Bill Davis
Forum Replies Created
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Don’t know why but I’m stuck on why they said $550 rather than a flat $500. Is the extra $50 supposed to make it a more “professional” offer. Sheesh.
Anyway, I’m shooting in San Diego next week and so posted a request for crew on another popular production oriented bullitin board and have been really surprised at the responses I got.
It’s a single day shoot – and I was clear that I was happy to pay prevailing rates and wasn’t asking anyone for any special discounts.
Along with the serious responses, I got three people that literally volunteered to drive from LA to SD and crew for the project for free – and two more who simply said I could pay them whatever I wanted.
I do think the economy and the expansion of the low end of the industry where anyone who can afford to buy a camcorder suddenly wants to work on any set they can just for experience is skewing the industry in odd ways.
There’s never been more price pressure to go lowball – and never more people who are willing to participate in that kind of impossible to sustain economic system than right now.
Heaven help us.
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Actually, its too bad having six extra unskilled people on a working set is more hassle than help . Cuz I was tempted to take a bunch of them up on the offer, knowing that then I wouldn’t have to personally schlepp any cases or gear around all weekend! Tempting! -
Personally, there’s only ONE criteria I use to decide whether to recommend any book on sales.
Does it represent FRESH new thinking. Or not.
Your public library has a THOUSAND books on how to sell stuff.
Why should I believe this book has special wisdom for me that all the thousands of others who’ve already written books on sales do not?
Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People is often cited as the greatest “sales” book ever written – and it’s time-tested wisdom is 72 years old!
Got something to say that all the other authors missed?
Great. I sincerely hope yours finds space on that crowded shelf.
But, IMO the world does NOT need more sales books. It just needs more people who understand that selling is fundamentally about building human relationships. Always has been – always will be.
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I’m going to say it again with the hope that it starts to catch on…
DON’T SELL TIME!
Really, honestly fight against this.
It penalizes you if you’re good and fast. It rewards those who are inexperienced and slow. And it does little to value the experience and skill you accumulate over time.
A good editor who can do things that look great QUICKLY should be paid substantially MORE than someone who is inefficient – and time based billings honor just the opposite.
It’s a fine system for accountants and administrators – and DEATH to the creative spirit.
Plus, it’s the ONLY billing mode that guarantees that your critical inventory is always trickling away.
Bid the project. Bid enough to be OK even if it takes twice the time to do a GREAT job. Cuz in the end, that’s what will make you employable.
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Agreed. Morley’s book ROCKS. It achieves what all truly superior technical books achieve – not only explaining WHAT to do to increase your chances of success – but WHY those factors are important.
I suspect that if I was young and starting over – and someone had exposed me even earlier to just two books – Morley’s fine work on scriptwriting and Tuffte’s “Visual Display of Quantitative Information” – that my career would have gone farther – faster.
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So much effort. So much money. And so many minutes gone from viewers lives to make a point that takes no more than a couple of seconds to verbalize. (Plus I’ve got to admit that 30 seconds after watching this I can’t even remember whether it’s the server or the network or WHAT that’s supposed to be so critically more important than the other.)
And of course, given Murphy’s Law – they likely changed the topology of their network approach and suddenly everything they worked so hard to burn into the brains of the team became obsolete within 48 hours.
Gotta love corporate video.
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The real kicker is that you pretty well know they’re going to get flooded with responses…..
Craig’s List!
Where lives and stuff are as cheap as they are mediocre. -
Well, the Sony WRR and WRT systems were staples in rental houses around here for decades. So they do have a fine track record for wireless at the moderate to top end.
And as to shotguns, it’s also defensible to note that whatever else you feel about Sony – they have a long and honorable history of professional video and audio design. Their products might not always be the absolute top of the line, BUT I can’t ever remember anything that came out of their professional divisions being sub-standard in any way.
I’ve used Sony 672’s short shotguns off cameras for the occasional choir mic or similar when pressed and I’ve always gotten perfectly acceptable recordings.
So I wouldn’t stress too much. If you see something that looks good – chances are it will serve you just fine.
My 2 cents anyway.
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Much of the important stuff has been covered.
But one thing hasn’t.
