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I QUIT…. Working for nothing.
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[Andy jackson] “I’m talking video production.”
But think about how even that has diversified.
Back when I started in 1980 you did Production OR Post Production. Big facilities did both of course but they were the only ones who could afford to.In Post there was the Assistant Editor, The Editor, The Chyron Operator, Composting, Motion Graphics. Even the Editor may have been separate Offline and Online Editors.
Diversification accelerated with the advent of the NLE as, over time, many Editors took on all those hats. Then some began to do camera work or camera people began to do their own editing.
Then with the advent of YouTube and file based delivery The Compressionist was born as a speciality and, yet, is now being consumed into The Editor role. One just has to look at the Compression Techniques forum here at the COW to see how many people struggle with this.
Add in File based acquisition and data management and delivery (Compressionist) and one adds to one’s diverse skill sets.
So if you know production, file based acquisition, post workflow and the many components I mentioned, file based delivery for both the web and broadcast, you now can jump into any number of niches. Sometimes I’m just the comrpessionist.
I gained advantages with file based cable spot delivery, for example, because I didn’t need the expensive beta decks or the dub house, shipping jobs, etc. I cut costs and was able to deliver spots around state (and now other states) than competitors. With that came doing the media buy and the agency percentage. This because I knew compression.
Each skill opened another door. Allowed me to offer end to end for less as well as get work in certain specialized areas. Be the generalist one day, the specialist the next.
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“Exactly Scott.
Their time will come…. Their clients will eventually dissapear in the mist.
As you say:
“When your time comes, I wonder if you will take your own advice?”
I wonder also!”Well, my plan is to retire myself out of the game, then do this same work, but for love first, and money second. I’m still a little too young and pretty, but I’m planning 4 and 8 years ahead. And I have an awesome gig on the side, that is emotionally highly rewarding. On top of that, I’m branching out and doing other freelance stuff. (See “Save This Script!” elsewhere on the COW). I’m not just running out the clock without taking some initiative.
By the way, I do detect a bit of envy in the comments about cushy gigs with high security…
Every decision comes with trade-offs, comes with a cost. I had two choices 25 years ago, one pretty lucrative, taking over an existing, established high-dollar business with a full client list of rich dudes, doing forensics work and depos for law firms, and living the stylin’ single life in Chicago. But it would be very unstable, feast or famine, and a LOT of drumming up business every day. The other, a civil service job, down in the state capitol, most of it very unglamorous. But very steady. And rewarding, in its own way. I got to do all the news and advertising work I dreamed of doing in college, and I was in control of much more of it, and at higher levels, than I would have been, working as a drone at J. Walter or CBS. I got stories out of it. None as good as Bob’s or Tim’s, but okay.
25 years ago, I made my choice of security and good benefits over higher salary. I saw people
advance their media careers and overtake me, and I wish them well. With those 25 years came highs and lows, and also there were plenty of times when I envied you independent video ronins out there, able to tell a client to “blank off” if you wanted. I got the security, but I also got to deal with a lot of compromises, limitations, restrictions… and my own kinds of pain along the way, It wasn’t ever a 24-hour party as you may imagine, and I knew you guys in the private sector were averaging about 25% higher annual take-home than me. I started as the punk kid working with old timers, now the tables have turned and it is me, taking directions from young people who were just getting their driver’s learning permits when I was first working for their bosses. But I chose the long game, and while I do wonder at what may have been, I have few real regrets. Indeed, If I hadn’t taken this job, I’d never have met my future wife and had three amazing kids either.You choose your own adventure, folks. Start out with two thousand dollars and a car… and spin that wheel of life. But take a lesson from the Book of Matthew and don’t begrudge someone else getting a good deal if that’s what they contracted for. Wishing them less success doesn’t bring any more of it over to you. it just eats you up inside and keeps you hollow. Fill that emptiness with your own dreams, and I hope you get to fulfill every one of them. You will, if you have a vision and pursue it with all the tools you have.
