Advice needed

[Tony]

David,

I recommend setting up a budget based on a per day shooting cost not hourly. Do not submit a flat bid or else you will lose your shorts on this job. I have found some clients over estimate the amount of time they think it will take to shoot a project because they do not know how to efficiently put together a shooting schedule. However in your case it may be different because certain elements or personell may not be avaiable until a certain time or date.

It should not matter if you shoot four hours or ten hours a day the cost should be the same to cover the expense of the crew and equipment. You do however need to budget for labor overtime in the event the crew needs to stay longer than 10 hours for certain days.

If you are hiring freelancers most generally have a minimum per day billing amount and will not consider working for one hour here and there.

Since the details of the job are vague you can only bid properly be estimating the job on a per day cost or else you will underbid yourself.

Good luck,

Tony Salgado

[Walter Biscardi]

[David Scott] “As I mentioned, the details are pretty sparce as we’ve only had a preliminary meeting.”

In a case like this where details are sparce, you need to take it upon yourself to force the issue a little bit by laying out some of the details yourself.

For instance you say the client wants to have a crew daily but doesn’t know how long each day. Well, the crew is going to want to be paid per day, not per hour. So I would note this by saying, “Right now you’re proposing up to 120 days of shooting, but these may not be full days. Unfortunately, my crew is hired ‘by the day,’ at $1,000 / day (just throwing out a number) and hourly is not an option. So if you want a crew everyday, we’re looking at $120,000 right there to shoot.”

If they come back and say “whoa, that’s too much money,” you can counter with something like, “Let’s look at supplying a crew for two or three days per week…..”

You just need to put down some realistic numbers that include what you honestly think it would take in your time, the crew’s time, tape costs, editing, etc….. to cut this together and put down a “probable budget” on paper. I’ve had clients propose grand scale ideas but then back off in a hurry when they realize just how much it’s going to cost. So before investing a LOT of time in a project, I’ll spend about 2 or 3 hours just really going overthing I think it will take and prepare some sort of a NON-BINDING budget proposal.

Whatever the proposal ends up being and you have a contract ready to sign, it’s VERY important to include a clause that states something like “any changes requested by the client that’s not covered in the scope of this contract shall be charged at the regular hourly / daily rates.” This is going to be a very large project with a lot of moving parts and it’s almost certain the client will make changes along the way.

Grand scale projects are fun, but also a LOT of work on your part. The Lamborghini project we did two years ago was about a 9 month project and it changed scope about a dozen times during production. Just try to be as explicit as possible in your contract and proposal and try to have fun with it!

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Creative Genius, Biscardi Creative Media
https://www.biscardicreative.com

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