[Mark Suszko]

Mom, stop posting here, geez.

“Oh, you wanted to RECORD that?”

[Mark Suszko]

While you massage the keys of your Bowmar Brain, two little bits more, and I swear, I’m done:

If the 1982 rule of thumb still holds for the rate being a thousand per finished minute, why don’t all 30-second spots cost $500?:-)

And, one more argument to make during the budget meeting, after you ask them outright what they can afford for this, and they say they don’t want to commit to a figure, or say something really impractical an unrealistic. If this was a commercial 30-second ad, or a training video or a promo of some sort, ask them this:

“On this new doodad you’re advertising, how much are you forecasting or planning to make on it this fiscal year? A million? Five? What percentage of that amount are you willing to spend to insure that you make that sales figure? One perent? Two? Would you invest five percent of the ultimate value of this account to make sure we sell all of it? And how much IS five percent of five million dollars? So why are we quibbling about the gorram cost of the #$#% tape stock?” (or insert whatever line item they are giving you a hard time about)

Hm?

Since it’s a PSA, you generally cannot point to a sales profit like in that “percentage of the Big Nut” argument. But you CAN point to things like: “this spot should drive 50x more people to the xyz web site each week”, or “This spot should result in x number of new donors or volunteers or voters calling the toll-free number”. Those are quantifiable results, a metric you can get a grip on. You can say that the effective spot will generate x number of new site visitors at a cost per thousand of Y, measured by site logs after the first day of the spots airing. Is that CPM in the ballpark or not? While you can never guarantee viewer response to that level of exactitude, you can certainly hit a range, and with that, compare the cost of the spot to other media like print ads, radio, etc.

“Oh, you wanted to RECORD that?”

[Mark Suszko]

Free type answers:
“It costs what it costs.”
“How much you got?”
“How long is a ball of string?”
“How much should a house cost?”
“What should you pay for a car?”

This whole thing is madness. I can’t give you a figure because I don’t work the same way as you. Where I work, most costs are comped because of the setup; clients only pay for expendables, the dubs, postage, any out of the ordinary expenses for travel, props, hotel or per diem for overnights, etc. The most expensive 30 second TV spot I shot this year, with a rented grip truck with Matthewrs dolly, jib, HMI’s and a P2 camera rental, and a full crew of seven and cast of six, shooting seven setups for 4 hours, ran the clients in the neighborhood of 900-1200 bucks, but I average between twenty dollars and fifty or so for most of my spots in terms of billables, and that’s mostly for tape, to generate spots that a comparable outside outfit in Chicago would charge roughly $2K-$3k for. I once won a local award for a no-shoot all graphics and sound design spot that cost me five dollars to make, beating five others and one by a friend that cost him over a grand. The facility and staff run off revolving funds and inter-departmental fund transfers… Monopoly money, if you will. In this way we make the entire enterprise affordable to our client agencies where it would otherwise be impractical. This is of course useless to your calculations.

Don’t base your bid on what the Famous Big Agency who’s name sounds like someone falling down a flight of stairs will charge. That’s a ridiculous mismatch. Instead:

Ask yourself, after factoring all the operating costs info you have on the project, do you think you can shoot the raw takes in two, four, six hours? Days? How many days do you figure you’ll take to edit the first one, including the time spent logging and digitizing and otherwise prepping the footage first? We already discussed how you calculate your rate way earlier. Rate times hours, baby, and depending how confident you are, a pad on top of that for safety or extra profit. You generate a figure YOU can live with, THEN hope the guy with the checkbook goes for it. If the Big Guys are still billing on a cost-plus system, you are going to spank them every time. Cost-plus offers no incentive to economize anywhere, and it typically jacks up the price of a comparable spot by twenty percent or more. The more the spot costs, the more an agency using cost-plus charges on top of that higher cost, in an unending spiral.

Sometimes, you can get the client to plain tell you what he can afford, and if it is at all congruent with some version of reality, then you conform the production to the available budget and most everyone is happy or at least equally UNhappy. Explain the Golden Triangle: you can have it FAST, CHEAP, and GOOD, but you only get to pick TWO of those three…. any two, but ONLY two. Anyone promising all three is a liar. When you get a response from the client on which two legs of that triangle they are wanting, you adjust the quality level or the delivery date (I’m saying it that way because 99 percent of the time, they will say low cost is important, leaving you only the other two dimensions to work with).

