[Chen Wu xin]

[zhang sandy] What kind of music will fit my trailer,do you have some advice?hope can give some example.”

Not an easy answer as music is very subjective. in the real world your employer/producer would give you direct examples. ie “i want it to sound like such and such”

I’ve seen the real trailer for this film, and your version is not that different(quality of encode/render aside). Did you use new footage, or just trailer footage? If you used trailer footage only you might want to pick up the DVD and rip footage from it. It’s available now even the movie just came out

And one of the main actresses, Yao Chen, is EXTREMELY popular right now, seems she’s on the cover of everything (in China) these past two years so putting here upfront might make sense.

Mark’s suggestions were quite helpful. Sometimes it is difficult when people are learning the art of editing because they lack the opinion of others. If this were a paid edit, you bet the producer would have quite a few notes for you every time they viewed it. And the more you edit the better you’ll get.

[Chen Wu xin]

[Todd Terry] “I suppose it could be a massive coincidence… “

Maybe, mostly likely spam bots of some sort.

I’ve had so much trouble with spam and privacy invasion in the past even though i take the utmost care to prevent this info from slipping in to the wrong hands. My current website has images of email addresses, addresses , phone/fax numbers etc. Not text. So spammers can not data mine any info from it.

Still, it amazes me how smart(and troublesome) spammers(criminals) are.

[Chen Wu xin]

My pleasure AND my apologies for past offences!!

[Chen Wu xin]

[Mark Suszko] “What about changing the job you have into a contractual/consultant gig? Gains you back some sense of control, frees up some time to explore new things, and you increase the pay (because you are covering more expenses).

In a down economy, try fixing the job you have, before you jump into the void of the unemployed.”

Great advice! There’s no reason not to try it out! And it DOES free “up some time to explore new things”!

[Chen Wu xin]

in my initial posts i had been nothing but polite, even after i was called cheapskate, and even my existence was questioned. (Which I found strange considering the relative non-troll nature of my thread starter)

i then responded politely to a rather rude toned post asking to see my work.

i stated my work is hosted on my website which contains personal info and I prefer not to post the URL on such a public forum. Jeez, there is even a disclaimer on the top of each forum warning of googles tracking policy.

Walter, if you didn’t read that post of mine, and continued to ask for it , or simply did not respect a simple wish for some anonymity, then YOU ASKED FOR IT! You could have completely ignored it, and offered your own advice for creating on budget or you could have not posted anything at all. But instead you gave us a long list of places we can see your work (even though I previously mentioned I’m quite familiar with and respect you a great deal ). Good list of places we can see your company’s work and all, but useless for this thread.

After Ned Miller politely responded to my, admittedly too-angry post, and because I understood that yes, my tone of the previous post was harsh, and negative and most of all non-constructive, I recanted – AND I realized I could post video directly on the cow, without the trouble of signing up for a YouTube etc account, i then posted a video here, along with as much info i could remember without pouring over excel files of invoices.

so Walter if you have nothing more to say, that really REALLY sucks, because I’d rather read one post of yours than a hundred of mine, and I’m pretty sure that sentiment is echoed amongst all present.

i signed up for a cow account JUST to create this thread to help a fellow poster. it wasn’t supposed to be anything other than a post meant to encourage another individual I felt was on par with me business wise, as not all of us here have large thriving expanding business. I’d venture to guess most of us don’t!

Although there was some helpful posts in this thread, for the most part it was met with very little of anything constructive. (Including this rant)

But I’ll state my original intent of this thread one more(third?) time: if you have to choose between:
giving up a career for lack of funds
or
Continuing to create while pinching a penny.

Pinch away, be frugal, be DIY, think outside the box. If you gotta hire interns today to be here tomorrow, phi beta Kappa!! To paraphrase Bob Zelin, who must have stated a million times, ”it can’t be done” to the perennial question where a poster asks can which computer monitor he/she can grade/colour on. ”It can’t be done, but get that panny industrial plasma for fraction of the price and it’ll work in pinch!”

He never said, ”quit, change your job”

Ps
(Sorry for my spelling/grammar, I’m on my phone and in transit)

[Chen Wu xin]

[walter biscardi] “The shoot is over, the clock stopped. “

yes, i agree.

My 8 hours start when i start work. When i strike a set, that’s my time. The client shouldn’t have to pay for it.
(try telling this to iaeste local ###)

However, as a business owner, service provider or freelancer, your fee should be calculated to reflect every thing that costs you money, All of your expenditures, be it stationary, plastic cups, soft boxes, cables, yada yada, including your intangible value, should be in your fee already. that’s business 101. You’ll go broke otherwise!

