Lost Marble Media

Now and then we get those awkward situations where we have to tell a client that we can’t add something to the project without charging extra. Oftentimes the customer will ask for something in particular, we finish the project to spec but are then told ‘that’s great but let’s try something else’. That’s fine as long as it’s understood that starting over on a whim will cost money. Another misconception is that if we’re being paid for 3 minutes of motion graphics work, for example, that adding an extra minute of live action to the video is simply a creative decision that will not raise the cost of the project. These kind of uncomfortable occurrences and many others like it can be avoided with good preparation prior to the buyer proposal. Below are some good tips to aid this process.

Have something in mind before initiating the project
We have a lot of cases where we’re simply asked to ‘make a promotional video’. Now, while this is obviously a good starting point, we’ll need a bit of extra information before we can begin. What is the video promoting? What style do you like or would you prefer? How long do you wish the video to be? Where will the video be displayed? What is your approximate budget? We fully realize that quite a lot of the time you might need direction with these matters and we’re always more than willing to help out but even if all you have is a youtube video you can show us that is similar to what you would like your video to be, it will be of great help to us in getting the job started.

Price versus product
If we’re approached by an individual or start-up with a low budget, we will do our best to work within that budget. What you need to keep in mind though, is that we’re being paid for our time. Basically, if you’re looking for a 60 second web commercial and you can only pay $300, the chances are that we won’t be able to hire actors or sets to produce the piece. Logically we cannot do this without making a loss. The same goes for revisions, if we’re being paid a minimal, non-negotiable fee to produce a 60 second video you shouldn’t expect to get 3 or 4 revisions of the video to choose from. It just doesn’t work out from a business stand-point (in higher paid work we do provide numerous versions for our clients to pick from). In these cases it’s best to either have a specific idea in mind or to talk to us and throw around some concepts before work begins. More often than not we can quickly render a rough version to let you see how an idea would play out before you give the go-ahead or at least show you some samples from our past work.

Using incorrect terminology
We never expect our clients to know the technical jargon. Part of the reason we get hired is that this line of work is a specialty. Unless you’re in the business of web-orientated media creation, why would you know insider words and slang? There’s rarely ever a problem because a customer doesn’t know what a key frame is or has never heard of an alpha channel. However, problems arise regularly because people tend to drop in words that they don’t fully understand. The most incorrectly used is ‘Flash’. A good example of this is a job we were approached about a few months ago. We were asked to create a ‘Flash Powerpoint presentation’ with slides and ‘flash animations’. We talked this over as far as scripting, voice overs and style. We started some preliminary work on the piece and it wasn’t until we asked the customer about controlling the pace or navigation of the slides that we realized they simply wanted a video presentation and not a slide presentation. The problem here was that the customer had heard some words used in conjunction with web presentations and without knowing what they were asked for a ‘Flash Powerpoint presentation’. In truth, I can’t think of a single video type that we produce that we haven’t had requested as a ‘Flash video/presentation’. The key here is to simply describe to us exactly what you want, where you want to use it and if possible provide a link to something similar.

We do believe that the above tips are good ones but the most important thing to keep in mind is that communication is the key.