Re: hourly rate

Free type answers:
"It costs what it costs."
"How much you got?"
"How long is a ball of string?"
"How much should a house cost?"
"What should you pay for a car?"

This whole thing is madness. I can't give you a figure because I don't work the same way as you. Where I work, most costs are comped because of the setup; clients only pay for expendables, the dubs, postage, any out of the ordinary expenses for travel, props, hotel or per diem for overnights, etc. The most expensive 30 second TV spot I shot this year, with a rented grip truck with Matthewrs dolly, jib, HMI's and a P2 camera rental, and a full crew of seven and cast of six, shooting seven setups for 4 hours, ran the clients in the neighborhood of 900-1200 bucks, but I average between twenty dollars and fifty or so for most of my spots in terms of billables, and that's mostly for tape, to generate spots that a comparable outside outfit in Chicago would charge roughly $2K-$3k for. I once won a local award for a no-shoot all graphics and sound design spot that cost me five dollars to make, beating five others and one by a friend that cost him over a grand. The facility and staff run off revolving funds and inter-departmental fund transfers... Monopoly money, if you will. In this way we make the entire enterprise affordable to our client agencies where it would otherwise be impractical. This is of course useless to your calculations.

Don't base your bid on what the Famous Big Agency who's name sounds like someone falling down a flight of stairs will charge. That's a ridiculous mismatch. Instead:

Ask yourself, after factoring all the operating costs info you have on the project, do you think you can shoot the raw takes in two, four, six hours? Days? How many days do you figure you'll take to edit the first one, including the time spent logging and digitizing and otherwise prepping the footage first? We already discussed how you calculate your rate way earlier. Rate times hours, baby, and depending how confident you are, a pad on top of that for safety or extra profit. You generate a figure YOU can live with, THEN hope the guy with the checkbook goes for it. If the Big Guys are still billing on a cost-plus system, you are going to spank them every time. Cost-plus offers no incentive to economize anywhere, and it typically jacks up the price of a comparable spot by twenty percent or more. The more the spot costs, the more an agency using cost-plus charges on top of that higher cost, in an unending spiral.

Sometimes, you can get the client to plain tell you what he can afford, and if it is at all congruent with some version of reality, then you conform the production to the available budget and most everyone is happy or at least equally UNhappy. Explain the Golden Triangle: you can have it FAST, CHEAP, and GOOD, but you only get to pick TWO of those three.... any two, but ONLY two. Anyone promising all three is a liar. When you get a response from the client on which two legs of that triangle they are wanting, you adjust the quality level or the delivery date (I'm saying it that way because 99 percent of the time, they will say low cost is important, leaving you only the other two dimensions to work with).

A rule of thumb my old boss has used since the 80's, and that some people hold to today, is to charge a grand per finished minute for something pedestrian and uncomplicated. I feel the fact that this rule may still work at times is that it's purely a coincidence. An ABC-roll Beta-SP to 1-inch edit bay in 1982 costing 3/4 of a million can be beaten today in most respects of time, quality, and sophistication by a NLE system costing under two grand in somebody's second bedroom, or even on a #$%@#% laptop in his car... If we're still charging the same grand a finished minute today, where is the difference going, into the editor's pocket? Or is it reflected in the shorter time to completion or higher quality or sohistication of effects? I don't have an answer, only more questions.

It costs what it costs.

Calculate the costs best as you can, and pitch them your numbers. Be ready to defend or explain each line item, have alternative suggestions ready for anything that is questioned, use the Treatment document and boards as the guide for why each choice has been made.

There is NO secret decoder ring, every spot is hand-wrought by an artisan(s) and they charge what they are worth for their time.





And who is this "Mike" guy!?!?!