Best of luck to you all, whether you hang in there and stay in this business, or go on to something else. Love what you do, and you’ll never “work” a day in your life, they say. I”ve found that to be pretty spot-on.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTzA_xesrL8
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[Craig Seeman] “Read Bob Zelin’s post. It’s about staying in business and if you focus on an area that isn’t viable for you, you won’t. See Walter’ Soyka’s follow up.”
Jeez, I must have somehow missed those. Life is all rainbows and unicorns now.
Scott Sheriff
Director
https://www.sstdigitalmedia.com“If you think it’s expensive to hire a professional to do the job, wait until you hire an amateur.” —Red Adair
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[Scott Sheriff] “Life is all rainbows and unicorns now.”
Life is all not rainbows and unicorns.
You’re absolutely to point out the pressures that economics are bringing to bear on the industry: the supply of (cheap) talent is outstripping demand (even though demand has increased tremendously), and that’s pushing rates down. Barriers to entry have fallen, and that’s pushing rates down, too.
Scott, I agree with you 100% that “mad skillz” alone are not a good defense against economics.
I think that Bob’s story is about recognizing when economic forces are changing and when they will hurt you, and moving to an adjacent space in the market — possibly even a new space that didn’t exist before — where economic forces actually work in your favor.
Here’s the Zen of the whole thing: Bob doesn’t fight the market. He goes with it. He listens to the market and does what it tells him to do. He positions himself within the market such that he can stay in places where demand and barriers to entry are relatively high.
If you can’t get the rate you were getting five years ago as a camera op, the market is telling you something. Supply is higher than demand. Barriers to entry are low. You can’t fight that.
You can find new clients, build a new specialty, go where the demand is and seek protection behind barriers to entry. Do something — change something — because what you are doing now is not working, and doubling down on a failing strategy will just make you fail faster.
Then get ready to do it all again in another couple years, because change is constant. We all have to work as much (if not more) at building our businesses as we do at production itself.
Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events -
Im in a theatre at the moment filming a show. Two cameras plus backup to two harddrives. One for each camera.
Will probably be here for four hours. Full day editing and copies produce.
Sales arnt brilliant. Orders up front about 25 and only a cast of 50.
Probably lucky if i make £200 profit. Again had to reduce prices to get this gig.
What is also worrying me is cloud services now available to the masses. Animoto. Sinage software. Even editing.
When the cost of cloud editing storage comes down in cost this will also be a big blow.
India will take over the whole industry with extremely low rates that none of us will be able to compete with especialy when broadband fibre speed increases.
Were completely screwed
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Walter writes –
Bob doesn’t fight the market. He goes with it. He listens to the market and does what it tells him to do.REPLY – this is exactly what I do. When I first saw the AVID, I thought it was the biggest piece of crap – just like all the other engineers that I knew in NY. But my film editor clients were all buying the AVID. I realized that either I learned how to work on the AVID, and set it up, or I would lose these clients. And so I learned the AVID. I was the ONLY ENGINEER IN NY that had any interest in learning the AVID at the time. And look what happened – it exploded.
As for the 75 pounds to shoot the job, I can only offer an analogy.
There are many neighborhoods where you live, and all of them have real estate agents. There are poor neighborhoods, and there are rich neighborhoods. The guys making money are working in the RICH neighborhoods. And the poor people will always complain that the real estate agent is ripping them off for their commission.Same with plumbers. You can be a plumber in a poor neighborhood, or in a rich neighborhood, with rich clients that will pay you top dollar. It’s all a matter of who you solicit. This applies (as I bring the analogy closer to our business) to a wedding photographer. There is the guy that asks his brother-in-law to hold the camera, and then there are Disney Weddings that can charge up to $25,000 for a video production. There are home theater installers
that install stereo and home video theater equipment for wealthy homes, that spend more than most post production installations.And of course, this relates to our business. There are clients with no money, and clients with lots of money. You have to solicit the clients with the money. Let the kids with the 5D do the free jobs for the guy that crys that he has no budget. I do many church installations – there are poor churches, and there are rich churches with extensive video facilities. I try to solicit the latter.
