[Mark Suszko]

GOOD scan converters are not blurry, BTW. Ours cost six bills when it was new and the output looks very nice. And it is a time saver for us (we do a LOT of powerpoint conversions to video) because instead of tweaking the individual slides we can scale and zoom and position to our heart’s content as if using a DVE, in real time. But there’s more than one way to do many projects, and if Camtasia works for you, fine.

When you want to hold firm on a price for something like this project, the variable that slides up and down is the amount of time and quality applied. Fast-good-cheap, pick any TWO. But ONLY two. You could for example just export the powerpoints as-is to jpegs, throw them down on the FCP timeline and stretch each to fit the narration, done in one hour.

Or, you could re-build each slide from scratch in Photoshop or Live Type at higher, more lovely resolution, with nicer backgrounds, even looped motion backs, add apropriate and tasteful transitions where needed, spend some time and artistic ability to make the slides as clear and functional as possible. That could take two days or more. Dividing the time into the fixed price, on that project, you’re LOSING money.

The question then becomes what quality level (for the price) is “good enough” for the client. Some of you guys that consider yourselves artisans and craftsmen and women would say without equivocation: “never anything but my absolute best.” That’s noble and if you can get away with that on every project, I admire you. In the real world, not everything always has to be performed at Olympian levels, and unless the client is Donald Trump, not every project needs to be gold-plated thruout.

This explains much about Microsoft (grin). The saying goes that Bill Gates never asked for or needed for Windows to be better than mac, just “good enough” at the price point that clients would buy it. A lot. And they did.

And this powerpoint job of yours is the same thing. We have to know is this just a play-it-once and throw-it-away thing for a small internal gathering of captive audience viewers, a “bic lighter” if you will, or is it going to be a sales tool that represents the company’s public face for a long time in the marketplace, or something in-between?

When you know what the stakes are, the budget kind of creates itself. You can ask them for example: “Is this little project supposed to help seal a 20-million dollar multiyear sales deal in China? What percent of that profit are you willing to invest in the successful sale? One percent? Point oh-five percent?” Then if true, you are going to do the work very much differently.

So, for a fixed price of $500 or less, you would do well spending an hour on the thing, total. Would the quality be satisfactory, and do they UNDERSTAND the quality in this situation is set by what they are willing to pay and not by your level of talent? This is a big “if”, to be sure. There is a real danger in being tagged with the “only does really cheap and low-end stuff” label. You have to have your own standards as well, and have thought this thru ahead of time. I hate giving fixed price quotes for anything, especially where there are many unknowns. You always wind up overcharging or undercharging, and neither is good.

Maybe you DO walk away now, saying, “I can deliver you a functional product at that price but it would be bad for my professional reputation to work below my normal quality level just to meet that price.” and there is the chance they’ll call you back or remember you later. It’s happened to me a time or two in my career that I told a client “no, this is not a good or effective project for a video, your money would be better spent doing this as a web page or PDF file”, and they respected me for it, indeed, called me back later to fix what someone else had done at the lower quality level and price.

This powerpoint sounds like one that is low stakes and low expectations, so they want to keep the expense low to match. Maybe your counter-proposal is to charge the $500 you wanted to charge, but tell them that includes your voice-over for free this time, and next time you will have to bill extra for that. You also stipulate that changes will be billed separately after the initial review, so they can’t keep holding off payment while they make you tweak the thing forever and ever. And if you’re going for the fixed price, below a grand, that will be paid in advance, not negotiable. They have that much in the petty cash/rainy day emergency fund.

Finally, two axioms you should have tattooed on the inside of your eyelids so you always have them in front of you during negotiations:

1)”You have to be willing and able to walk away if the deal is not good enough, and really mean it. Even if you are starving. Break this rule, just once, and they forever own you.”

2)”The first person to say a number loses.” Talk first about every dimension of the project BUT the rate, don’t be afraid to hold off on the quote until you can crunch the numbers; this is being professional about it. You are getting to a consensus about the values and scope of the project and making sure everybody has the same expectations. Then see rule 1 again.

Best of luck, do tell us how this turns out.

Mark Suszko

“Oh, you wanted to RECORD that?”

[Mark Suszko]

There’s also a litle trick to that, Walter, might come in handy some day with a state or local government. Many of them have adopted “prompt payment” legislation which forces the payment staff to put a priority on any bill that gives a discount for prompt payment, over one that doesn’t.

