To avoid any misunderstanding please find our definition of Shooting Days
As you may have already seen, all of our packages are broken down with an assigned number of shooting days. 1 day, 2 days or 3-4 days.
But these shooting days are not about Labour.
They are about our estimate of the amount of time it will take to ensure we capture all of the visual and audio elements for the promo we are contracted to deliver. AKA The Deliverable. For instance a Crowdfunding Investment Video. This will be clearly defined in our Letter of Engagement and agreed by both parties.
Now the key point is the more days we allocate to your production, the more time we have to ensure against unforeseen issues such as lousy traffic (Hello EC1 !), Contributors not showing up, Interviewees not being available all on the same day, location availability, bad weather – ever waited for a cloud to move? We do that a lot!
The extra time also means we have more time to get creative with our shots. To choose more varied and interesting backdrops. To experiment with multiple takes or locations.
Ideally if we all do our preparation well (that is us as filmmakers and you as the contributor) there is a very good chance we will end early.
This is a good thing. This is our goal for every shoot.
This means no one got so nervous they required 27 takes. It means no jackhammers were ruining a location costing us half a day. It means in short… everyone nailed it.
Now this unfortunately is where some clients new to video production mistakenly believe that this remaining time is now available to shoot other video footage that they might need that is outside of a crowdfunding video.
On the surface this seems prudent. After all you don’t want that extra time to go to waste. But what it fails to consider is that
We are NOT invoicing you for our time,
But for a specific pre-defined ‘Deliverable’.
ie. a Crowdfunding Video for Seedrs or Crowdcube.
Thus asking us to shoot extra footage so you can create an advert is basically asking for us to give you a free promo. We would literally be giving our creativity and product away for nothing.
Often a client will say… ‘we’ll do the editing. Just give us the footage.’ Well that is a whole other misconception which you can read about here:
The short answer is unless you have agreed to pay for all the rushes, this suggestion to edit yourself is not an option, and even then we also need to protect our brand just like you. Our job as creatives is about more than just capturing images. It is about capturing the right images for a specific audience in the most engaging way to create an emotion or desired action.
Now all of the above taken as given….
We often shoot multiple promos back-to-back.
Creating 1 set of promos for investors and 1 set of promos for consumers / marketing / Brand building.
This usually can save you over 50% on the 2nd video package.
But this needs to be agreed in advance so that not only can we be properly compensated for the additional deliverables, BUT more importantly, so we can plan the 2nd shoot to the best of our ability.
Different audiences have different scripts. Different pace. Different tone. In order to be effective we have to give this second promo the exact same care and creativity as the first one.
So to recap, we are creatives you have contracted
to deliver a specific pre-defined promo.
And just as you ferociously protect your brand, we too as filmmakers must protect ours. And ours is judged solely on our deliverables, which we hope you will now understand are not given away lightly.
Any questions, feel free to drop us a line. hello@mabinogi.co.uk
Also if you are new to video production and have more questions about working with Mabinogi, please find a selection of helpful articles to get you started:
Pitching for Capital Not Likes
Comments are closed.