[Mads Nybo jørgensen]

Nice website and clear contact details.

However, the COW job board is a much better place to advertise jobs.

All the Best
Mads

@madsvid, London, UK
Check out my other hangouts:
Twitter: @madsvid
https://mads-thinkingoutloud.blogspot.co.uk

[Mads Nybo jørgensen]

Hey Jensen,

If you’ve read any of Bob’s other posts, you’ll have noticed that he was being nice to you 😉

However, by my observations Media Production is more and more a freelancers/contractors game and no one wants to pay you a full-time wage, because they simply don’t know when their next job will arrive.

You can either settle in at corporate and low-end broadcast and be the master of all trades and none – i.e do camera, editing, producing etc.

Or specialize in doing one thing very well and become the top person to go to in your field – this approach requires you to make big sacrifices and potentially move to where the jobs are. Many people has failed in doing the specialist thing, simply because they didn’t build themselves a network of like minded professionals who were able to pass on their details and recommendations.

So you have to either network for business, or colleagues – either way, craigslist and the other job forums is the last place you want to look for work at.

All the Best
Mads

@madsvid, London, UK
Check out my other hangouts:
Twitter: @madsvid
https://mads-thinkingoutloud.blogspot.co.uk

[Mads Nybo jørgensen]

Hey Greg,

Difficult questions to answer as in that I would normally charge a client good money for that kind of consultancy. However, as we’re all learning and helping one another, let me give you a few opinions as to how I would approach the job 🙂

4,000 clips is a lot of masters to deal with. And if they’re all one take with no cuts, then you might be better off not going to FCP at all.

Start at point of the shoot: SXS cards is just not a viable option – expensive and slow, as a result useless to mange. Instead capture straight to a raid protected system, with a real-time “back-up” to a portable drive to go every night to Post.

Alternatively, consider doing a dual record at studio, one with clean blue screen and the other with the keyed on background. An Autocue (tele-prompter) might save you a day or many in the edit. And if you can do the key on location, you might save a lot of FCP render time.

This is all depending on how much editing is required. But a cluster of Avid’s or Quantel’s or Smoke’s desktop off-lines. With one real-time on-line system in the middle, all working of the same SAN, could save you time and money. 1 on-line editor is likely to be cheaper than 10 of them with their own home system to pay for.

You could offer the freelancer $150 a finished edit (= $75/hour = 4 edits/day = $600/day depending on how good and fast the editor is). Don’t forget your own mark-up + insurance + hiring in additional help to cope with potential “slackers”.

Do consider the cost of physically distributing the rushes with associated content and getting the masters return – you might be better off hiring a “factory” in Mumbai or similar to out-source all your post to.

Subtitles can always be added. A specialized agency might be faster and cheaper for this job.

Hope this helps?

All the Best
Mads

@madsvid, London, UK
Check out my other hangouts:
Twitter: @madsvid
https://mads-thinkingoutloud.blogspot.co.uk

[Mads Nybo jørgensen]

Hey Mark,

I’m with the other guys on this, “lending” your insurance out is only going to end in tears and potentially put you in jail.

I’ve just been through getting insurance for my production business and it was not an easy process. But I would not have gone on location without it.

In the UK we have 1 day insurance offers for smaller productions starting from £140/Day.

Some hire companies will also offer it on their kit – but this doesn’t cover employees/contractors and public liability.

Your alternative is that your friend hires you to do the production – they still keep the client contact and you won’t violate your insurance. You could also hire your friend and do the job through your business.

But you do have to ask yourself; if your friend can’t afford the insurance, are they in reality undercutting yours and other professional companies prices? And do you want to be instrumental in this unfair competition practice?

All the Best
Mads

@madsvid, London, UK
Check out my other hangouts:
Twitter: @madsvid
https://mads-thinkingoutloud.blogspot.co.uk

[Mads Nybo jørgensen]

Hey Greg,

Sounds exciting.

