[Tim Wilson]

You’re very much on the right track. Whatever terms you come to, be sure that you’ve both had input, that you’re both comfortable, and that you’re both flexible.

I had a similar situation back in the day, Maybe sounds like you, but for me, client #1 was who I wanted to work with most. 🙂 They eventually became the biggest client, but that took a while.

Things were also a little tighter for me — it was a weekly TV show, so I DID have tight deadlines. Client #2 ALSO had a TV show, and BOTH were shot on location.

The opening bid for Client #1 was, you can have me all day Monday if it’s multiple locations. Tuesday is okay ONLY if we’re doing one location.

I gave ’em a heads up when the review copy was coming, they had half a day to review and give comments. (It was a 30 min. show. The whole team usually reviewed at lunch if they knew it was coming.)

If they miss the deadline, I ship anyway and they live with it…unless they tell me it’s too important to ship without review. In that case, we slip in a re-run, and they pay me half anyway. I’d still get the full payment when the review was complete. That is, non-emergency re-runs were otherwise free (except for duplication and shipping costs), but an emergency re-run cost money, because I’d spent time regardless…and used up time that I could have billed someone else.

BTW, it only happened twice — I suspect because they knew the cost. And the two times they had to do it, the first thing they said was, “We know we need to pay you half the rate of a new show, but we need to do it anyway.” No hard feelings. Done.

This is oversimplifying, and was a bit more flexible than it sounds. For example, if there was something special that needed to be shot at one time and one time only, I did it without hesitation…but if they threw out the schedule, it was OUT. We’d have to figure out together when I might be able to finish the project. Stuff like that happened all the time, and it was never a crisis because we’d gotten in the habit of talking it through.

Implied in all this is that we set a minimum and a maximum together, for both my time and their money, that served as a framework. We could both see when one was running against the other, and we figured out how to deal with it.

It helped to have plenty of good faith on both sides — and plenty of good cheer. Many of the discussions took place in bars. Highly recommended. 🙂

Keep talking. Keep adjusting. Don’t let bad feelings accumulate.

You get the idea. Something like this isn’t JUST a firm business contract. You’re also talking about a relationship. It will help if you both treat it like that. You know, in ADDITION to the business part. 🙂

tw

[Tim Wilson]

[David Roth Weiss] “I suggest you tell your wife’s firm about my theory on flat rate billing. :):):)”

Not a theory — just an observation. I know that Boston’s not the center of the world, but we do have the most lawyers per square mile in the world. Even more than Washington. And I certainly don’t know all the immigration lawyers in town, but all the ones that I know do flat rate billing for basic immigration tasks. Not other things — just basic immigration stuff. Who knows? Maybe a byproduct of overheated competition for a limited pool of not-often-well-heeled clients.

I ain’t saying it’s cheap, though. It’s not. I might have enough money to do it once. I’d definitely need a loan to do it twice.

Your mileage will vary.

It occurs to me to mention re: Chris’s original query that immigration is only one part of it. There’s also the getting a job doing After Effects part of it. It’s a question we’ve heard often enough that we’re devoting an entire article to it in next month’s COW magazine. Be sure to check it out.

tw

[Tim Wilson]

My wife works in an office that does immigration law, and I agree that having a lawyer is a crucial step. Best to have one local to your target area, because you’re going to have make a lot of visits to their office. (Most work on flat fees, so don’t worry: they have an incentive to work as efficiently as possible.)

Also good advice: best to have a job before you settle here, as an employer is the single most important hurdle for the immigration folks in the US — they want to know that you can pay your own way.

Okay, it helps not to have a criminal record in your home country, but you can work around that if you have a job much more easily than you can work around having no criminal record but no job.

So you’re quite right that the “US office” approach is going to be by far the easiest one.

Good luck!

Tim

[Tim Wilson]

http://www.broadcaststore.com

They claim to be the world’s largest dealer of pro video gear. I don’t have any reason to doubt them. They have two pages of U-matic models listed, each of which is a link to lots of units of that model. Using the SONY VO-9800TC as an example, they have 24 units listed that include the TC generator and external jog-shuttle. (That’s an SP model with RS-422 and all the goodies.)

The prices start at $3100, although you can “log in” for a better price. There are a bunch that say “call” for prices — I would guess that those are higher. Depending on how long you intend to use it, that may be the way to go.

Because of the nature of the beast, they’re in NY and LA, but they surely know how to pack it to get it to NC sans peanuts.

