[Timothy J. allen]

Your question is really about design. I

[Timothy J. allen]

Let’s pretend that you find yourself on an elevator with an artist, artist rep. or label executive. What would you say, do, point them to, or give to that person to convince them that it’s worth taking the risk to hire your company?

When you develop material to promote your company, you’ll want to anticipate questions the most common questions and objections. The material that you will provide to potential clients should at least anticipate questions such as:

1. Who are you and why should I trust what you say? (How do you establish your credibility?)
2. What can your company do to better promote or brand what I sell? (in your case, the image of the artists, or the label, records, etc.)? (What have you done for other companies such as mine?)
3. Why should we hire you instead of A) doing that work ourselves or B) hiring a larger “known” company? (Again, this is related to risk vs. reward.)

While you won’t be able to get into specific details with potential clients until you find out what their specific needs are, that micro-presentation and any materials you develop to help it, should be targeted towards getting you that appointment with the right person. At that appointment, you can “sell” your services based on their specific needs.

The fun part about the media and marketing business is that you don’t have to (and in my opinion, shouldn’t) limit your sales materials to “boring powerpoints and brochures”. Use your own creativity to offer unique solutions based on the flavor of your company. There’s a fine line between memorable and over-the-top, but in your field you might be able to have more fun with your ideas.

Just like the salesmen of old, be prepared to bring out “product samples” to show what you can do. This might be toys with website URLs printed on them to direct them to some online marketing you’ve done, to samples of major press coverage. The good thing is that you are in the idea business, and ideas don’t have to weigh much when you carry them around. 😉 Just be able to quickly show people what you can do and why it would be worth hiring you.

Remember the way you present yourself is their first clue on how you will represent them.

Good luck!
-TJA

[Timothy J. allen]

How much to charge really depends on the content of the video and what it takes to bring that content to your viewers eyeballs.

How much will the video cost you to make? Add up your total time, money for materials like tape, equipment rental or depreciation, administrative costs, printer toner for labels, courier costs, etc. Don’t forget to add the amount that you’ll need to pay your government for taxes on wages for those who you hire to help.

After your expenses are covered, decide how much profit you need to make on the video for it to be worth doing. (For instance a $400 profit might sound pretty good at first, but if the video takes a full week to complete, that’s less than you’d probably make at most entry level jobs.)

I’m going out on a limb here, but I’d venture to say that most professional quality corporate videos that would hold the audience’s attention for 10-minutes would take more than a week to do, especially when you count preproduction meetings with the client, scriptwriting, arranging for crew, blocking the video shoot out, arranging logistics for the shoot(s), shooting, graphics creation, editing, audio post, mastering, and properly archiving everything to wrap it up properly and professionally.

Then again, if all or most of the elements are provided to you (including the approved script, video footage, timecode notes, preproduced graphics, voice over files etc.), and you can complete it very quickly… there’s a chance that your quote works.

Just like Craig said, if you finished it all very quickly, (within just a few hours from front to back) the quote might bring a livable wage. That’s such a tight quote, you’d have to be extremely clear about client expectations and be very specific about any of the client’s “change order requests” in the language of the quote.

Timothy Allen

[Timothy J. allen]

One other thing as far as “edit design” goes…

I get a lot of inspiration from looking at print design. It may not always match the aspect ratio, but some of the best designers still work in print and *sometimes* it can inspire things that translate over to our work pretty well.

Go to your local bookstore, pick up some magazines and look at the typography, color, graphic elements, and aesthetic balance. Take a pencil and a sheet of paper and sketch out what you like about it. Take those sketches to your edit suit and hang them up where you can see them.

If you begin with some strong, but simple themes and keep the audience in mind, you have a great opportunity to make something you can really be proud of. Most of all, have fun! Some of the best work I’ve done started out with the phrase “this may not work, but let’s try it just to see…”

Tim

[Timothy J. allen]

Thanks, Bill! I’ll try Fluid Morph next time I run across this situation. Before I used Avid, I was so used to having to go into RED to do almost anything. I’m really glad that Avid wraps so many of RED’s features into it’s own GUI.