When it comes to big government projects, there’s often a big old above the line budget. XX millions. Then there’s language somewhere in the details that indicates that they want the “documentary” video of the process. And often, there’s a PERCENTAGE of the sub-budget of the sub-budget that they set aside when developing the overall budget FOR THE VIDEO COVERAGE that let them generate the original overall budget number in the first place.
SOMEBODY knows that number. The original contractor. The local council. Maybe just the poor secretary who had to input the original documents into the system.
I’m NOT saying you should try to obtain any insider information or information you’re not legally entitled to. Bad ethics is a slippery slope and once you’re in the mud, you’ll never, ever get clean.
But quite often, that information is NOT insider – but rather PUBLISHED PUBLIC INFO as a part of the open bidding process. Imagine they set asside .001% of the contract budget for the video. Do you own calculator?
Would that help you bid this? Ya think?
If this is what you want do for a living, take it seriously. LEARN about this organization. Learn who knows these numbers. Don’t break the rules, but if there’s critical information that you can secure WITHIN the rules, why in gods name wouldn’t you want that? Would a polite phone call to their offices to ask if there’s a BUDGET in any PUBLIC DOCUMENTATION relating to this gig?,
Hell, you want to play at the executive level, understand there’s nothing illegal about learning where these office folks drink and getting to know some of the people in the front office personally. That’s what lobbyists do every day. And perhaps cultivating a personal relationship with the people you’ll be working with means they’ll watch out of beneficial public information that could assist you. Again, as long as they’re not providing you with something that someone else can find out, you’re playing scrupulously fair.
Let’s see, on page 1090 of the original TUNNEL THROUGH RED ROCK design contract it specifies that they’re to spend “NOT OVER $50,000 in creating a video record of their lovely $13.6 millions dollar project.
Bingo,
My bid: $49.999.00
If you’re gonna play this game. Why not dedicate yourself to learning how to play as well as possible?
Just some random thoughts from another guy who’s been there.
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This is why it’s so fundamentally stupid for EVERYONE involved to undercharge/underbudget for professional work.
I can’t count the number of times, somebody in my early career “lowballed” me – and I took the gig – only to have them screw up and have to come back and pay a whole second studio AND VO fee netting me more than the original quote.
I’ve got clients I’ve had for 20 years – and they all know that while my original fee is NOT going to be the cheapest they can find, I’m also pretty flexible if someone up the chain of command decides to flex their superior education and demands that I recut the sentence from “Over 50% of users agree…” To “More than 50% of users agree…”
Heck, I even agree that the second instance is proper grammar while the first is arguably wrong. (Over being a direction as in “above” rather than a indicator of amount, after all.) The point, however is that while arguably gramatically incorrect, it not only sounds PERFECTLY correct – it still totally honors the original fundamental goal of communicating clearly to the audience.
So how much is it worth to go back and change it?
That’s why I keep my original fee high-ish and don’t mess around with charging for these little re-cuts unless there are substantial changes to the original work. At some point the “change seriousness” crosses over – and in my experience clients always understand that and never argue about a second session/VO fee.
So in summation, set your rates so that you can be a “nice guy” and throw in the incidentals.
If you don’t, you’ll wake up someday and discover it’s costing you more to generate a damn BILL for the work, than the actual economic benefit of the profit you can fairly charge for doing it.
My 2 cents’ anyway.
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Top 3? OK.
Coming in at #3. The AKG 414 TLII
The reason – In the early 1990s it happened to be the mic hanging in the studio where I did the first VO series I’d ever done where I earned more than 5 figures in a single day.Coming in at #2. The Sennheiser MD-421U
The reason – this was the best large diaphram mic I could afford when I started doing VO work out of my own studio in the late 1970s Paid $200 – earned THOUSANDS!Coming in at #1. The original Telephunken (Neumann pre-cursor) developed by the Germans circa WWII and likely stored secretly in the mic closet of the finest studios in the world – this mic will make anyone sound like a GOD!
The reason? It set the standard for idiots believing that there is some “magical” quality in microphones that will change them from inexperienced civilians into voiceover PROFESSIONALS merely by posessing this particular concoction of metal and wire. The power of this idea rivals the power of the story of Santa Claus or the Ten Commandments. With this myth in place, people keep believing in the power of the hardware – allowing those of us who’ve made a lovely living doing VO work to keep the secret that a great VO requires any particular mic in the same fashion that a great recipe REQUIRES mushrooms.FWIW.