A rule of thumb my old boss has used since the 80’s, and that some people hold to today, is to charge a grand per finished minute for something pedestrian and uncomplicated. I feel the fact that this rule may still work at times is that it’s purely a coincidence. An ABC-roll Beta-SP to 1-inch edit bay in 1982 costing 3/4 of a million can be beaten today in most respects of time, quality, and sophistication by a NLE system costing under two grand in somebody’s second bedroom, or even on a #$%@#% laptop in his car… If we’re still charging the same grand a finished minute today, where is the difference going, into the editor’s pocket? Or is it reflected in the shorter time to completion or higher quality or sohistication of effects? I don’t have an answer, only more questions.

It costs what it costs.

Calculate the costs best as you can, and pitch them your numbers. Be ready to defend or explain each line item, have alternative suggestions ready for anything that is questioned, use the Treatment document and boards as the guide for why each choice has been made.

There is NO secret decoder ring, every spot is hand-wrought by an artisan(s) and they charge what they are worth for their time.

And who is this “Mike” guy!?!?!

[Mark Suszko]

“subject to review by a committee of clients”. Well, there is probably the number-one problem you’ll face. If you use the treatment process as the guiding document, you will save a lot of trouble because you run the treatment past these people and get them up to speed before a dime is spent. If they are going to kill or change an idea for any reason, let it be there, on paper, where a change will not cost wasted time and money later. They cannot point to your finished work and claim to be surprised at anything about it, since they knew everything that was coming and had signed off on it first. To protect their interests and yours, insist on this step in pre-production. Go as far as making a photomatic prototype of the typical spot in the series to make sure it is understood.

(Even that step can be dangerous, some clients have been known to be so thick, they cancelled a spot at the photomatic stage becasue they believed they were looking at the final air cut of a finished spot, Conversely, some have been so stupid, they liked the photomatic rough cut so much they insisted on using it as the master.)

Some factors in your planning for the six spots:

Travel. Customs probs. Weather/humidity. Breakdowns with a delay in getting repaired or backup gear/supplies in. Talent that needs more coaching than planned. Over three weeks, somebody WILL get sick. If you could give more details about the project, we could make more detailed suggestions.

[Mark Suszko]

Well some folks use a sort of template approach, extrapolating from the knowns and from previous experience, but if you’ve never done a particular kind of project you just really don’t know, that in this kind of situation a flat fee will KILL you.

When you’re operating mostly in the dark, it can be useful to set certain benchmarks or progress points, and budget to that. Make one as a test case, then use that experience as a rule of thumb for the rest, if they are all of a similar type.

But as you yourself pointed out, documentary, music video, PSA’s all are all very different and run under different assumptions and rules.

What I will say from my experience is, if it is a program that *can* be scripted, then a professionally done Creative Treatment and then a Script derived from it will be the key to unravelling much of the mysteries. As a planning document, the Treatment lays out your needs for locations, sets, effects, actors, graphics, everything. It’s not the script, but a blueprint, a beat by beat description of the settings, characters, action and kinds of things to be said, but no actual dialog, along with explanations of the rationale and the styles needed, and more. With a good treatment, any writer that’s half good can create the actual dialog script with ease. The Treatment stage is where you pitch all the ideas and see which the client likes enough to pay for.

From there, you usually build your strip boards… a kind of mutant version of a Gannt (or is it Pertt?) chart, calendar, and spreadsheet. Whatever you call it or however you create it, it breaks down the script into preproduction days, shoot days, post production days, etc. and by this process of dividing and sub-dividing the tasks into tinier and tinier slices, you get to a point where you can apply rules of thumb and standards to define the slices and generate actual figures for the hours needed. Hours times rate equals budget figures.

In the case of your 6 PSA’s, in the treatment process you work out if they are six chapters of one ongoing story, six variations of one theme, six completely stand-alone pieces all radically different from each other (maybe like the various Geico campaigns all running simultaneously these days). Obviously, just from that much information, you can tell quite a bit about the general shape and cost of things. If they are all variations on one theme, it’s likely you are going to share the same location and maybe talent for every one of them. This may mean a shorter number of shoot days, though probably very intense ones. Travel will be up to five times less using just one location, but overtime may go up. What if the spots are all stock footage-derived? Then no talent or transport or camera rentals, but a budget for aquiring the stock and rights, and maybe more editing time will be needed…

All kinds of numbers start to suggest themselves once a few assumptions and specs get laid down. When you know your talent and their capabilities, you get some idea of how long they might take to nail a scene, times how many scenes, etc. and generate some time figures. Better actors cost more but save time and give a higher quality. A shorter number of shoot days reduces the studio and gear rental costs too. if you can nail six spots in one day’s rental, you’ve saved hundreds if not thousands right there. If the notice is short, or the actors are not as good and maybe need prompters, that’s another expense and more time to calculate.

