[Tom Sefton]

Hi Max,

Reading between the lines I would say that your work is perfectly fine if they want all of your footage. I would imagine that they have either:

got an offer of editing and post production from another firm that is cheaper than your costs (because they are buying the client,

they are trying to give the work to a friend’s company

or they have an intern/new member of staff/douche who has said that with a copy of fcpx they can edit the footage together so why should they pay you…

Stick to your guns and keep that footage. Ask them specifically what was wrong with your work, ask them if another firm is already involved, ask them why they want your footage if they deem it “unsatisfactory”…

Best of luck

[Tom Sefton]

Research, research, research…..

Find some office space – work out your rent.
Find out how much utilities bills will be for that area.
Find out how much phone and internet access will cost.
Find out how much travel to and from the office will cost – business vehicle contract hire?
Find out how much tax you need to pay, and what is the cheapest and most convenient way of doing it.
Find out how much business insurance for your firm will cost and PAY IT.
Find out how much a good lawyer in the area will cost.
Work out how much you will expect the business to contribute toward your daily expenses – travel, food etc..
Find out how much it will cost to do some marketing for your startup firm – SEO, virals, social media, phone book, local tv, free work for publicity etc..
Have a think about what equipment you really NEED. Not what would be cool – judge this by what work you have to complete in the next 6 months. If you have cash saved to buy this, congratulations; you are one of many that doesn’t. If you don’t, find out how much your repayments on a business loan will be. Find out how much your ongoing costs will be for your equipment – tapestock, batteries, hard drives etc.

UK example:
Average business rent(private office space, not shared, minimal furniture): £550 pcm
Average utilities bills: £240 pcm
Internet and phone: £45 pcm
Mobile phone contracts x3: £120
Insurance: £45 pcm
Legal fees (average monthly cost): £35 pcm
Marketing costs (SEO allowance, plus business directory): £150pcm
Business loan (£20k borrowed over 5 years at 7.5%): £500(roughly) pcm
Vehicle contract hire – £220 pcm allowance

Total – £1905 pcm costs. With minimal marketing, small office space with no chroma key set or sound stage, small(ish) business loan that would pay for 2 full edit suites, one mobile and one full camera kit, basic insurance and minimal legal assistance. This has to be paid every month, without fail.

This doesn’t include tax, wages, travel(petrol, train costs, travel to jobs), food(lunches at work), maintenance for equipment.

If you have 3 people working at the business each drawing a gross salary of £1500 pcm (a modest £18k per annum which is well below the UK average), you need a gross turnover of at least £8k pcm to cope with tax, VAT, travel and food.

If you all think you can, and you want to try – do it. It will be hard, you will want to kill each other.

Good luck!

[Tom Sefton]

Instead of using copyright music, why not give some exposure to some local muscic artists? They might appreciate having their songs on your webcast with some credit….obviously not some terrible garage band….

[Tom Sefton]

Sorry to hear of your shenanigans this week Dylan. Hate to say it, but let it go. Karma is a bitch. Before you speak to him again you would be well within your rights to tell him exactly how much of your time he has wasted though (not that he would probably care though).

Mind you, I could be having a weak moment. Yup, I was. Destroy him!

[Tom Sefton]

Hi David,

My company deals quite a lot with museums so I may be able to offer some advice.

Do we need to go down any special avenues to be able to have museums sell our film or can we just batch produce a bunch of them and see if the museums will have them?

Of course, as long as you own the copyright for absolutely everything on the DVD; music, stock footage, release fees for actors/VO artists etc, then there is no reason why you cant approach the museums direct and ask them if they are interested. Essentially if you own the copyright for the film in perpetuity then I think (may need some clarification here) you are essentially acting as a publisher, selling direct to retailer.

Do you have any museums in mind? With the economic climate as it is in the UK at the moment, many museums have lost funding and/or are having to cut costs – namely staff. I would imagine that they would be much more interested in a business situation where they have to do as little work as possible. If you can find a way to replenish their stock for them, monitor sales and offer support for people who can’t put a DVD in the right way in a player (this was a serious request that I had to deal with after providing some free copies of a DVD to a museum for them to hand out – the fact it was free didn’t matter, and I had to deal with a complaint from someone and establish that they had put the disk in upside down) then go ahead. Best thing would be to get in touch with a local museums trust – don’t know what they are in North Lincs – we did a job a few years back at the Wilderspin museum in Barton on Humber, I could probably dig out some names of people at the museum there?