– how much are your expenditures (and if freelance how much are your personal costs i.e: mortgage, car, gas etc
– billable hours
– how much profit do you want
= fee or hourly rate

[Chen Wu xin]

[walter biscardi] “That’s right out of NASCAR. How do you earn a million dollars as a NASCAR owner? Start with two million…..”

if you are a business owner starting from scratch, then function as a start-up with the intention to scale easily and quickly, look for capital.

Could be done in other industries. Video production, most likely not, at least not quickly.

Walter, i won’t make any assumptions about your revenue, but can i ask how many years ago did you open your first post house?

[Chen Wu xin]

[Mark Suszko] I don’t know about Hong Kong, but here you can rent access to a dummy office with a nice meeting room, a front desk receptionist, all the appearances… for a month by month rental. So you have the good-looking place to take meetings, and you shoot mostly on location, so no studio rental to keep up.”

Unfortunately in Shanghai real estate is quite expensive, especially commercial property, besides i like working from home.

however, studio space in Shanghai is quite cheap, top photo studios run about 200USD dollars a day, and include a basic flash kit w/soft boxes and one assistant.

in June, we shot in a 57’x57’studio w/25x25m high ceiling cyc wall in one one corner for 180USD a day .

https://dev.rimagine.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/about-studio1-thumb.jpg
https://www.rimagine.com/about-us/photo-studio-shanghai/

[Chen Wu xin]

Hi Mark

Interesting!!!

I just checked, and my city, being a major financial hub has tons of these companies/services!!

With respect to virtual addresses –
Unfortunately an area of our apartment has a few rooms allocated as a small studio, editing suite and a small mixing room that doubles as VO booth so, basically I need clients to be able to look up my address on my website in the taxi ride over, or to show their driver, so a virtual address wouldn’t work well.

However telephone communications …hmmm??
We have a home phone land line that we use solely for the business. I know I’ve lost quite a few possible interviewees for the TV stuff, after they’ve asked for my URL …then I never hear from them again. Not that our website is bad, but it’s totally, completely head to toe corporate, and small business oriented.

Just checked a few places; around 100 USD a month for virtual phone number/communications with a real receptionist answering.

I wonder how they handle multiple business calls to the same number. No info in their websites relating to how they might route multiple identities to one land line and two mobile numbers.

Do you have any experience in this Mark?

Thanks again

[Chen Wu xin]

[Ned Miller] “I’d love to be able to produce by hiring crew at one third the rate of pros like you do, please teach us how. Since this is the Business forum we’d all like to know how to increase profits by hiring recent grads without them screwing up.”

Ok Ned, i gotcha,

(and i’m born bred and raised, third Gen Canadian, we use the same idioms as you. You don’t have to explain, hehe)

I’m uploading to the Demo section on Creative Cow now
https://reels.creativecow.net/film/ndi-2-directors-cut-30sec-spot-avcmvc1280x72024pmp4

What would you like to know? cost/working with crew member stuff?

ummm, ok, I’m just gonna write what comes to me, excuse my grammar and spelling.

So ok, it’s Shanghai, china, but it’s not that cheap! Top/mid people here make just as much as their American counterparts.

I’m putting ALL costs in Chinese currency (RMB), all costs are give or take 100 or 200RMB. And It’s about 1$USD=6RMB,

– Second TV spot I’ve done for this client, it’s a large training company (4000+ employees, 150 000 customers)

(Day=8hours)
one day shoot(very quick shoot, about 6 hours filming), 6 days preproduction with their marketing people, 3 days edit w/client, 1 day music, half day for VO, 1 day for final assembly. My rates are about 3000RMB/8 hour, more or less plus costs upfront. Overages, within reason come out of my pocket – keeps me aware of everything!!!!!

– My deliverables for this spot are one 15 sec and one 30 sec cut; uncompressed .avi on USB stick. The client takes care of print to tape, the dupe house knows what format goes to which network/station, about 500/ hour plus stock.(not my problem…yet)
— no colour correction yet on this spot. The client will decide later if they want it done by me or by a real colourists, cuz they’re not cheap.

– The PA/assistant director, whatever you want to call her, is an event coordinator for Seagrams (Bacardi etc), not a PA!!!
– About 1700RMB a day, she was billed for 4 days spread over one month (she came to 3ish meetings for free about 6 total hour’s maybe)
– she scheduled everything : transpo, lunches, crew pick up, got the gov and building management permits /permission for the outside shots and communicated with the client regarding extras, location access, release forms etc. liaisoned with everybody including my client!
– Roughly about 4000RMBish for the, transpo, lunches, all the little extras
– there is pan up of the actress as she enters the buildings, the women on the poster is a well known Shanghai celeb and former spokesperson for the client, the PA contacted her agency and got approval to use the image (my client must have paid something??)

