[Nick Griffin]

I agree with Bob. This smells of “I want to give the job to my brother in law so I have to get two other bids that make his look reasonable.” OR, it’s someone completely out of their depth who thinks video is produced and sold in “units.”

Not sure how you would approach this within the context of a military structure, but if it was a request from a business a good approach in the beginning would be to try to get in touch with multiple people in the organization. Explain that you have a wide variety of options to offer which could… save them a great deal of money… give them a cinematic look… or (fill in the blank).

Or you could just blow the whole thing off as yet another bizarre request from someone you’ll probably never do business with.

[Nick Griffin]

Yes, but…

Keynote does a nice job of outputing to Quicktime and, while it can mimick PowerPoint, its own set of transitions and effects is so superior that you’d have to be crazy not to re-craft your presentation with the Keynote features before exporting to QT video… but…

Unless you are doing this with your own presentation (rather than someone else’s) and unless you or the person who created the show did so with a television mentality, you’re likely to run into “slides” that are WAY too complex to be readable in SD video. I see all levels of users almost always putting way, way, WAY too many words on the screen. Somewhere the old maxim of no more than 7 words to a line and 7 lines to a slide has been lost. To my way of thinking step one of taking a show from PowerPoint to video is going to be re-designing the show.

And just in case anyone is unaware of this little fact, Keynote (half of a package sold by Apple under the name iWork — the other half being a mild page make-up program called Pages) is DIRT CHEAP at just $80 for both programs. If you use and will present from a Mac there’s no reason that I can think of to ever use PowerPoint. The question I always hear when presening with Keynote is “Wow! How’d you get PowerPoint to do THAT?”

Un-related: Steve Eisen of Chicago – you aren’t the same Steve Eisen who runs a company called Ideal, are you?

[Nick Griffin]

Just about everything said so far is correct depending on the situation and one’s perpective as a provider of production services. But this began as Randy being asked to provide a fixed price “package” price for a “packaged” service of which the people asking seem to have very little understanding. They sell units so they just want to know how much a unit will cost. We know the variables are infinite. They don’t.

So does Randy want to try to find a way to accomodate this that protects him from the dreaded “projects from hell that never end” or does he just want to turn them down?

There was an earlier reference to wedding packages. Maybe the best answer is that approach. A basic shoot with 1 camera pretending to be 2 or 3 in the edit, not to exceed X hours, a down and dirty edit session with some simple efx thrown in and viola… here’s an example of what the purchaser gets for $X,000. On the same demo put an example of a much more elaborate production indicating that specific requests are available by bid.

The key to making this work is the clarity of your sales materials. You must specify what they are getting and provide a highly realistic expectation of what they’re getting as the finished product. Buyers are at their unhappiest when they expect one thing and get something else.

And sorry to ask the obvious (and perhaps in doing so point out the fallacy in my suggestion above) but, what band is going to want a “packaged” music video that looks anything like someone else’s “packaged” music video? Having shot stills for bands in a past life I seem to remember that the goal was always to NOT look like anything they’d seen before.

[Nick Griffin]

As said above, have a clearly defined “package” and go from there. If at all possible have a location / stage / studio over which you have control and the package includes x hours there. Then if the band wants something else it’s an extra location charge. If they want a fog machine, that’s extra. Use this as a selling opportunity. The whole trick is to not come off as nickle and dimeing them. Presenting a relatively complete schedule of services and costs at the very outset should accomplish this.

[Nick Griffin]

I nominate flowmotion as voluntary proofreader for the next issue. God knows I surely can’t proof my own stuff — even loosely. (Or is it losely?)

[Nick Griffin]

Thom –

One thing that a surprisingly large number of people seem unaware is the fact that the COW is a massive archive of past discussions. I strongly recommend that you spend some time glancing through the older threads and learn from people who are a whole lot smarter than me.

But since you asked, I’ll address some of your specific areas.

WHY are you starting a business? Just because you want to or because there’s a number of people just beating down your door to do business with you? As has been said here many times, “build it and they will come” is a formula for bankruptcy, or at the very least years of discomfort.

The short answer on how to get clients is to let it be their idea and then be available to answer their questions. This is in marked contrast to the notion that they have to be “sold” something. Your task therefore becomes letting people know what you specialize in and that you have some availability should they need your services. Here’s where personal style and flair come into play. Client says, “I want THAT LOOK and Thom knows how to do that.” Of course better still is when THAT LOOK is something you created and are perceived as the only source for it.

Granted, this is only what the more sophisticated an knowledgeable clients should be thinking. The more normal and mundane are thinking, “I need a video project done and I don’t really know how to go about it. I’ll ask one of my buddies who they’ve used for this sort of thing or I’ll look in the Yellow Pages or Google it and get really lost. Oh wait… here’s a DVD that somebody just dropped off telling me about how to get the most out of my next video project.” (You get the idea — especially if part of the idea is knowing why I don’t write dialog!)

When do you upgrade and when do you expand? When you absolutely HAVE to. When the upgrade will EASILY pay for itself in a matter of months — ESPECIALLY true with technology. One of the worst positions you can be in is to have years of payments left on obsolete equipment. Computers and software age faster than mayonnaise in the summer sun.

Finally, here’s the best advice I can offer. Don’t start a business without having already done the same tasks on someone else’s clock. Work for someone so you can get a realistic idea of how things, including things as basic as business itself, work. And not just you, either. Your producer friend must learn the trade before trying to do it on her own. Learning from the bottom up is a tremendous waste of time. Trust me, that’s how I did it. That’s why I don’t yet own that tropical island I’ve always wanted.

Hope this is of some help. Read the archives. They’re a vast wealth of information.

[Nick Griffin]

Thanks, Tim. Trying to find the balance between stupidly obvious and painfully insightful. But mostly looking to begin some new discussions. After all, the business part of this IS the one thing we all have in common.

As to the flip-flops, I find it

[Nick Griffin]

Actually the phrase “But that’s just my opinion. I could be wrong” was the sign-off that Dennis Miller used to say at the end of his rants which ended the monologue portion of his HBO show.

So, he’s the man. (At least he was before he drank all that right wing Kool Aid. Maybe in light of current sentiments he’s sobered up and returned to the radical middle where he was funniest.)

[Nick Griffin]

I think burning t/c is overly confrontational and mildly rude. A small, translucent bug makes it clear that it’s your footgae without throwing it in their face. As the man said, “But that’s just my opinion. I could be wrong.”

[Nick Griffin]

Within your rights? If you’re in the US, probably.

Does this have the potential to upset the people getting the footage? Maybe yes, maybe no.

Your agreement to provide the raw foots should have specified what they could DO with it and that you still owned it. But hindsight is almost always 20/20. Then again, they may just be the anal type of client who wants to have control of everything even if they then don’t do anything with it. I’ve had clients who simply wanted to be sure that they saw everything, even if they had no idea what to do with it other than comfort themselves that they were “in control.”

My advice, add the bug in a small and subtle manner and wait to see how they react. Maybe then you’ll have the conversation about ownership.

-Nick (still not at NAB) Griffin