So, if you mark your bill with a prominent notice: “Discount of 5% off total if paid within 10 days of receipt”, you get to go to the front of the line. Might shave ten to eighty days off the wait to get paid. Or not, because even cutting in line may not help if the line is really long.

Ask your doctor, er, accountant, if prompt payment discounts are right for YOU.

“Oh, you wanted to RECORD that?”

[Mark Suszko]

You didn’t say what the extra language was. I will guess Spanish. Spanish is hard to jam into the same time limit as English because of its construction; it just takes longer to say certain things in Spanish. If you press the voiceover artist to speed up their reading to fit the English time, it often becomes either unintelligible or cartoony, like the old John Fuschida Fedex commercials, or Hong Kong Giant Monster/Kung-Fu movies.

I have had this problem myself, doing 30-second spots as well as longer-form training videos. The best strategy is to decide on additional languages in pre-production. Then shoot and edit with more deliberate space, strategic pauses, and interstitial scenes like cut-aways to non-person views or objects with variable lengths to create a “pocket” in the running time where a Spanish translation can “catch up” to the English content. So don’t perform or edit the dialog too tight, and that may be all you need.

If I get this extra language requirement after the fact, I set up ADR sessions where I run one scene at a time in a loop and let the translator hear and see it as they read their Spanish script, and we keep re-doing each looped set of thirty or so seconds at a time until we’re happy with the timing, expression, and accuracy.

You sometimes run into controversy doing Spanish tracks because there is no clear prefferred standard as far as I know; some clients want a “pure” European/Castillian Spanish, some want Puerto Rican Spanish, Some want Cuban-Spanish or Columbian-Spanish, etc. The same as there are many choices of British and American dialects, where a Bronx sound is not the same as an Appalachian twang or Texas drawl or Valley girl lilt. There’s more that goes into this than many folks know or appreciate.

Using audio DAW’s like Adobe Audition, you can artificially accellerate the foreign dialog a few percent while keeping the pitch normal, and this may also buy you just enough margin to fit. Otherwise, and I have had this happen, the translator has to re-write it shorter, on the spot, usually without client approval, to make the time. This is extra work and basically you are asking someone to do script writing for no extra pay, with possibly questionable results. Not the best or most cost-efficient approach.

The next thing to do, which I what I have started telling my clients to do, is just buckle down and hire bilingual actors and just shoot each scene both ways from the beginning. You get a much higher quality and no timing issues. This also avoids the very troubling issue of having one translator do all the characters in a video regardless of gender. Imagine how you’d like an English translation of a movie done like that. Mel Blanc could do it, but he’s dead. If you want to show you respect that audience and want to connect with them, the translation should be accessible and not an insulting afterthought. A crummy job might do more harm than not translating at all.

This bilingual shooting technique is actually a very old concept: I tell my clients that Laurel & Hardy HATED the idea of foreign voice translators interpreting their work and their voices, so they budgeted extra time to re-shoot a few of their movies in Spanish, with them reading their own lines phonetically off cue cards. Some Bela Lugosi vampire movies were also shot like this: an entire second cast came in overnight to use the same standing sets and shoot a Spanish version simultaneous with the English production. Keeping this organized is not that hard if you use even simple slates and two scripts. I can handle it, and my language experience consists of a barely-passing “D” in high school Spanish. Which somehow makes ME the office translation expert, go figure!:-) I can follow enough to find and keep my place in the script, and if you edit long enough, and have a musical ear, it’s actually not that hard to work in a Spanish, for me, anyway.

Your final option is skip bad voice-over and go with closed-captioning in Spanish instead. No accent or dialect issues, no timing problems, easy to add to existing programming.

As far as you being handed a CD of the language reads and told to “make it fit”, this is the most unprofessional and technically difficult way of going about the project and I’m sorry you got stuck with that. The only way that really works is if the translator sat with a copy of the master video and read to fit in the first place. Just reading Spanish into a mic without seeing the timing is a recipe for disaster, as you’ve probably experienced. Try the time-compression features of a DAW to make that easier, but next time insist on one of the other alternatives I mentioned.

Buena Suerte, Amigo. 🙂

“Oh, you wanted to RECORD that?”

[Mark Suszko]

When you hand them the HD tape, attach a coupon for a “returning customer’s discount” on burning it to Blue-Ray HD DVD for them. Might help convince them to come back.

“Oh, you wanted to RECORD that?”

[Mark Suszko]

One other consideration: if you bill consistently for render time at whatever rate you set, occasionally “comping” the render time as “added value” under special circumstances can be a powerful tool in dealing with a client that’s on the fence, without dropping your regular rate and billing.