-Tim

[Timothy J. allen]

Todd,
I’ve used high school football footage as a stand-in for NFL… uh… (did I say “NFL”?) – I mean… ahem… “professional football” footage before. It was incidental to the shots – like the shots you mention.

It worked just fine. If viewers are expecting to see NFL footage, that’s most likely what they will think that it really is. It’s amazing but viewers tend to “see” what they expect to see.

I’d say ask the coaches and the organization that oversees the game and offer a “special thanks to the Central High Tiger Football Team” (or something similar) in the credits.

You may even be able to use something they’ve already shot, especially if you give them a “football footage courtesy of XYZ” credit.

We shot our own footage with permission from the coaches and the state high school athletic association (but not from individual players).

I still did not show recognizable faces and I made sure that the names on the backs of the jerseys were not legible in the final shots, but bottom line is that we didn’t have to pay for rights to the footage and it went over just fine for standing in as professional football footage.

By the way, as you may have surmised from what I wrote at the front of this post, be careful about referring to the game using any specific licensed organization’s name, especially with graphics. I’m sure you are already very aware that the NFL logo is trademarked, but I figure a gentle reminder might not hurt.

[Timothy J. allen]

We’ve tried sending video files through Telestream Clipmail, delivered them through a cheap FTP site, Fed-Ex on CDs and DVDs, and using an MPEG-2 C-band signal via satellite to our client’s MPEG-2 Integrated Receiver Decoder (IRD).

Each method has advantages and disadvantages. Some of the methods are speedier and can have higher quality images, but they cost more.

If I were a small company sending files to a client across the country and timely (but not immediate) delivery was necessary, I’d still try YouSendIt first.

I generally try not to spend money unless I can prove a solid return on the investment, but sometimes the “return on investment” is not just in direct dollars, but in the goodwill and return business generated by good customer service.

That said, if you count the money that you don’t have to spend on VHS tapes or blank DVD media, some of those methods for delivering client approvals pay for themselves fairly quickly. (Maybe not the digital satellite method, but in our case I think we were paying for the bandwidth headroom anyway.)

[Timothy J. allen]

Several Producers who’ve used “Disc Makers” tell me that they are very happy with the service they received. I haven’t used their services, but I have used their duplicator hardware for a couple of years and never had a single problem with the it.

We’ve also used Vision Wise. They’ve always done an excellent job. When we first started having the requirement for talking menus on our DVDs(for the sight-impaired) and closed captioning, and Vision Wise was the first company we used. They were more than patient while working with us to create the “talking menu” DVD. They are based in Dallas, TX, but we never had any issue with the location of their company, since communication between us was good throughout the process.

Hope that helps…

Timothy Allen

[Timothy J. allen]

Mark spells it out pretty well. Rather then simply echoing his advice, I’ll add just one more thing…

I don’t recommend setting a pure simple “hourly rate”. I’d set a day rate (up to ten hours) a half day rate (for those times you work between 1 minute and 4 hours on a project during a day) and an “overtime” hourly rate (the overtime rate should be well above your daily rate divided by 10, I’d say at least double).

This keeps you from losing full days of work because you booked a project that only took 90 minutes. I book a minimum half day for any project. There are a number of reasons for doing so, including:

*It keeps clients from “underestimating” the time it takes to edit something.

*It help keep you from working with “grinders” who only want to pay for a couple of hours of work, even though booking the edit session with them blows away the time you could have booked for a larger job.

*In my opinion, that 11th or 12th hour you spend doing “one more thing before we wrap up and you go home” is worth more than any of the hours during your “expected normal” working hours. It gives everyone a reason to wrap the project up in a timely manner rather than keep going that same day. (There’s not as much incentive if you are “already here anyway and it will only add a couple of hours to the finished cost”.)
JMHO

[Timothy J. allen]

You need to keep it up long enough so that the company can defend themselves legally as to whether they made an effort (due diligence) to inform customers of “the catches” upfront.

Email the client and ask them how long they want you to keep it on screen. Get the their response in writing, then put the graphic up for as long as they say to keep it up.

It’s not really a creative decision, it’s a legal one, so they should make the call. If they ask for suggestions, feel free to offer advice, but make sure they give you their final decision in writing.