Schools are pretty similar – budgets are being cut for them too. I would check to see if your project is on the national curriculum for any school ages and then pursue some headteachers to see if they would be interested in purchasing copies, or renting them with some equipment for playback?

Museums would be your best bet if the film isn’t on the national curriculum – I’d approach a local one to ask how they would prefer to use your product to make some money.

Best of Luck.

[Tom Sefton]

Great post Sam. You are bang on. Creativity will always win, no arguments here. I’m a creative as are all of the people who visit this forum. I’m just interested to know what business model to use if we are supposed to admit that using cheap cameras, cheap production crews and cheap edit suites for videos makes as good results as using top quality gear and crews if we have a great idea? Once prices come to such a low point and videos are all high quality because we are working our arses off to be as creative as possible on small budgets, no-one will ever get those prices back up. Ever. 

If a client gets a $50k result from $5k budget then you will never get them paying more than $5k.

Why should we sell our creativity, our skills and experience and our expensive equipment for less? Once hourly rates drop as low as $30 an hour across the board, a business will never ever earn more than $72k per year. Working every day per year 10 hours per day. Less equipment, rent, tax, expenses, software, utilities and staff you won’t have much less. But if you are ok with that, the company who employs you sure as hell will be!

I know that there is now a massive Market for small budget videos-we are making decent money in it, but we don’t offer big budget results for it, we show the client the difference in what they are paying for – cheaper camera, cheaper edit suite and no crew and they usually come up with some more money to make it superfunky.

We constantly compete with young video companies-some we lose, but the majority we win because we are good and we have experience. My old man always said-they pay for the job, my experience is free….

The only mistake you make is claiming that because we are not willing to help young beginners for free (I am happy to do it if they are a pro, not for a freebie for an intern in a company who should be spending with you) we could be in trouble. What about the hundreds of companies in the UK and USA who don’t bother reading or writing on cow forums or helping others? Are they doomed or are they too busy counting their cash and roll call of big clients? I know 5 video pro’s in the immediate area around me who turn over more than £150k per year and have never thought to read a cow forum, they are great at their job and know how to make money though! 

Best of luck-I won’t stop trying to protect your and my budgets and creative integrity because I’m convinced that is the only way for us all to make a good living from the industry we all love. Have a good weekend! 

[Tom Sefton]

Not sure what your budget for production is and how long the installation has to last for but….

Some of the guys who worked at Electrosonic in the UK started up a firm that is selling some really interesting hardware. The firm is called Wotbox and one of the products is a solid state video store that is networkable and has in-built edge blending capabilities.

Other than that, I would recommend stumpfl and watchout!

[Tom Sefton]

I think you have misunderstood my post mark. I’m not going to comment any more, other then say-I have clearly stated that I have offered other young video pro’s tips on their career in the past and I applaud others for doing so too. This was a totally different request. I have pointed out that the problem rests on companies asking beginners in their employ to take on video work rather than paying for it, not advising fellow professionals. I know my quality sells my work. But as our job is shown to be easier, video producers make less money.

You surely can’t be missing the point that this was a request from someone on how to make a video that x years ago YOU would have been pricing up?

I ain’t doomed pal, I just like sticking up for my fellow pro’s.

[Tom Sefton]

Thanks Scott. I’m not surprised at what other professionals have done here in any way. It just shows what generous and well meaning people they are. I’m not. I want my business and all of the people’s who post on this fine forum to remain secret, sacred and difficult to learn. Because then we will start making money again. I’m not advocating greed is good but our industry is facing some big problems-highlighted most recently by apple’s willingness to stick 2 fingers up at the creative video industry to gain more sales with consumers and the dreaded prosumer with its release of fcpx and dropping of fcp7. Andreas question was well meaning and naive, that’s all; I just don’t like giving up secrets about our trade so that someone can do the job on the cheap and a video pro brother or sister in the USA or wherever in the world misses out. Andrea, for the record I wish you all the best with this job, and any others you get. If this is going to be your chosen career I hope it’s a successful one.

Peace?

[Tom Sefton]

Mark, I’ve been openly bad mouthed for being arrogant on here and i can’t make a point about someone starting up a new account to do it?

Fine, point made, issue dropped.