Getting 10 editors should not be a problem for you. There are plenty of agencies around. At the throughput that you want to achieve, my advice would be for you to negotiate a price on each video, rather than a day-rate.

However, your bigger issue will be data management for recording, delivery to editor and master to client. Not to forget Quality Control either, as in every editor has their own benchmark, so you need to stipulate yours.

All the Best
Mads

@madsvid, London, UK
Check out my other hangouts:
Twitter: @madsvid
https://mads-thinkingoutloud.blogspot.co.uk

[Mads Nybo jørgensen]

Hey Aaron,

Please don’t take offence, but I think that you need a bit of tough love.

That shooter is your client. Without that shooter, you might very well be getting no work at all. Best case scenario is that the shooter is the CEO’s grand niece or neighbours son, worst case is that your client fire that person and hire someone full-time who is also very good at editing…

It is very true that 90% of corporate post production in the low and mid budget range is to save someone else’s work – you just need to learn how to offer it as a service, and make good money from it.

With regards to your show-reel; you should not be reliant on one client only to supply material for this bit of your marketing. If you can’t get any shooting jobs, go and shoot your own corporate video. Stand-ups, interviews and good composited pack-shots are always in demand – and once you have your show-reel, the most obvious place to share it: With your existing clients. They might even hire you to train the in-house shooter, or ask you to do the more important communications. In any case, there are normally better budgets in consulting and producing, than there is in shooting and editing.

I hope you don’t mind me making this next observation: If you click through on your name to your COW profile, you’ll immediately notice a number of posts about you not being happy about your job or your employer or your time off – this is all too much negative stuff.

Take it from someone who has been many times on that side of the fence and start with cherishing what you have, and consider how you can positively improve on what must be an amazing situation; you have a wife, a beautiful kid about to arrive imminently and work coming in – what is there not to like about this?

All the Best
Mads

@madsvid, London, UK
Check out my other hangouts:
Twitter: @madsvid
https://mads-thinkingoutloud.blogspot.co.uk

[Mads Nybo jørgensen]

Let’s all give a warm welcome to Cinimage, who has been a trusted member of the Creative Cow’s community since yesterday.

To you the potential client of Cinimage, I would like to offer you a free professional comunications consultancy service that makes sure that your product will not offend your peers and that the message will be that of enticing your customer to call you.

All the Best
Mads

@madsvid, London, UK
Check out my other hangouts:
Twitter: @madsvid
https://mads-thinkingoutloud.blogspot.co.uk

[Mads Nybo jørgensen]

Hey Kelli,

How much damage did you do to that truck?

If you are a PAYE employee and if you were directed by your boss/employer to borrow that truck in order for you to be able to carry out your work, then the issue of insurance is with your employer.

What is the client saying about the issue?
And did they hand over the keys for you to drive the truck? As in you didn’t take it without their permission?

Do keep in mind that your boss is 1) likely to be embarrassed about the damage to a clients vehicle 2) Might be under-insured by not having insurance for third-party vehicles etc.

Cars and Trucks always seems to be the problem in the video and film industry. Often an employer will prefer the “employee” (freelancer/contract worker) to provide their own vehicle, and they’ll also like if said employee work long hours, which has in many case had fatal outcomes. Whenever it has come up in the past I’ve always made sure that my crew was insured to drive the vehicle and that they didn’t work themselves into a state where they might fall asleep behind the wheel.

You need to ask your employer as to why he didn’t made sure that you were insured to drive that truck?

As a last note: In the future you need yourself to make sure that you have been insured to drive the vehicle before putting the key in the ignition. As in that your boss might be liable, but that won’t help you when the Police gets called out to an accident…

All the Best
Mads

@madsvid, London, UK
Check out my other hangouts:
Twitter: @madsvid
https://mads-thinkingoutloud.blogspot.co.uk

[Mads Nybo jørgensen]

Hey Ala,

I don’t know where you are based?
1st priority for expanding your business, is to make sure that people can find you 😉

Business plans are a wonderful thing to show to the bank and people who think that they will like to invest in your new company – however, they are also a big time waster created just for the purpose of satisfying your own vanity – sadly, I am speaking from experience here…

If your turn-over currently is below the local VAT (sales tax) threshold – don’t bother.