BTW, I found these guys on froogle, using “U-matic” as the search term. (The dash is crucial for returning the best results.) I actually hate google, but their buying search engine is pretty useful.

Finally, I hope you reported that ebay seller if they didn’t give you your money back. The seller was clearly nuts.

Your chances are even better if they used Paypal — unlike ebay, they’ll shut the guy down in a heartbeat, and will freeze the funds until you’re satisfied. I’ve had only one bad ebay experience — Paypal was all over him until I was happy, which I eventually was. I never, ever use anything but Paypal to pay for that very reason.

Good luck!

Tim

[Tim Wilson]

Fair enough on the hourly thing. I still never did it, and never will…but you’re right that it’s not the dealbreaker.

I’m still clear why there’s any objection to pre-production in a doc. You can be open to change as you proceed, just as you are with scripted production. But the harder the production — and docs are the HARDEST — the more that preproduction pays off.

I’m not being theoretical here, which we could pleasantly debate for years. And I love that. But this is practical. Somebody has a budget. There’s time to spend, and time that can’t be spent. You either meet these goals or you don’t. It’s like the old saying, if you don’t have a goal, you’ll never achieve it.

Seriously. Raise your hands if a client ever came to you and said, “I don’t have a particular story to tell. Don’t bother with an outline. Start rolling camera on anything you want, and I’ll pay you as much as it takes.”

Anybody?

Bueller?

Nope. You start with a story. If there’s no story, there’s no reason to start. Even if the goal of the production is explicitly discovery for the filmmakers, there’s still a budget, there’s still a calendar, and everything else serves those two masters. Both of those serve the content.

Note that I didn’t say that you had to have the content mapped…but I doubt you can name a documentary where the content wasn’t significantly mapped out. Maybe it was an outline…but I can’t think of a documentary that didn’t have a whole heck of a lot more than that before it began.

Funny that you mention that outlines, even scripts, compromise objectivity. If there was such a thing (and I don’t believe there is), I think the compromise begins with the camera. You make a choice to point in one direction rather than another, a time to turn it on and turn it off. These at the very least influence content, but since the dawn of documentary production, most of us have argued that these are ethical choices as well as artistic ones.

I’ll go further and say that there’s no more inherently subjective and actively ethical artform than the documentary. Discuss.

Maybe not here though. 🙂 Do we need to open a production philosophy community? I’m enjoying this.

Anyway, let’s forget objectivity. Maybe it’s a goal, maybe it isn’t. But there’s still some kind of goal fpr the content. It may or may not be the biggest goal of the PRODUCTION — although I absolutely believe it’s always the PRIMARY goal of any documentary production — but it’s one of them.

Again, I may be being overly reductive, but if you don’t have an actual story to tell, there’s no point for clients to spend money, for investors to invest, no point in taking the camera out of the bag.

My two scents.

tw

[Tim Wilson]

I’m still going to disagree, based on my experience if nothing else. I wouldn’t dream of doing the easiest job in the world without knowing the client’s budget, the intended content, the intended length, and how much time I had to give the project. Once you know that stuff, I don’t see any reason to treat docs differently from any other project.

Now that I think about it, though, it occurs to me that, precisely because it IS like any project, you can bill for it like any other project. If you bill hourly, bill hourly. But if you break the client’s budget or your own time budget on a regular basis, you’re out of business. The other two questions are simply ways to answer THOSE two questions.

I’ll confess that I only went the hourly route on jobs I didn’t really want. This exposes a prejudice on my part, but my feeling is that the people best-suited to getting paid hourly is manual laborers, low-level government workers, and people like secretaries and assistants in corporate life.

I don’t mean the slightest disrespect to any of these, but I conducted business as a principal in my company, and a producer on every project. That means I wasn’t a laborer, I was an executive. And executives don’t get paid hourly. Hence my insistence on a budget of both money and time before the first shot gets taken.

Hence also my point that the only way the task gets infinite is if you let the client make it infinite. They might resent it, but I found that once I got them through this first hurdle, I was in the driver’s seat the rest of the way.

[Tim Wilson]

[David Roth Weiss] “So, the real question one needs to ask is, how can I possibly calculate a finite bid on a job that has an infinite number of varibles? And the answer is, you can’t. The only way you can possibly come out whole is to be paid for your time, by the hour, day, week, or month.”

Stongly agree with the first two sentences. No way anyone can, or should, bid against infinite variables.

Couldn’t disagree with the third sentence more. I like the beginning of it though: “The only way can possibly come out whole is to….”

reduce the number of variables!

