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Screwed by a freelancer
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Mike,
The following rant isn’t directed at you per se (we’ve never met and I assume that you are a good fellow); I’m directing this to Producers in general. I’m just taking the opportunity here to get this off of my chest:
I’m a long time DP who has been doing some producing and directing lately; I’ve hired people and been hired.
Just today, someone from one of the crewing agencies called wanting a union member (such as me) to shoot what is probably little more than a Powerpoint presentation at a hotel in October. What is my rate? I told them. But can’t you do it for 1/2 that?
I understand that different kinds of projects have different budgets. I understand that people feel compelled to race toward the bottom in order to capture gigs from the competition.
However, I’ve yet to see a show, no matter how low budget, where it was ok with the client if the footage turned out unusable.
Producers forget this when discussing rate, saying such silly things as “hey, it’s only a guy giving a presentation!” or “I can get anybody to do this job; why should I pay you anything like that rate?”, as though the camera people were dime a dozen.
My response? Assuming that this is so, then go ahead and hire some inexperienced person to do the job, pay them the low rates that you negotiated with your client, and roll the dice.
The bottom line: anytime you cut corners, you decrease the chances that the show will work and increase the chances that you’ll go to your client with only lame excuses about how you saved them money. It might work! Then again, it might not.
I can’t work that way, as a DP or as a Producer. I like to do a good job.
Charge your clients what it costs to do the show. Get the best people that you can. If you do this, chances are good that you will develop a reputation as being a guy who always delivers.
Don Starnes
Director / Director of Photography
http://www.donstarnes.com -
Don,
Is Randy Starnes your brother? If so, tell him I said hi…
David
David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los AngelesPOST-PRODUCTION WITHOUT THE USUAL INSANITY ™
A forum host of Creative COW’s Apple Final Cut Pro, Business & Marketing, and Indie Film & Documentary forums.
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Don – no worries. The beauty of the COW forums is that people with similar and different backgrounds can exchange both good and bad experiences in a non-confrontational manner and in the end learn from one another.
Next time I need something shot in San Fran I know who to call!
That’s another great thing about this site, you can find the best people to work with. Just today we are editing some beautiful XDCAM stuff shot for us by another COW member.
Mike Cohen
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Like everyone else here, I’ve got no clue about how things broke down on your specific shoot. So I’m left with trying to shoehorn your story into my experiences.
And a line you posted struck a chord with me.
“he importance of shooting it artfully and really paying attention to shot composition etc was paramount.”
The reason I single this line out is that if I sat down with someone whose baseline work I didn’t know – I could see this single line of instruction hitting the brains of 5 different shooters and causing WILD swings in the results.
If my impression was that this was a solid pro – I’d expect them to take solid basics and then push a bit here and there with that instruction. HOWEVER, If I said the same thing to a guy who was SICK TO DEATH of making boring corporate videos, this same line might feel like permission to pull out the dutch head rig and go crazy.
Maybe I can illustrate my point best this way. Back in the early days of computers, I read of a focus group where they were seeing if the instruction manual on their new IBM-PC software was written clearly enough.
The first concrete instruction was “Remove the floppy diskette from the sleeve.”
So the first test subject reached in his pocket, pulled out his pen knife, cut open the plastic and removed the actual media disc from the floppy holder.
There were a LOT of surprised folks behind the one-way mirror. But why? The guy took the his instruction, interpreted it PERFECTLY WELL consistent with his individual experience – and the end result was still a square-one screwup.
So perhaps you got a guy like that. Waited all his life to use that damn dutch head – and was maybe delighted when you gave him tacit permission (at leas in his brain) to go there?
Just thinking out loud.
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Been there…done that. We’ve hired freelancers several times for shoots in other cities where the client was unwilling to pay us to go there and shoot, but was willing for us to coordinate and pay a freelancer.
In each case the freelancers had impressive reels and long, network worthy credit lists. In virtually every case, we would get their footage back from the shoot and watch it dumbfounded….because 80% of the footage was unusable.
We’ve hired individuals with impressive demo reels and impressive resumes who said all the right things in multiple interviews. Then after 3 or 4 shoots realized they either didn’t know how to focus, or had no idea what proper exposure is or how to use zebra patterns, or understand color temperature or when to use nuetral desnity filters etc. I could go on and on. Ultimately, I started giving potential videographer/DP candidates our Canon XL1 for a couple days and told them to shoot 30 minutes of something and bring it back to me.
It doesn’t take long to see if somebody knows what they’re doing when you give them an assignment like this. What I’ve come to realize is that people will put ANHYTHING on a demo and call it their own. They could’ve pulled cable on a shoot and they’ll put it on their reel and pass it off as their own. We’ve experienced this exact same problem with freelance graphic artists and motion graphic designers. Their reels are incredible, but we hire them for a project and literally $2500 later, we have NOTHING usuable to show for it.
I think that many videographers, DP’s, graphic artists and others in our industry can only do good work when they’re directed…by a good video/film director or art director or producer or a combination of those. I’ve worked for years as DP and a graphic artist so I know a little about how to turn out good work on both of those fronts. And both require not only technical skill and knowledge, but also artistic skill and creativity.
Now granted, hiring a freelancer is almost always a crapshoot because it’s hard to ask them to take your camera and shoot something for you or ask them to design something for free. But we’re at the point where we won’t hire a freelancer unless we get several good referrals.
We hired a guy a couple years ago to shoot a series of studio interviews. He was in a COMPLETELY controlled environment. He has 25 years of shooting experience. He owned his own company for several years. We instructed him to setup a shotgun mic and a lavalier mic on the interviewees so we had a choice on the audio and had redundancy. He shot probably a dozen interiews over 2 days.
During setup I wanted to ask to listen to the headphones but thought, “I should trust people more, and this guy has been shooting for ages.” So I didn’t. BIG mistake.
When I went to edit the video, I was horrified. The audio was almost unusable. The shotgun was overmodulated and completely unusable. The impedance on the wireless was set incorrectly and the audio was unbelievely hissy and noisy.
We trusted the guy because he was recommended to us and was known in the area. It took me literally 2 days and numerous filter passes in Adobe Audition to fix the audio. In the end it sounded amazingly good compared to the source, but TWO DAYS to fix something anybody should’ve been able to hear. But this guy couldn’t.
When we brought this issue up with him, we got the standard freelance shooter response. “Well, I’m accustomed to working on projects where there’s a sound guy.” This is bullsh_t because we gave him the project parameters before we hired him. And it would’ve been absurd to hire an audio tech for a shoot like this where people walked in, sat down, were mic’d and we interviewed them for 30 minutes.
Anyway…I’ve had similar experiences to what the original poster describes. Luckily, I’ve either been able to save stuff or been on the shoot and caught it before it caused disaster.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com -
While I have never been pleased with the work of any freelancer I have ever hired for anything, I have also never been screwed by one.
I know if I want something done right I have to do it myself and I know that sometimes I just can’t do it all myself. I get it.
I hire when I have to then I go back and clean it all up.
Look at it as an ego booster.
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