Re: Professionals poll....Please participate.....PRETTY PLEASE, PLEASE......

OK, I'll play...

1. What state/region are you currently working in?

This is a tough question for us. We're located in Seattle, but 75% of our clients are in the NY to DC corridor, with another 10% in LA, 10% international (Sydney,London), and maybe 5% local.

2. What is your going rate for a single hour of non-linear editing? (not including logging and menial tasks.)

$180 p/hr on our Avid DS, $125 p/hr on our Matrox Digisuite. Rates vary widely per project. That's our broadcast commercial rate. Because we mainly create content for concert video projection and other live entertainment stuff, we often end up quoting a 'whole project' fee that includes editing,compositing,animation,storyboards etc... The edit rate is subsumed in this in these cases.

3. What is the "going" rate in your market for a standard "concept to completion" :30 second spot?

We have no local spot clients. We do some local DVD content creation work and projection design work for the Seattle Opera. Our regional and national commercial client budgets range from $10,000 to $100,000 for 30 second spots, concept to completion. This price usually includes a :30, :10, and 2:00 'B-roll' (most of our commercial clients are the same producers we design content for shows with... we end up doing their commercials for the shows as well...)

4. What is your most common task?

I'm the Creative Director... that means I mainly ride herd over several animators, compositors, editors, and illustators. I get my hands dirty doing the heavy compositing, and final cut editorial myself.

5. How do you feel about your position in the market? (bear in mind that you don't need to be a business owner to have an opinion about your market.)

Our position is good. Our market is VERY focussed, there are only so many people producing live shows that need projection and multimedia presence. Within this market we are probably ranked about 3rd nationwide. We are just in the past year beginning to crack into commercial production as well.

6. How do you compete with people that you view to be at, or around, your level of experience and strength in the marketplace? (I'm not looking for trade secrets, just generalizations.)

Press,Press,Press... With us it's about getting the word out. Concert and live entertainment producers don't crack the yellow pages when they need content design. We do alot of press releases, we solicit articles on EVERY project we do. We focus on Entertainment Design Magazine, Post Magazine, Video Systems Design, Theatrical Index, etc. We are press WHORES. In our business it's all about the 'current flavor' to get through the door. Once I have a producers attention for a moment I can knock em' dead with our reel usually, or better yet a few 'teaser' images of what their project could look like. Once we're in the show creation relationship with a producer, it's not hard to convince them to let us do the commercial as well. We do alot of targeted direct marketing. It's fairly easy to keep track of the likely business opportunities in our market... there's really only about 20 or 30 business entities that have a demand for our kind of work, and within those entities, maybe 200 people we keep track of. We are equally obsessive about 'tracking' the competition, what they're up to, who they're working with, and how good it's looking.

I know we do 'weird' stuff, but I hope this helps...

Best,
Bob