I don’t mean to pick on you, David. But I heard this constantly when I was doing documentaries, and I never, ever found it to be true of a single project I worked on.

Start by seeing it from the client’s point of view. How can you possibly ask them to commit to a potentially infinite budget. “And the answer is, you can’t.” Reducing the number of variables is the one and only task you have before you take your camera out of the bag.

There aren’t an infinite number of things for you both to think about in order to begin, either. As far as I’m concerned, there are only four.

The first is the budget. There’s no such thing as an infinite budget, so you adjust your work accordingly. Hey client, I can do anything you want to beyond what we agreed upon, but you’ll have to pay me. The one and only way this happens is if you both agree on a target.

Say you’re the one doing the documentary, and you want investors. You can only raise so much money. If you want more money, you need to get it. If you can’t, you do what you have to do to get the job to fit the money. Or you go out of business.

The second is the content. Whether you’re the creator, or you’re working for someone else, preproduction is even MORE important for docs precisely BECAUSE you need to control the variables. Even if it’s not a script, it’s an outline.

The third is the target length. I built a career on doing nature docs, and most were 30 minutes or less. One example was a welcome video at a national park. Seven to ten minutes tops. The thirty minute gigs were science and nature magazine shows, airing on PBS and government stations. Sometimes I had 3 stories, sometimes 1…but I still had 30 minutes, including credits, period.

There are other kinds of TV gigs. The pinnacles are Discovery and National Geographic. Both build their schedules around hour-long programs with 4 breaks. That’s 42 minutes, in roughly 10 minute chunks. Another pinnacle is POV on PBS: roughly an hour, in one 45-ish minute chunk. Same with HBO. And on and on.

YOUR time is the final consideration. You have a life. You have a job. You have other clients calling for your time. You HAVE to put a cap on the amount of time you’re going to spend on any one project, or you can’t have a business.

So think about a favorite documentary. My three favorites in recent years are Bowling for Columbine, Super Size Me, and No Way Home. Every one of those had a budget, an outline if not a script, and a general target length. Even the feature-length ones can’t come in at much more than 90 minutes.

And whether it’s Michael Moore, Morgan Spurlock or Martin Scorcese, every one of them had something else to do when these projects were over. The calendar was calling. Every important choice they made was based on their own answers to those four basic questions.

(There are some other specific questions that come up, with a subset of the EXACT same considerations. Is Joan Baez available? Is somebody else asking for a fee to appear? Are the rights to a given photograph available? Your decision whether or to pursue these, an alternative, or skip it altogether is made by determining if you have the time and the budget to mess with them. You KNOW the answer, and you make your decision accordingly.)

So in the end, the forces that shape a hard project like a documentary are the same ones that shape an easy project, say, a testimonal PSA built around a 30-second head shot. The answers to each question vary depending on the project, but the questions never do.

What’s the budget? You know before you begin.

What’s the content? You know before you begin.

What’s the target length? You know before you begin.

What does your schedule allow? You know before you begin.

Some of these are firmer than others, but none is an entirely unknown factor before you begin…or else you don’t begin. Not if you want to do this twice.

The more often you want to do it — in my case HUNDREDS of times — the more important it is that you know the answers to these questions.

Follow these principles, and the rewards are far greater than the money you receive. Fail to follow them more than once or twice, and you WILL be getting an hourly wage…working in a fast-food drive-through.

Good night and good luck.

Best,
Tim

[Tim Wilson]

The process you describe is exactly how I built my own production business. Started doing commercial and corporate work, then left it behind as I moved into full-time documentary production.

One thing to note is that it didn’t happen overnight. I used the commercial money to fund the doc business while it was getting off the ground.

The other thing to note is that a client is a client. Doing commercials “for practice” is a fine way to hone your chops…but you wouldn’t expect to regularly take a pile of commercials you created to a client you never consulted beforehand and say “It’s great work. Would you like to pay me?” The process is client first, then production.

I know that sounds ridiculously obvious, but many people miss it. This really is the way it works. There’s a reason why corporate sponsors are thanked by name in documetaries, say, on PBS. It’s true for documentaries that never air on TV as well — somebody pays for them to be created.

You’ve clearly got that part under control, since you’re now asking about how to bill. You’re right, by the project is the only way to go. From there, it entirely depends on the kind of doc you’re doing.

