[Jorge Molinari]

Agreed. A good indie film is my goal. Unsolicited advice is many times the best advice, so thanks. Doing the “preview” is one of the approaches I’ve considered. Anyway at this point all I have is the concept. I haven’t even made an outline to begin a 1st draft of the script.

[Jorge Molinari]

Thanks for your insights Bob. Actually in my last two “request for quote”, that is exactly what I did. I’ve quoted closer to where I want to be and in this case lost both gigs. Actually one was a full production, the other was just aerial beauty shots for b-roll, like you are suggesting. No biggie, given my part time circumstance, getting to the market price by losing jobs rather than working cheap is preferable.

I think I see where you’re coming from with regards to doing commercial work; but my ultimate goal is to produce a film someday in the far future. This is how I see it: The closest thing to doing a feature is doing a short. But to do shorts I need to spend money. Commercials are like shorts where I actually get paid. So I get comparable experience to producing a short, and the client pays all the production costs, and I have money left over hopefully pay for my equipment. Ultimately what I want is to get “narrative experience” and $$$ to pay for equipment. So that in a few years from now, I can put back all the experience and $$$ I earned in commercials towards making a feature film. And while I’m well aware my film will be buried under the mountains of indie films that get produced every year, never to be screened, this is something I want to do. Call it a bucket-list type of thing.

[Jorge Molinari]

Thanks Mark. The four aerial shots are a GoPro Hero 3 Black(not the + version) mounted to a DJI Phantom 1 (again, older version) with their Zenmuse H3-2D gimbal. All other shots including the time-lapse are with a BlackMagic Pocket Cinema Camera with a Lumix 12-35/f2.8 lens. I set the GoPro to 1080p, Narrow FOV, and CineRAW format. I find that under good lighting conditions the GoPro at these settings will intercut with the BlackMagic footage very well.

[Jorge Molinari]

Thanks for the advice and critique Mark. What you say about car dealerships being their own special case makes a lot of sense. This spot was a one-man band type of thing. I did concept, production, and post. No stock footage was used.

[Jorge Molinari]

Well that was an interesting reply. The lack of any replies before this one makes me speculate others share your sentiment, but chose to adhere to the “if you can’t say anything nice…” policy. We agree my post validates the OP’s complaints. It has been a concern of mine that during my short stint at this, that I’ve been low-balling and making it worse for the “old guard”. That’s why I was drawn to the title of this thread. I’ve been very diligent at logging my time in my projects. So I know how close or far off I’ve been in my initial estimates. I know how long projects take me, and I know how much I want to charge per hour, what I don’t know is what THE MARKET charges, hence my post. And I’m aware markets vary widely by geography. So my question was a shortcut to gaining knowledge on the market portion of the price equation. I will get to the market price eventually anyway by way of iteration, slowly increasing my rates over time. The longer it takes me to learn the market price, the more jobs I will end up taking at “lower than market” price. The more people there are starting from the bottom, like myself, the lower the “market price” will become. This of course assumes we are talking about people doing quality work.

You seem concerned about competition and it almost sounds like you wish I go out of business. That may happen in many cases (I’ve seen it) but in my case it is not possible because I have an career that is unrelated to video production. And that is why I’m concerned for the guys that make a living off of this, I don’t want the persons doing this on the side to ruin it for them. That is why I relate to the title of this thread. I don’t want to be one of the thousands of wannabes that ruin it.

It is a weird thing, if I wanted to reduce competition, I’d do the opposite of what we see on the internet: I would not teach any video of production skills but publish all the market prices. That way the unskilled generate quotes just as high as the skilled video producers. In this scenario all the jobs go to the skilled. But what we have is the opposite: Tons of free resources to learn the craft and good gear getting cheaper by the minute. The barrier to entry is extremely low, and yet it is very difficult to find information on market prices. So we have:

1. A lot of wannabies doing crappy work, which are not a concern to this discussion.
2. The established “old guard” doing good work and making a living. (With each year getting tougher to make a living from video from what I hear). Because of…
3. Wannabe’s doing good work and charging little, thereby lowering the price of good work. I believe the OP was referring to these guys.

Like you stated, clients will snap #3 all day. As the pool of video producer grows, so does the pool of “good producers”, even if good producers represent only 2% of all producers. So there could be a time when clients are “snapping up” good, cheap work indefinitely. Even if each one of those instances represents a video production startup going out of business. The escalating population of video producers may provide an infinite supply one day. Clients may eventually reach the proverbial “fool ALL that people ALL the time”. This is how it is today in video game development, where almost all games free to download (free for the clients) even though they represent thousands of hours of work by the content creators. And free (getting $0 for your work) is, incredibly, not even the bottom. In acting and screenwriting, the content creators broke the free work barrier and actually PAY to have their scripts read, or audition in front of a supposedly “connected” person. Here the supply is so large there is a cottage industry of unscrupulous “connected” people who do indeed fool “all the people all the time”. Will video production ever get there? I hope not, but I do think sharing price ranges pulls in the opposite direction of racing to the bottom. That was my reasoning in asking the question. Thanks for your reply.

[Jorge Molinari]

I’m glad I found this thread in the COW. I’m a newbie to video production but my work is good enough to get paying clients. I have a full time job and family so I don’t have a lot of time for video production. So which the little time I have to produce videos, I would like to maximize profits (don’t we all). Basically I would love to break even on all the gear and software I’ve purchased (and would like to purchase in the future). Up to this point I’ve done only 2 paying jobs, but I’m almost certain I’m not charging what the videos are worth, and I really don’t want to be that guy that ruins it for the rest of the video producers. So with that said, can people here please quote how much would the charge for this TV spot I delivered a few weeks ago?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jN-qn0Ubgpc

Your $$$ estimates and any additional feedback would be most welcome. What I would REALLY love to know is how much is a commercial like this worth on my local market.

Some contents or functionalities here are not available due to your cookie preferences!

This happens because the functionality/content marked as “Google Youtube” uses cookies that you choosed to keep disabled. In order to view this content or use this functionality, please enable cookies: click here to open your cookie preferences.