Tim Wilson
3
COW Coins
Forum Replies Created
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[Chris Harlan] “[Bob Woodhead] “that’s it…. turn off Cow, nose <-> grindstone”
Yeah, I think that’s some good advice.”
That’s about the worst advice I’ve ever heard.
Tim Wilson
Vice President, Editor-in-Chief
Creative COW -
Having worked at Boris FX in the early part of the century, I can tell you that Boris and the BCC team are wildmen. They love nothing more than taking in suggestions and turning them around fast. Head on over to the COW’s Boris forum and get in on the fun.
Tim Wilson
Vice President, Editor-in-Chief
Creative COW -
A belated thumbs up to you, Oliver, for your observation about the different ways that RED and Alexa are both prospering. “Leverage” notwithstanding, Alexa is simply better suited to the “40 hours of footage down to 42 minutes, 22 times a year,” where RED’s advantages become clear when you can build a fresh workflow around it. I’ve obviously oversimplified your point, but I think that you’re also right about how this applies to X In the context of Jason, Steve and Andy’s posts above.
It has always been true that 7 had (some admittedly large) niches where it worked and where it didn’t. I still think that X is already bigger than 7, but may never be as useful for the exact same niche-sters that prospered with 7, a la there not really being that many people wrestling very long between RED or Alexa. The workflow is ultimately more important than features or interface metaphors.
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[Ned Miller] “Go for the business where you maximize your revenue with the least amount of time spent, monies outlaid and physical effort. And making it up with having a zillion small real estate videos doesn’t seem like the way to go. Tremendous time suck. “
Awesome advice.
Coupla quick notes:
1) I’ll put my point in your language to be clearer: you’re right that it’s a hamster wheel. To be successful in real estate video, YOU HAVE TO LOVE THE HAMSTER WHEEL.
2) I didn’t have a problem with realtors trying to hustle me, mostly because we became friends and community volunteers working side by side. Which was another of my points: be ACTIVE in this meetings, and in the community as a volunteer, or you will be miserable.
And yes, a target for relentless hustling.
3) To put it another way, you have to become a realtor in every sense but selling the actual homes.
4) But I liked that, and I liked being around realtors, mortgage brokers, lenders.
Will YOU like it, Shawn? Maybe yes, maybe no. But that’s another aspect of my point about “becoming a realtor.” Once you’re “in and of” that world, a whooooole lot of things get a lot easier.
5) I didn’t try to do any of this after 2008, and DSLRs were only barely part of the equation, so yeah, maybe my advice is worthless now.
Wouldn’t be the first time. LOL
While I didn’t do this after a crash, I did do it after a hurricane — H. Andrew, even after this recent one, still #4 on the all-time disaster list — so things were pretty dang bad. Nobody had money to buy houses or buy my services unless they really, really wanted to.
Which is why I think that my advice about getting ALLLLL the way in as the ONLY way to succeed at this is still sound. I didn’t have to sell my services that hard. They were ready to buy before they ever saw my work. The demo of my own house was the LAST step, not the first one.
6) We’ve talked a lot in this forum about to compete with cheap, often free, althernatives, but I found that things were getting better for quality videographers as the market was tightening – if a house isn’t selling, some people decided that better marketing tools would help.
And Ned’s advice is rock-solid regardless. You can do almost anything more easily than this, and if you ask, “What kind of video should I get into?” I don’t know that real estate video would even go on my list at all.
But if we’re starting at “I want to get into real estate video, what’s the best way” there are steps that can be taken to increase your chance of success.
Tim Wilson
Vice President, Editor-in-Chief
Creative COW -
We never worked in high-end real estate. That has nothing to do with anything I was talking about whatsoever.
We got a couple of hundred bucks a pop, and we made it up in volume. We worked with a bunch of individual realtors to line up shoots back to back, so we’d walk away with $1500/day or so….but that also had to cover post!!!