Historical stuff can be a little easier on production. You’re mostly shooting indoors, and an interview is an interview. The heavy lifting is in post, where you have to not just edit, but add all the animation and effects that people have come to expect. Indeed, I’ve found historical docs to be among the most effects-intensive work you’ll ever do, short of a creature feature.

Speaking of which, I mostly did nature docs. No question you have to roll tape. And roll. And roll. My experience is that with practice, you’ll only miss a few seconds changing 30-minute tapes, but you’ll more than make it in post up by not having to shuttle through much longer tapes to find what you need. Practice timecode discipline, or there’s no amount of money that will be worth your misery.

It helps to build the story in your mind as you shoot. Pre-production is essential, but it’s only a start. Once you get into the wilderness, the story has a way of taking over. If you pay attention, it will help you start to make shooting choices, to understand the b-roll you need, and perhaps most important, tell you what you DON’T need to shoot.

No matter what, shooting takes much, much more time in this scenario. From there, editing takes time, but you know how to edit. While it takes much longer to edit when working with a lot of footage (10 or 15x isn’t uncommon) it’s much easier to guess your time budget than with effects-laden post.

The reason why I go into this is that you have to have some idea of hard costs (especially tape — you’ll need as many extra batteries as you can carry, too), some idea of the balance of your effort(between shooting, editing and effects), and at least a rough guess of how long you take for each of these.

Then once you’ve done all this math? Throw it all out. Do what you can with the client’s budget. They’ll never have enough, at least to begin…which is why your commercial work can balance it out while you get your legs under you.

Sorry to have gone on at such length, but I hope you’re seeing that different kinds of docs create much different scenarios for production…and therefore different impacts on budget.

A final note: even though I dismissed the idea of doing spec work for commercials (do the work now, pray to get paid later), it can actually pay off with docs. You can shake loose some extra money if you create a 3 or 4 minute preview of the work you intend to do with EXACTLY the style and full production value you intend to execute. But that’s a whole other post. 🙂

So where do we start talking from here?

Best,
Tim

[Tim Wilson]

Ron, thanks so much for writing. I’m THRILLED to be at The COW, and am happy to respond anywhere I can. (Although we might have this thread moved to the COW Magazine forum.)

Several points I’d like to clarify. You asked for my opinion, so here it is. Your mileage may vary.

[ron moody] “You summarized by stating that you do and would continue to use Macs as your editing tools.”

Actually, I *know* Macs from over 20 years’ experience. And that amount of experience with APPLE is why I’ll never own another Mac.

I wouldn’t even THINK about using one to edit professionally.

Especially in the context of the article, I wanted to make clear that my slamming of Apple doesn’t come from ignorance of FCP. It comes from over 24 years of experience with Apple.

Please read on for details.

[ron moody] “Adobe’s forced move to XP when Premiere Pro”

First, don’t forget that it was APPLE that forced Adobe’s move off Mac. Premiere had been on Win since 1996, of course, but Adobe still developed it for Mac until Apple muscled them off the platform.

Looking at what Apple is doing to challenge Adobe on core apps like After Effects and Photoshop, and on key technologies like PDF and Flash, I just don’t see how any serious media professional who has a choice would mortgage their future to a vendor so hostile to the platform’s only remaining major software developer.

(Microsoft counts for many customers, but not so much in the creative area that we’re talking about here. And it’s not like Apple isn’t challenging them too.)

The bottom line for me is that if you care as much about using Adobe apps as I do, you’re betting against yourself to work with Apple.

The story isn’t any better for hardware vendors, btw. Here’s a short list of people that helped put FCP on the map as a serious editor, and that Apple threw right off the map: Matrox (the first RT card for FCP), Digital Voodoo (the first 10-bit IO) and Cinewave (the first HD hardware. ProMax got hosed when they tried to develop hardware for Apple, too.

I could also talk about the number of pro dealers that Apple has burned — indeed, nearly all of the nation’s Mac VARs joined together in a class-action lawsuit against Apple — but that would be sort of piling on. You get the point.

So yes, I built my business as an all-Mac shop. But my shop is now all PC, as is my home. (Both are all AMD/ATI, btw.)

[ron moody] “I still remember how much slower XP is that Win2K was.”

On older hardware, absolutely true.

On newer hardware, absolutely not.

This isn’t just my opinion. It was repeatedly verified for every version of software I helped create since XP’s introduction.

I hear you on hesitating to move to another OS, though. You SHOULD be cautious. Here are a couple of things to keep in mind, though.

1) Adobe launched Premiere Pro on XP because Adobe NEEDED the power of that OS to do what they wanted Premiere to do.

