[Tom Sefton]

Olly,

It isn’t too late at all. If you want to make it seem as though you pulling is down to someone else, blame it on you solicitor. Tell them he/she looked over the contract and advised you not to sign it.

This is going to cost you money, time and a relationship with a client.

Best of luck.

[Tom Sefton]

Are you going to pull your pants down for them in the meeting tomorrow morning?

Please don’t sign that piece of paper!

As Mark and Scott are pointing out, you are giving them;
interest free credit, free unlimited use of your time, free hire of your equipment and facilities, and storage of the project materials for an un-determined time. Are you going to buy the extra hard drives for this? Are you going to pay the upfront cost to the the dupe house when 5000 DVD’s are needed with full colour printing? Are you really going to give them your time for free and then pay them 60% of whatever revenue is made just for the privelige of working for them for x months for nothing?

As Scott rightly says – if expenses are being deducted before you get paid, then expect for some nice big lunches, business clothes, hotels and car hire to be paid before you do.

Franchise model or not, if you are the first one to be asked then decline on these terms. How do you know that your rushes and materials aren’t going to end up on the edit bench of a swanky Soho post house when this client’s project gets very succesful? Nothing in that contract seems to protect you from them using your nicely shot rushes for whatever they like, and with whichever producer they want(the cynic inside me even wonders whether someone inside this fashion outfit has something to do with media production and needs someone to film the events for free).

I know it’s a risk but its only my time

No matter how scarce work is, keep your pride and dignity in your trade. Your time is precious, you can’t buy more of it, and you can’t earn more money while you are on this project working for free for them. This isn’t just your time, it is the start of a business relationship that is unfairly balanced. Walk away, or tell them how you want this changed so you are paid up front, or maintain control over what you are creating.

I would have thought that a better business decision would be to offer some free production services to a local business. Who knows, if you shoot it and then own the footage, they might have to pay you something to use it for a project in the next year.

[Tom Sefton]

Hang in there.

The one skill that you can’t go on a course for, buy some equipment to help you with or pay marketing costs towards is the skill of the hustler. You’re going to have to learn how to hustle work in, create jobs and projects from nothing, surprise your clients with what you know and how it can help them and much much more. You need to help them for free occasionally, knowing that it will pay off.

Unfortunately for you, in this economic situation there is no quick fix or dead cert for bringing in business and money immediately. Your clients either have the money to pay for video work now, or they don’t until 2012. If you offer deals that are as cheap as you mentioned, how are you ever going to get your prices back up? As Walter has pointed out – figure out your rate card and stick to it. Either that, or price your work on a unique cost each time and use this as an excuse to speak to the client as much as possible throughout the quoting period.

I really respect your decision to go it alone. At the moment, this is the hardest possible time to be doing what we are doing, but you can make it work. As has been mentioned before – don’t be scared by someone who has some sort of broadcasting background. This means nothing – you are only as good as your last job. We have received 2 projects recently as a direct result of someone with broadcast pedigree making a royal hash of the work.

[Tom Sefton]

Wouldn’t a BOXX workstation be a perfect replacement for a MacPro system?

You could then easily build some add on PC based render farm PC’s to use via a LAN.

[Tom Sefton]

Take the money, take the money, take the money, take the money.

It is infinitely easier to find another job, be it a freelance contract, project you can tackle as a self employed person or a video production job WHILST YOU ARE EMPLOYED.

I agree that the car dealership sounds like the work will be fleeting and that you won’t be doing what you love for 100% of the time, but in this economy – take the money.

You can always work nights, weekends, holidays and all other hours under the sun to keep your freelance productions going.

Not to sound too whipped either, but ask the mrs too.

[Tom Sefton]

Hi Christian,

We’ve used the 550D, 7D and 5D MKII for event work and it is worth remembering that the maximum file size it can generate is 4GB. This roughly equates to around 12 minutes of video per single shot, so if you have anything that is going to take longer than this you need either:

a different camera
or
a second camera and operator that will co-ordinate the stop and start of their shots so they can be synced in post later.

You will also need plenty of memory. 24GB should cover an hour of footage, but you will need a laptop there that you can dump the footage to, and an external HDD to back it up. If you have 2 cameras, you would require around 48GB of SD card memory (to ensure that whilst dumping footage off one camera you can continue shooting). Your worflow on the day with 2 people will consist of constant shooting and then dumping card memory to your laptop.

If your laptop is powerful enough, it might also be worth leaving it to convert all of your files from H264 format to cineform avi’s whilst you work – this will help you in post.

Also – when you come to edit this footage together, keep in mind that standard hard drives won’t have fast enough data rates for you to play back more than 2 layers of footage on your timeline, and even basic effects will stretch the playback. You would be better off with a RAID0 array, a Solid State drive or a GSpeed unit.

[Tom Sefton]

https://www.alcorn.com/products/dvm/

think this is a pretty pricey option, but a good one. Seem to remember a colleague saying that they used it with various frame rates…

[Tom Sefton]

What about a bespoke-built PC server with a solid state hard drive?

[Tom Sefton]

have a look at wotbox products. They produce an interesting video store that can be edge blended and controlled by a master show controller. Either way this technique won’t be acheivable without a good budget.

PS – Thomas – love the ingenuity of your idea. Its almost like a Pepper’s Ghost video effect that we are working on at the moment!

[Tom Sefton]

Don’t like it dude. No-one wants to know you are doing their job for a car. It gives the impression that you really are in it for the money, not the long haul.

Like Grinner says – market your company based on the cool things you have done, the cool things you are going to learn and the cool things you are about to get paid to do(never letting anyone know how much you are being paid to do them).