You can do the same.
Bob Zelin
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Do you guys remember when you got into the business? Did you step on anyones toes as a noob?
We all did. As an assistant editor, didnt you do jobs that the higher paid online editor should be doing and your boss said, “why should I pay that guy twice as much to do as that guy does for the same work?”
Just sucks when you are on the wrong end of the deal.
Just sayin…..
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Andy said:
When the cost of cloud editing storage comes down in cost this will also be a big blow.
India will take over the whole industry with extremely low rates that none of us will be able to compete with especialy when broadband fibre speed increases.
Were completely screwed
I myself had this epiphany almost ten years ago, came into the office looking like my dog had died, and nobody there really understood that we were seeing the oncoming mass extinction event of our industry. To this day, I can’t really get people to accept what’s coming.
Here is a little taste;
In under 12 years now, the Square Kilometer Array will be completed.
It is a network of radio telescopes that will cover the entire Southern hemisphere of the earth to make a virtual scope, the quivalent of a dish a square kilometer across. Tied together by new broadband connections, the SKA will be a bigger project than the current Big Daddy of science, the Higgs-hunting supercollider at CERN. It will see two orders of magnitude deeper into space and time than we now know.From the day they flip the switch to get “first light” on the Square Kilometer Array, the SKA will begin to generate an exabyte of data, every day. That’s a “1”, with eighteen zeros after it.
Every day. Or put another way, about the daily traffic of our entire internet today, from one experiment. IBM is leading an international consortium to figure out how to record, move, store, and process this flood of data. The hardware to do it hasn’t even been designed yet. But the clock is ticking down already.
In 12 years, they will have some way to deal with an exabyte a day, and that technology is going to be commercialized. We will be plankton swimming in a sea of data. Nothing ever need be erased again, ever, across the realm of human endeavor; storage will be that cheap and easy. The so-called “cloud” of today will fulfil the grandiouse promises being made today, and probably much more.
At that point, (and almost all of us here will be alive to see that day) is that it will cost no more for an edit to happen for you in Mumbai, than it does to have it happen in Milwaukee. Editors will chase the sun around the clock, editing stories and projects while we sleep.
Since the data infrastructure will have become so completely englobing and fundamental, cost for entry will be zero. With exabyte processing power, language translation will be effortless and real-time, we will all seem to speak the same language wherever we are.
So yes, you are going to have to adjust your day rate down when Rajeev there offers compositing for two rupees a day. Or you will have to quit and do something Rajeev cannot yet do. There won’t be much. Or maybe, there will.
Because the first internet boom happened, when CERN worker Tim Berners Lee’s little riff on hypertext markup language made web browsing of his tech documents practical, the web as WE understand it was born. With the billions of dollars’ worth of companies, products, and services it generated. That’s going to happen again.
The exabyte boom will also bring new industries and ways to make a living, in the same way as HTML did… and maybe some of our skills will be applicable to that new world, and thus worth a little more.
Heck, in twelve years, with exabyte tech, we might all be “living” digitally in the cloud oruselves, in what Ray Kurzweil refers to as the “Singularity”. You may call it a consentual version of The Matrix.
And getting your day rate will be the smallest of your problems.
Where do you plan to be in 12 years? I will bet you won’t be doing exactly what you’re doing now. Do we all just quit? Or do we turn and face the strange ch-ch-ch-changes?
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Well Mark. I was worried
I`m suicidal now!
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Don’t worry. With global climate change, India won’t be livable in 12 years. Hollywood will have been submerged as well. This will open up the vast number of Bollywood and Hollywood jobs to the rest of us. The best place to setup facilities will be in the Himalayas or the Rocky Mountains. If you buy land there now while it’s still cheap, you’ll be in great business shape by 2024.
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