You can guess from the recent Soundbooth beta that’s available for WIn XP that their next release of the Production Studio will also support XP. And Mac as long as Apple says they get to…but we’re talking about being forced to move to Vista. I don’t think you will be at this point.

That said, with the optimizations that Adobe has always been about, my guess is that any Adobe apps will be much, much faster on Vista than XP.

2) Even with service packs included, Msoft changes OSes much more slowly than Apple does, and with far less disruption. You HAVE to do it that way when 90%+ of the world is counting on you.

Apple routinely tosses around software and hardware changes because they can. They don’t do public betas like Microsoft does because they don’t want you to know what’s coming, or when it’s coming. They answer to nobody but themselves.

3) Fact: Macs are slower.

I’m not talking about slower processing. Macs do indeed process pretty fast. Their *throughput* is dog-slow, though. Here at The COW, we would need at least 4, and maybe 6, Apple X Serves to simply equal the speed we have on EACH of our AMD servers.

I found the same thing with my OpenGL development. I created a whole series of OpenGL demos on Mac that I had to make 3-4 times longer on PC to compensate for the demos going 3 to 4 times faster, That is, my Mac demos ran so much faster even on older, slower, PCs that you literally couldn’t even see what I was trying to show. And this was with software exclusively developed on Mac with NO optimizations for Windows.

Move to Mac and your OpenGL will be ridiculously slower. Opening apps is slower. Opening windows is slower. Timelines take longer to scroll. Displaying effects changes takes much longer. Literally everything you see on your screen will happen more slowly on Mac.

Think about what that means for editing. Not rendering — both platforms do that just fine — but *editing.* Every part of editing except for IO takes place on screen. Do you really want to move more slowly while you try to earn a living? When you have a choice to move faster?

Editing is about feel. After you’ve worked on Windows, you may never get your feel back on Mac because it will move so much slower than you’re used to.

Now admittedly, I have a seriously muscular box, custom built for me by BOLData Systems. They’ll make you one just like it. It’s built around two Dual Core AMD Opterons, Processor 185 running at 2.61 GHz each. (If you’ve looked around, you know this blows any Intel chipset completely away.) It’s got 3.25 GB of RAM. The video card is an ATI Radeon X1900 with 256 MB VRAM, running my 21″ widescreen desktop at 1680×1050.

I have to tell you that running the Vista beta, this thing SCREAMS. I can’t believe how much faster it is than XP. And as you’ve seen above, I find either XP or Vista dramatically more responsive than even the newest Macs…for less money.

I don’t want to push too hard on the money point though. Regardless of platform, your investment in your computer will be rewarded. Just rewarded MORE if you buy AMD/ATI gear for Windows. 🙂

Before I leave the topic of Vista, I think it’s easy to create firm opinions about it that are less rooted in fact than in the potential disaster that comes with any OS update. There’s HUGE potential for disaster. So while again emphasizing that I agree with caution….

…and as much as I hate to point people out of The COW…I highly recommend the Vista Myths blog at ZD Net. https://blogs.zdnet.com/Bott/

I think you’ll find yourself put at ease, and maybe excited enough to do what I did and download the Vista beta to take it for a spin.

Not recommended for your professional editing box, of course. But that’s one of the cool things about a public beta. You can take it for a jeapordy-free spin.

[ron moody] “Back to the reason for this post. You stated several things in your article, but ended focused on the Mac.”

I apologize for going on at such length to answer your concise, clearly stated question, but I have one additional point to clarify.

While the “about the author” bit at the bottom said that I’m equally adept on Mac and Windows, that’s sort of true on average — I’m actually more adept on Mac (20+ years vs. only 7 on Win), but I vastly, vastly prefer Windows.

Having now removed every Mac from my life that I have the power to remove, I have no doubt that my Windows proficiency will grow fast. Maybe even as fast as my EDITING on Windows. 🙂

A final reminder that in the context of the article as a whole, I came down hard on Apple. The highest grade I gave them was for “playing with themselves.” I was observing that their relentless drive to get every other vendor off the platform will mean they’re the only ones left…but I was also making a rude joke at their expense.

In the end, feel free to disregard everything I say. My experience may not be useful to you, and you may find my conclusions to be simply wrong. I’m used to it 🙂

But really, truly, I wouldn’t wish professional Mac video editing on anyone who has a choice.

My apologies for not making that clearer in the article.

Best,
Tim

[Tim Wilson]