If you are still serious about building a company to take over the world with – good.

Read this free book first: https://www.sethgodin.com/sg/docs/bootstrap.pdf – it told me everything that I needed to know, five years too late. But I am certainly going to use it next time around.

The only two people that you need on board is a good honest book-keeper and a great accountant. Make sure that you agree with both: How much they’ll cost you? and that they don’t work more hours than is needed.

All other “employees” will follow as either freelancers/contractors, or if there is enough work for an assistant, hire one of those. But NOT until you have the cash in the bank. Don’t be afraid of making strategic partnerships where you with like minded people share office space/telephone answering service/cleaner etc.

With regards to finance for the venture – only spend money on marketing and keeping the clients happy. (Do create a marketing plan)

At some stage your accountant will talk to you about forming a company to protect yourself from liabilities and make better tax savings. Only do this if you can afford to pay him in cash up front and if you’re actually going to save some money on doing it.

Bottom line: Keep your clients happy, Make profit!
You make profit by selling your products at a higher price than it cost you to produce them – don’t forget to factor in all the small things such as paper clips etc. Every company in this sector is different, so you’re better off working out your own margins based on your cost base.

If you have too many clients, you could be better off by raising your prices by 50-100%, rather than expanding – as shockingly as that might sound, do try it – I’m sure that you’ll be pleasantly surprised by how many of your clients will accept the extra cost in return for good work.

Do not waste your time with a business plan unless you’re looking for at least $2 Million in capital (That is the point where the bankers and investors will entertain you, and do so with a big smile)

Enjoy!

All the Best
Mads

@madsvid, London, UK
Check out my other hangouts:
Twitter: @madsvid
https://mads-thinkingoutloud.blogspot.co.uk

[Mads Nybo jørgensen]

Youtube – we can’t live with it and we can’t live without it. It didn’t start cheap amateur video for the masses, that was done by all those cheap digital video cameras and editing software that eventually also found its way in corporate and broadcast video. Maybe the story telling style of corporate videos have changed, but not likely to be because of Youtube.

However, it did offer an easy to access platform for sharing all those millions of hours of home made footage and as the voyeurist in all humans, we started watching all (or just a tiny bit) of all that footage.

Professional marketeers soon caught on as they realised that Youtube is one of the, if not the biggest, search engine of all times – hence why we can’t live without it.

So for the professional video maker, where does the money come from in a world of free video?

Keep on giving it away, it is the only way Youtube users knows how to watch video. Either earn your money from brands and corporates that needs exposure, and want to have something that communicates their quality of brand better, than your amateur video look.

Or produce a programme that will bring enough advertising in as a source of revenue for Google to pay you for the effort – it is likely that you need a million views plus, before making a profit. An interesting observation is that Youtube (Google) recently are starting to reach out with cash for programme makers to use. But is this and your advert funded videos, actually is close to the amount of money Google makes? As in that if Google takes 95% of the revenue, the good producers will seek to pendle their goods elsewhere with networks that appreciates them more.

Vimeo has been mentioned. But both Lovefilm (Amazon), iTunes and Netflix are getting very aggressive and will increasingly be using their rental numbers to know what programming to produce to keep viewers using their platforms. Once the likes of HBO, SKY, Tesco and Wallmart etners this game, then the true value battle of the viewer
will begin – which is that (lousy or not) content will always remain the king.

Just my 5p 🙂

All the Best
Mads

@madsvid, London, UK
Check out my other hangouts:
Twitter: @madsvid
https://mads-thinkingoutloud.blogspot.co.uk