– All the Chinese extras are students of that company; I believe they received free contract extensions for their studies as compensation, and a milk tea. They brought their own wardrobe (it’s sweltering July, but the spot will air in October in Northern China where a few dozen new centers are opening) if you look closely in the background everyone is in shorts!

– The foreigners are employees of that company as well, teacher/trainers I guess? Maybe admin (the owner of the company is Canadian women)
– Everyone made it to the locations by themselves, but transport was paid for.

– The first location was the court of a mall; other locations were owned, operated by the client (and were all across the street from each other)
– the office location is the office of the client’s VC
– the elevator shot was unplanned – the marketing guys thought we needed it – it was stolen location from a hotel across the street during lunch.

-The videographer,whom my friend recommended , had filmed their wedding but is actually a studio wedding photographer by trade (huge industry here! A dozen or more massive “photo studios malls” in Shanghai alone)
– He was paid 2100 or 2200RMB and brought two assistants, paid by him
– He used 2 Canon 7D w/50mm 1.4, would swap them when the heat warning came on
– Available light only ‘cept a small LED,
– the assistants used a large 150x200cm and small 80ish cm reflector on stand, and a large configurable flag. He used my CF cards. He brought his benro or velbon photo tripod. The head, i have no idea.
– all shot in sequence

– make-up/hair stylist, hired by the photographer, paid by me, was 900 a day. I gave her more because she used much more make than she thought she needed. She earned it, it was absolutely sweltering and the actress was sweating constantly!!

– The music was written/performed by me.
– i edited the spot. i used AVID 5.5MC in case we go to a colourist in the future, or else i would have used Vegas 9

– Voice over is done by a professional hostess, she came to my mixing room/VO booth to record, 100RMB/hour, 4 hours total. (the marketing guys were killing us try to perfect it! A hundred takes that all sound great to me, and in the end we ended up time stretching it argghhh!!! You can distinctly hear the artifacts when the VO track is muted)

– Marketing did their own proposal, shot list and the shots they wanted, they gave me tons of referral pics and videos of style, emotion and the pacing they wanted. then i did a stick figure storyboard.

– the actress is a receptionist for the client, the company emailed “all the young pretty girls in shanghai offices”.
– she was paid her normal salary for the day.
– they did their own auditions, which i told them to film and we discussed it later

– client paid just over 50000RMB, about 8000dollars approx (plus whatever cost they had on their end, ie man hours, extras compensation etc)

Whats else? I think that’s enough info?

You want to know how to save money, honestly, I don’t know – think outside the box a little.

KISS – keep it simple stupid.

I find if you get the client to contribute as much possible, that helps a lot!! Plus it really gets them to communicate with you, you get their take on why they chose such and such location or why they want the actress they do, and they feel like they have more control that way. You end up spending a lot of time with them. They get so pumped up when they feel like they are making a movie. And it helps because you have to go through every process with them and in doing so you go through every process again and again.

Think outside the box when hiring people, not everybody needs to be film job oriented.
i.e event coordinator as a PA!!
this is great, her real job is making sure people are supposed to be doing what they need to do, regardless of if it’s a fashion show, gala, expo – or a film shoot!! She knows how to talk and who to talk to! Its her job. She had never a done film shoot before, so during the meetings i made sure she understood a few things. Most importantly that she is my voice to everyone and everything except the camera and the actors. When we were filming, right away i got her behind the camera, looking the replays, after 30 mins i could just point to a problem on the monitor and she’s barking orders at the extras, “when he yells action, laugh more don’t just stand there” or telling shoppers to stop walking when we’re abou to shoot. She would instinctively arrive on location and talk to the people who matter, again her normal job.

How about the studio wedding photog as videographer!!
I saw my friend’s wedding vid, looked beautiful, i went to his photo studio, saw his dozen Philip bloom style vids he had made, looked through his photo portfolio. I showed him the pics of the location we’d be at and he said, “No lights”. I thought it was a question, but nope, he meant he was going to use available light only. I wasn’t impressed, but after an hour of going through his portfolio, I was definitely impressed. He wowed me so I hired him.

Look, every gig is different. You don’t need me preaching to you, or teaching you.

Just approach everything with a slanted view, indie style, where resources are limited and you gotta do what gotta to get the job done!

So, there it is, you asked for it

Don’t make assumption, ask questions first!

Cheers