I come from an analog linear background initially, where machine time of any sort ties up the next customer in line, preventing more profit opportunities. So I would always bill *something* for renders or encodes, though it would not be the same rate as active editing work.

“Oh, you wanted to RECORD that?”

[Mark Suszko]

Good suggestion. One of the things a “civilian” faces is unrealistic expectations coupled with an under-appreciation for the time and money used to get a result. Before you hit him with the numbers, maybe it would be helpful to show him some other “similar” product with the sound off and reel off what the price tag is (ballpark it) for what he’s seeing on the screen: what the lighting cost to buy or rent, the kind of camera and it’s day rate, the hours it might take to get a specific shot, how much a dolly shot on track in a semi-circle around Billy Blanks or whatever adds to the cost… you get the idea.

High-end sales pitches use this for everything from homes to cars to wines and fine watches, telling you what’s going into the product that justifies the value put on it. The house and car analogies I find are particularly well-received: “two homes both keep the rain off your head, one is twenty grand and the other a million, what’s the difference? The DETAILS.” ” A Yugo and a Ferrari both get you across town in the same amount of time at the speed limit. Why is the Ferrari so much more expensive?” So, unck, what kind of car are we shopping for here? A Yugo? A malibu? A Caddy? You tell me what you can afford and what you want out of it, I’ll see if I can find a way to make the two match. But remember the golden triangle: Fast, cheap, good, pick any two but ONLY two.”

“Oh, you wanted to RECORD that?”

[Mark Suszko]

Ask three people this and you’ll get four answers, and every one of them will be right. For that person.

Is this client very hands-on? Are they really doing the lion’s share of the organizing of the project and all you’re doing is shooting to their schedule and editing to their preset list? Or on the opposite extreme, did they give you a sketch on a napkin and tell you to figure out all the rest? (Really happened to me once, client said it was the best work I’d ever done for them)

The amount of hours you will have to put in on those two scenarios could vary widely. Once you know how detailed or un-detailed the client is, you can try to match them with the detail level of your estimate. The more you know about the project, of course, the better you can refine the numbers.

On the skimpy side, the best you might be able to say is: “We estimate N number of shoot days and editing at between X and Y number of days, based on Y number of days, the day rate will be this and the total will be THAT. The shooting package will run Z amount for the N days we estimate this will take. Additional rain days for shooting will be billed at N rate if needed. We would need your approval to do and bill additional editing work beyond Y days. Terms are one third of the total minimum estimate upon signature of the contract, payable immediately. One third to be paid upon viewing the first cut of the edited product, final amount outstanding to be paid in full upon approval of the final cut master and duplication order.”

You name the deliverables, any specific items that make this bid distinct, like use of a jib, and the due dates for each. That kind of wording tells the client you’ve done enough homework to narrow it down to min/max range, and he knows what the costs will be if something goes over. But it doesn’t give away the store and it remains flexible should situations change. It doesn’t give a competitor too much information that he could use to undercut you. If he says he can underbid you, you can point to your bid and say: “well, he’s cutting costs because he’s not giving you the high angle jib shot you specified, if that quality touch is still important to you, he’ll have to up his price to give it to you”. It also protects both sides in that, if the project has to die at some point before completion, you get paid for what you’ve done to that point and they don’t spend more than that.

I would not tell the client your hourly rate or break out every little roll of gaffer tape and clothes pin bag, etc. on the estimate unless they bent your arm about it. Because the first thing a grinder will want to do is tear thru your detailed breakout sheet and question every item until you want to stick a fork in his eye just to stop the conversation. Also, some of your pricing info may be proprietary, like your discount rate on blank shooting stock or the sweetheart deal on the jib rental for that sweeping closing scene they want. Don’t give away all your secrets. That’s one of the places your markup and profit come from.

“Oh, you wanted to RECORD that?”

[Mark Suszko]

I think there is something to be said for the contrarian; the person who zigs when the rest of the crowd zags. Plus, I have to admit I’ve always been intimidated by the coasts and the enormous over-abundance of competition and talent there. In that vein, while I know that the conventional wisdom and most popular opinion here will probably still be “go to LA”, I just want to point out that there is no law that says all film production can only be IN LA.

You kind of insinuated you want an internship in theatrical films of the big studio type.

That’s all fine but of course the competition for that is brutal, more so since the strike.