Shawn, with that experience behind me, I can confirm Mark’s observation that the work is brutal — but it’s brutal for realtors too. CNBC ranks selling real estate at #10 on the list of most stressful jobs, and I think it should be a lot higher up than that.
That’s why I keep emphasizing the amount of sweat it takes. You have to have skin in the game, or they won’t respect you. And if they don’t respect you, they won’t pay you.
My previous post was mostly about GETTING the work. Let’s talk about DOING the work.
When we wrestled those back to back shoots, we had to start by working the schedules of five independent businesspeople into the order that WE needed them to be, to minimize our driving.
During the shoots, we did all the lighting and dressing ourselves. Moving plants and furniture, floofing pillows, getting something nicer out of a kitchen cabinet to put on a dining room table, whatever it took. We even scheduled shoots so that the sun was on the proper side of the house, which meant that we scouted the locations beforehand.
This was in Florida, so if the sky wasn’t absolutely perfect, we’d have to come back another day to shoot exteriors. Can’t shoot an overcast sky and call it a Florida real estate video.
We wrote the copy, did the vo and music, and of course every house we edited had unique graphics, including a picture of the realtor, because we all knew that the house wasn’t the actual product — the REALTOR was.
High end jobs are a snap. At $500,000, a realtor rolls the dice on maybe a $15,000 commission. In our world, it was more like $5000, and that’s GROSS. They paid us one time in the process, but they’d been buying print ads every single week. They’d also put in a ton of time, so even asking as little as we were was asking a lot. Out of pocket expenses are massive, and are just as big for houses that don’t sell as for the ones that do — and a lot just don’t.
Speaking of expenses, how many realtors do you know? If you know many, you’ll know that lot of them keep signs in their garage because they BOUGHT those signs. They pound the signs into the ground themselves, because if they don’t, they have to PAY somebody to do it for them. Nothing comes for free in their world, any more than it does in yours. That’s why this isn’t like other jobs. You’re one freelancer selling to another, and their out of pocket percentage is higher than yours.
Shawn, if you’re not willing to work like a demon, JUST LIKE A REALTOR DOES, listen to Mark. Do anything and everything else you possibly can, because this will make you miserable.
I might have a whole different set of advice for somebody pursuing high-end real estate, but I’ll never know because I never did. LOL
I loved this work. I loved everything about it, including the hustling, but especially the creative freedom I got, and the feeling of kinship. And some good deals on houses. LOL But I loved it so much that I overlooked Mark’s very important point. Listen to us both. 🙂
Tim Wilson
Vice President, Editor-in-Chief
Creative COW -
[Bryan Mailer] “Are the downloads with these 7 free days from the sponsor’s website free for commercial use with no strings attached?”
Yes.
Be aware that you’ll need to give them your credit card, and if you stay beyond 7 days, they’ll charge you for a month’s membership. This is spelled out clearly, but we still hear people complaining that it’s somehow sneaky. It’s not. Most people who do free trials do the same thing.
We also hear from people who actually READ the details that it’s good stuff, and many of them continue with the membership.
Enjoy,
TimTim Wilson
Vice President, Editor-in-Chief
Creative COW -
I absolutely loved doing real estate video. Even turned it into not one but TWO different local TV shows.
I’ll answer more thoroughly when I’m not typing on my phone…but DO you have a demo? My wife and I had our business together, and know what WE used for a demo? OUR house. We produced the shit out of that thing, and got a yes on our first pitch, which I can’t remember ever happening before or since.
This is one racket where it really really pays off to network in person. Is there some local group of business people in your area? Rotary? Chamber of Commerce? These usually meet around mealtimes. Regularly attend one that meets at breakfast, AND one that meets at lunch. Volunteer for community stuff. I promise realtors will be participating in these events. It’ll be good for your soul AND you’ll achieve your number one goal as a business guy: making people feel good about THEMSELVES for giving money to YOU.
