Another Business Shoot..

The current economic situation has hit many of us on two fronts. On the one hand, couples are spending less on their weddings than in previous years, yet as more people get laid off, there seems to be a swell in brand-new wedding videographers.

You can either lower your rates and work for minimum wage or less, or you can modify your business model. We've choosen the latter and have gone after businesses whose websites could benefit from video or better quality video.

One of those businesses we contacted was selling an instructional video from their website. They had a sample video posted that was obviously shot by an amateur with a consumer camera, on-camera microphone and untrained voice as narrator.

They responded to my email by telephoning and we had a fruitful discussion about how their current video was limiting their sales potential and how we could improve things. The next day, they paid our deposit through our website's PayPal form.

I send all clients a "how to prepare" list, that includes clothing suggestions (red is bad for ntsc and small stripe designs cause distracting moiré patterns). This particular client wanted the entire video shot greenscreened so we could use one of our modern office background sets instead of his client's large, plain, generic office setting.

One of the items we send clients (well, we actualy ask them to download it) is a storyboard form. We ask that each shot be detailed with either a quick sketch (stick figures are fine) or short sentence describing what is to be seen in each shot and in the next column, they are asked to give the narration for that shot.

Everything seemed fine and the date was set for two weeks hence. The day before the shoot, I still hadn't received the script nor the storyboard, so I emailed. The client's reply stated that he'd been too busy to do either and said that we would just shoot, send him the edited video and he'd write the script and storyboard for us to do the narration and fit with the video.

Whoa! That means two separate, full editing sessions. I explained (via email) that our agreement (which he had previously downloaded, printed, signed and mailed to us) stated that we do one edit then send an approval copy from which they can request up to one free hour of editing changes. It continues to say that all time past that hour is billed at our normal editing rates.

Well, there's nothing that can motivate an all-night storyboard session like tacking on a huge extra fee!

When we met with him the next morning, he still didn't have a script, but he did have a pretty good storyboard with good hints about what the script would be saying for each shot on the list. We agreed to do the shoot, but would not begin editing until we received the finished script.

He had previously assured us that the office was huge and we would have no trouble finding the minimum twenty feet by twenty feet I told him was needed for the greenscreen setup. Well, the office was large alright, but the most space we could squeeze was about eight feet by ten feet, and we had to move a ton of stuff to get that much room, so greenscreen was out.

And although the client had previously told us that we would not need to capture any audio since he was having us to a voice-over for the entire video, he suddenly got the idea that he'd like to have the sounds of the equipment in the video.

Fortunately, we'd brought most of our gear, except camera crane, Glidecam stuff, and teleprompter, so this wasn't a problem except that they were unable to turn off all of the air conditioning and there was street traffic that could be heard from inside the building. (Fix it in post!).

They had plenty of outlets, but also were running a lot of stuff on the circuits, so we had to employ 50' extension cords to power our lights. We had a 100 footer in the car, just in case and we bring a generator when shooting in the "boonies".

The actual shooting went pretty well, though three hours into it, the client decided to drop two of the printer models he'd originally intended to cover, putting us down to nine models, instead of eleven.

Well, sorry to say, this is your typical business shoot. Clients don't take you seriously enough about preparations, scripts and storyboards. Locations are rarely anything like the client describes, and the client's energy runs low as the shooting goes on.

While the wedding market may be compressed by the current economic situation, there are plenty of business opportunities awaiting the ambitious videographer. Web video presents an ocean of opportunities for you and your prospects are right near home, and easily found via Google or a drive down Main Street. What are you waiting for?

As you pursue web video opportunities, may we remind you that professional web development and web hosting is offerred by yours truly.