On the back end, in editing, what can you anticipate for working on six variations of one basic template spot? Obviously, after the graphics for the first spot are made, subsequent variations might become super-fast to update. Same with music cues, etc. The first of a series is always a little longer getting done, you’re always learning and perfecting as you go. I once had to do a run of very simple PSA’s, all very templatized,( a simple stand-up, guy reading off a prompter for 28 seconds, fade up, drop a third for ten seconds, cover with a page of chyron at the 17 seconds mark, fade to black at end, add music on a second pass) with mostly changes to lower thirds and slates, but it was something like five spots each of twenty differnet guys in a weekend. I got to where by spot number 20, I could cut the whole thing in one continuous AB roll take, once I could find the right take of the actor, and create each spot in about three-four minutes, but it still took everything I had to make the Monday morning deadline. Were they great? Was I proud of the work? meh… it was exacly what the clients asked for and wanted and it was on time. But it was not art.

How well do you know yourself as the editor? If it’s kind of cut and dried work, mostly straightforwards cuts of the best takes of scripted stuff, and you’re mostly making fine adjustments to timing and the like, how fast can you throw things together? Not to scare you, but Walter Murch said that on Apocolypse Now, it was considered a good day if they make one single cut in a day. That is, going thru five or more camera angles of the same shot, and all the takes of that shot, cutting something together, then viewing it and viewing it in context of all the shots that came before it, then approving the cut or udoing the splice and trying something else… to wind up with one CUT per day that stayed and was approved, was considered amazing progress. I bet you’re going to be a little faster than that, but by how much? Do you build in x number of hours for experimentation when the script is not very specific, or the shots in the can don’t match the storyboards and you must improvise or repair? What if they throw changes at you in post? Are the compositing or other special effects tasks things you’re very comfortable with? What if they are farmed out to someone else? What’s the deadline for the project to air, and is there enough time to dot he thing right the firt time, is there some pad to use in perfecting the final 10 percent of the thing, or is the timetable sucha rush you’ll have to pull double shifts to make the fedex drop in time? For which you should be charging a higher rate…?

And I thought quadratric equations were tough in school!

I think the thing you can take away from my rant here is, anybody who can just drop a flat figure on you for a job as potentially complicated as this, without doing the homework, is foolish or crazy. or so experieced he/she probably doesn’t need the work anymore.

[Mark Suszko]

This would be in a 30-second PSA. Can you show an actual, graphic fatality, and under what circumstances. More to the point, would any station air it?

[Mark Suszko]

With respect, I have to disagree in that the relative power of the very high-end suite still counts for little if the raw material you give the “person” to edit is itself garbage. The original question was not about a Henry vs. a Flame, after all. In the mid-range, the suites are roughly comparable for quality and speed and features, though each one boasts it’s own specialities. You can make just as good a product with any of them or none of them, but it’s not the tool, it’s the talent and training that makes it happen.

[Mark Suszko]

“Sorry, Mark. It’s not always about the “man” doing the work.”

Says someone with a genderless handle, so how can I tell? 🙂 If you’re proud to be a woman editor, let the world know you by your name, I say.

I was using the word “man” in the more generic sense, but really, I think most of us reading knew that. Just this week I wrote to someone a long dissertation on the early history of women editors in film, I appreciate them just fine, so please, I’ve had a tough week, and am not appreciating the humor, can we agree not go there again today with a sidebar on femenism applied to common usage and grammar, as it is an inapropriate interruption and detour of this discussion.

[Mark Suszko]

Anybody got a link to a TV station’s own S&P rules?

[Mark Suszko]

The same camera footage on a Smoke workstation and a FCP Express is going to look… the same. It is not about the software, it’s about the wetware: The guy shooting and editing it, and what’s between his ears.

No 3-d animation software has a button that says: “make dinosaur”. Neither does any NLE have a button that says “make this video stink/not stink”.

Your quality starts at aquisition. A quality script, delivered by a quality talent. A properly lit scene, with attractive composition, a BIG lens feeding a BIG set of chips, sitting on a solid tripod with a good pan head, recording to the least-compressed, most lossless format you can afford to use. Quality mics placed with skill and recorded properly.

Quality editing begins with assembling a properly-spec’d system, conformed to standards for levels and such, and set up to work with as uncompressed and artifact-free a format as you can afford. Then you import and log the tapes carefully, and assemble the shots according to a well-thought-out plan.

No audience can tell what brand or make of editing software an award-winning and popular show was cut on. It’s not about the tool, it’s about the man who wields it.