Here’s the thing about realtors. Almost all of them are self employed. They pay a fee to the broker just to have a place in the office, and split every single commission. They spend money out of their own pockets for signs, business cards and listings in those real estate books you see in diners. They are relentless in taking classes, because there’s no longer enough business for them to miss a single trick, and these classes cost hundreds, if not thousands of dollars out of their pockets. Even if the broker lets you in the door, you’ll probably have to sell your services to every single realtor in that office, one at a time.
And if you don’t have as much skin in the game as they do, if you aren’t hustling as hard as they are, you won’t get a dime.
That actually had MUCH more to do with getting jobs than our demo. They knew that we were spending money we didn’t have to be at all those stupid, stupid meetings. Going to all these local fundraisers was a huge time and money suck, but by the time we made our first pitch, every single realtor in town knew our names, our business name, the story of how we came to town, and every service we offered before we ever suggested a real estate video. The fact is, before we ever showed a demo, they ASSUMED it would be great. They WANTED it to be great, because they knew we were hustlers, and we would shake every nickel out of our pockets for them, and would hustle harder for them than anyone had ever hustled for them before.
And we had to go through this every single time for every realtor in the office, because they were all in business for themselves, and were already spending a small fortune on advertising. But we didn’t talk to them like we were selling advertising. We talked to them like their teammates, and they believed it, because it was true.
. This isn’t like any other job you’ll ever have. If they don’t already KNOW you’re one of them, your demo won’t matter a bit. These people are gambling their family’s entire future every single day, and the last thing they want to hear is one more clown wanting to stretch them thinner. But they’ll always be happy to hear from someone that they really, truly believe is capable of lightening their load, not just their wallet.
Sorry for any odd typos and rambling….another more rational and grammatical post soon…
Tim Wilson
Vice President, Editor-in-Chief
Creative COW -
[Jeremy Garchow] “FCP8.
…what might have been…”
What “might have been” is that FCP 8 would be exactly the same damn thing that FCP has been since 2005, when the last new structural feature, multicam, was added. Since then, it’s pretty much just formats, and even Pro Res came four years later than DNxHD.
For all that I can be cranky in posts — I mean, who posts when they’re happy, right? LOL — I’m actually a very positive, optimistic guy…but I have absolutely zero idea where anybody got the idea that anything big and new would have happened this time. Maybe because it HADN’T in 2007 or 2009, so in 2011, we were finally due?
Maybe I have a different perspective because all I do is read posts, and I do read ALL OF THEM, but in even numbered years, people howled that there was no release, FCP must be dying, Apple doesn’t care….then in the odd-numbered years, a release would show up, and people would say the exact same thing — nothing here, FCP must be dying, Apple doesn’t care.
All of which got fired up again every time a new release of iTunes broke FCP.
Pro Res in 2007 was obviously a big deal, and breathed new life into what appeared to otherwise be a moribund development enterprise…but by 2009, people here were already talking about looking for more modern alternatives.
Now, if by “FCP 8, what might have been,” you mean FCP 7 plus 64 bits, well, yeah, that’d be a cool enough FCP 8. But otherwise, do you really think that Apple had been focusing on FCPX since 2005 and THAT’s why nothing much but Pro Res happened since then?
On the flip side, I’m still bullish on FCPX…if you can stand working on a Mac LOL….but FCP 8? My prediction for what might have been is that the bear might still have been hibernating.
This actually makes another interesting thread — what MIGHT have been for FCP 8? Both realistically what it might have been, and we WISHED it might have been….
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OT, but I gotta ask you Gary, the lights back on for you guys yet?
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[Michael Gissing] “However, Avid will not have a viable business model if it tries to chase Apple down that rabbit hole.”
If by “rabbit hole” you mean breaking compatibility with the entire installed base of an ostensible market leader for the sake of a $299 app, I think we’re safe. LOL
Note too that Avid is reviving the offer to upgrade from previous versions of Avid software to Symphony 6.5 for $999.