Last month, I wrote about my favorite video magazine author - Stefan Sargent. Stefan generally writes about production problems and mistakes he's made. You can learn a lot about the video business by gathering back issues of DV Magazine and reading his articles.

But I've got a horror story to match, this time. You'd think that at my age and with my experience, I'd have my video contract tight and bullet-proof by now, but no.

We were hired for an instructional video shoot with voice-over, a nice break from weddings, especially since the wedding season was winding down a bit early this year.

The client had downloaded our storyboard form and was to have it filled out and a script by shoot day. A day or two before the shoot, I find out his sister is ill and he won't have time to do the script. I want to postphone the shoot, but it looks like we'll lose the client if I insist on a script. My wife tells me I should be more flexible. I gave in.

I made it clear to the client why scripts and storyboards were so important, but he says he's produced one of these things before and he's got it all figured out.

The scheduled half-day shoot goes reasonably well, and we wrap up with just an hour and a half over our allotted four hours. I posted the raw video from one camera on the web with timecode for him to script by.

Sounds like everything should work out, huh?

Weeks later I get a package with materials from our client. What appears to be several hundred pages of printed sheets and a cd. He's laid out everything by sequences, three dozen of them. The cd has numbered folders to match sequences with script in each and some having images and pdf files also. I'm impressed with the organization of everything - a stack of sheets for script, each page marked with its sequence number. Storyboard sheets, with insufficient info (but that's par for the course!), but he also included fairly detailed instruction sheets, which made clear what he wanted, to a point.

So what's my problem? The first twelve sequences, with narration, are before the first video is used. He gave me a smattering of images and pdf files, but I'm left to fill about eighty percent of the visual gap. True enough, I'd agreed to make some background animations, title screens, etc. but I made it clear I am no animator and that he would have to supply all non-video visual content.

I normally average two and a half days in post production on a half-day video shoot, but it took me four days to edit these first dozen sequences because I had to find images, create animations, and basically come up with about eighty percent of the visual content to go with the narration.

Whew! I've done it. I'm finally at the part where we have video. From this point on, it should be just edit the two-camera shoot and lay down the narration, right? Wrong.

Sequence 13 has six minutes of narration and just over three and a half minutes of video. That's a gap of nearly two and a half minutes. What do you do with narration that outruns your visual content for two and a half minutes?

Well, I grabbed stills from video, more images from the internet which I edited, sometimes making their background transparent to overlay with a still from video. I made title screens and animated the text with After Effects. I slo-mo'd several scenes to stretch and used more stills from video which I'd hold for up to eight seconds (ugh!).

It took all day. I have two dozen sequences to go and this is only a $1350 project. I can't afford to spend a whole month on it.

I just emailed my client with a nice, long letter trying to explain the situation in a way that won't ruffle feathers, and not make it sound like I'm trying to get more money out of him, but the bottom line is I gave him the following options -

OPTIONS:

• I can edit down the script to match the video we have
• You can send me more visual content
• You can edit down the remaining script to match the actual, usable video we shot. (Just use the online video, and send me timecode markers matched to the script)
• I’ll just throw up a nauseating number of title screens with bullet points to fill the gaps
• We can split the misery and I’ll spend three more weeks for another thousand dollars

As a last option, I suppose I could just throw the script on the screen and have like a bouncing ball to follow the spoken words (like they did in sing-along songs in the early twentieth century!)

What would you do? What do you have (or will you now have) in your contract to avoid this predicament?

I've set up a topic in our forums for comments- see you there!