car business, it’s Fast, Cheap, Dependable – Pick 2″
Steve Wargo
Tempe, ArizonaIt’s a dry heat!
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Hi Greg,
How are you doing?
Are you looking for some sort of sales kind of thing or something to get a client to think in the long term as far as investing in a quality project or….?
TimK,
Kolb Productions,
Creative Cow Host,
Author/Trainer
http://www.focalpress.com
http://www.classondemand.net -
Hi Tim,
Doing well. I hope you are too. Just something that would be helpful to a potential client, or even a current client, that peak their interest and get them to read more. Perhaps some kind of factoid related to corporate/ business video, like…”More than 60% of medium to large businesses use DVDs to traing their employees” Or even a more meaningless yet entertaining factoid about video production.
I still don’t understand how you can do fast, cheap, quality. How does one do cheap quality?
Thanks.
Greg
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Mark,
I think the original was: “Faster, Cheaper, Better — choose any two.”
DRW
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[Greg] “I still don’t understand how you can do fast, cheap, quality. How does one do cheap quality?”
The saying refers to the fact that you can manipulate the three factors to minimize one by pushing the other two…
You could theoretically do a quality job at a more reasonable price if you could have a year to do it as fill in work…not fast.
You could really turn the project and make it great with some overtime and late nights and subcontractors…not cheap.
You could do something really fast and not charge much if the standards were low for production value…stammering actors who aren’t lit and only get two takes while the cameraman, who you hired inexpensively as he just graduated from Earl’s Video School, shoots off his shoulder…not quality.
I think an interesting concept is “What do you throw away?” Show a picture of paper brochures and a picture of a DVD/CD…it’s all about perceived value…make sure your message stays in front of your client…etc, etc…
It isn’t as true as it was 5 or 10 years ago, but I still think it applies to some degree.
TimK,
Kolb Productions,
Creative Cow Host,
Author/Trainer
http://www.focalpress.com
http://www.classondemand.net -
[Greg] ” still don’t understand how you can do fast, cheap, quality. How does one do cheap quality?”
Thats easy, just put in more time, but make sure its not “premium time” — as in put your assistant on this one, or do it in your spare time.
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As a sales message I think the “pick any two” line is kind of negative. It’s fine for us to talk about this amongst ourselves of course.
But with clients I’d advise a more standard approach, giving examples of how clients in your target market are benefiting from your services.
Naturally I haven’t done this myself but it’s fun to give free advice and worth about as much.
— Bob C
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Where I work, we have some nice toys, maybe not the bleeding edge, but adequate. But most of our clients have zero budget or something very small… as in, maybe I can get 10-dollar honorariums and a VHS dub to my actors for a commercial spot, and maybe I can get 50 bucks for a special, vital prop, and that’s it. We work on revolving funds and charge-backs, so I live in a world of “funny money” compared to most of you guys.:-)All the production is billed as a one-time fee, but there is no billing structure to cover things like props or special supplies.
So for us the iron triangle equals we can still make it look good, and we can meet your budget, but we’re going to have to take way more time. Also, we have a LOT of customers in the pipeline, so we have to have a lot of lead time to fill requests for services. If I can’t buy or build standing sets or travel to a real location, I have to fake the locations using greenscreen, Lightwave, Photoshop, etc. and since the money clock’s not ticking on my hours put in, I can take all summer to make a high-end looking spot if I need to.
Other times, something comes in and needs an immediate turnaround. It may realy need some roto work, but they will settle for a soft edge wipe as long as it’s in the fedex guy’s hands by three.
Or the time a client wanted the look of some cel animation for a spot voiced by a kid. I tried to get them to buy us a copy of Toonboom which was like maybe $300 at the time and downloadable online, so I could have been animating in really high quality with preceision control within an hour of the go-ahead. They decided that $300 was too much, but still wanted the animation. So I built some south-park-like characters in a paint application, built several sets of mouth shapes, and built an entire spot in the linear suite, doing stop-motion single-frame linear edits and manipulating the characters with a 1-channel Alladin DVE and Alladin paint, keying in appropriate mouth shapes. Took two-three full days, made my eyes cross, and… they loved it, it ran statewide for years.
I once got a local first place award for a domestic violence spot that cost me less than $20 in props, all closeup tabeltop photography of a stopwatch, some simple switcher effects, with some pretty good theater-of-the-mind audio track work to sell a clearly-thought-out copy idea. I took several days to tweak and perfect the spot best as I could. I beat my rival’s $1000 spot that used location photography, boom shots, and actors dressed as clowns.
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Bob,
I have to disagree. I think its reality. And, while reality may be a bitter pill, its better for everyone if the client is grounded in reality than in some “ladida” false conception that wishful thinking will get their project done yesterday, for nothing, and at the very highest quality. That is far too often the artist’s conception of reality, and one that leads to poisoned relationships and hurt feelings.
DRW
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