What if you could be a bigger fish in a slightly smaller pond? Like Florida, North Carolina, Detroit Michigan and Chicago Illinois?

I’m thinking, working thru advertising agencies in the Midwest, you might be able to find an internship with the agency using a small studio doing commercials on film, or training or marketing or educational films. A perusal of the various state’s film production guides as a search of internships at ad agencies could turn up opportunities that the thundering herd have ignored on their stampede to NY or LA. And being an intern on these smaller projects means you will probably have more hands-on and higher-level experiences than you would in a comparable coastal situation. Another possibility is to get an internship working with LA film crews shooting in YOUR area on location. Chicago would be a good place to try for this, google the Illinois and Chicago film producer’s guide books/production resource guides. Also the FIlm 411 series of guide books.

I didn’t get into film, but here’s the super-short version of my internship experience, it might inspire you. The rest of the class got internships in all the big Chicago “O&O” stations, the flagships for CBS, NBC, ABC, etc. I did not get as lucky, I thought. Due to living and travel situations, I took an internship at a suburban cable outlet closer to home.

Comes the end of the summer, the class gathers to compare notes. The student that worked at WBBM, the CBS affiliate, had worked under Bill Kurtis and had a nice letter of introduction/recommendation to show at job interviews. And nothing else.

Because of union rules, she had not handled any production gear, had not shot, edited, etc. anything. She’d been a glorified temp secretary and learned to make copies, faxes and a damnfine cup of cappuccino. ( had to look that word up, I don’t drink it or make it) The others from the big agencies and stations had similar reports: tantalizing glimpes into the inner workings and great contacts, but no hands-on skills to make them marketable or immediately employable.

My turn to report: I was line producer for a PM-Magazine type show at the non-union cable place (Continental Cablevision of Elmhurst), I was responsible for everything to do with each Wednesday’s show (other interns each handled a different day episode each week). I researched and picked topics, found and pre-interviewed guests, wrote scripts, assistant-directed and TD’d sometimes, ran crew positions for the other day’s shows, I went out with gear and a crew and lit, shot, edited, and reported my own stand-ups and VSOT interview packages. I worked in and with the multicam remote truck… basically hands-on everything but the satellite dish, which was “holy”. Had practice shooting multicam sports, variety shows, parades. I had a long list of tech gear I was qualified to run, and best of all, a reel of the actual aired programs I had made myself. This is my 24th or so year of making a living in the business, nothing too fancy, but successful in it’s own way. All built on those initial skills.

Small can be beautiful. So maybe find a small documentary maker in the midwest and spend the summer shooting film of Eagles, or work on shooting second unit for car commercials, or for location spots for “E.R.” when they come up in the summer, things like that. The skills are all the same, only the perceived glamor may be missing.

But you might find a career of your dreams in the unlikeliest of places. So look where nobody else is looking, is my suggestion.

“Oh, you wanted to RECORD that?”

[Mark Suszko]

“Commensurate with international rates” sounds like corporate-speak for: “third-world peasant labor pricing”.:-)

The writing never gets proper respect, and yet without it, all the other money and time spent on the project is usually a total waste. When the corporate guy complains that this is too much money for scribblings on paper, ask them what the final result of the project is supposed to be. Is it to increase sales by three million dollars? If that’s so, what percentage of that number are they willing to invest to OBTAIN that result? Would you spend one percent of that three mil to bring it in? Two percent?

You could try the Writer’s Guild web sites East or West, depending which side of the Mississippi River you live on as one resource for information on current rates.

I also suggest you get to Amazon.com and order a used copy of John Morley’s ” Scriptwriting for High-Impact Videos” right away, this will be an invaluable resource for you. It is for corporate scriptwriters what MacKee and Syd Field are for Screenwriters.

Much of this kind of work in corporate is work-for-hire, so you can bill on a basis of time and materials, i.e. an hourly rate for the meetings and research you have to do, plus a rate for the actual writing time, and your markup, boils down to a final package price, which usually but not always includes some plus like “Includes one free re-write upon review of first draft”.

I would see if I could bill in thirds or at least halves, the break point being getting to the creative treatment stage. If your writing process survives to an approval of the treatment, the hardest work is done and the rest is really pretty easy and nearly foolproof. So I would put my emphasis on getting to that point.

“Oh, you wanted to RECORD that?”

[Mark Suszko]

On Windows a lot of people swear by Camtasia or Camtesia, I can never rememeber how they spell it. Beware, these things make HUGE files.

“Oh, you wanted to RECORD that?”