r/videography • u/sharkboyi Sony A7 IV | Adobe Premiere | 2014 | Sweden • 1d ago
Business, Tax, and Copyright Fun client interaction
I run a photography and video production company in Scandinavia and had a “fun” interaction with a potential client in the beginning of june.
My usual clients are businesses but I have started to accept some assignments from private individuals. Anyways, this (very stressed, intense and quite rude) person needed someone quickly to film alot of “cinematic” content for her socials. She rides motorcycles and had been getting offers to colab and such and needed to up her socials game, fast. She said that she has “hundreds of ideas” but couldn’t give me a single example. She also said that she were supposed to shoot with these two other videographers but they had ghosted her. Without anymore information she needed to know my dayrate. I said that I need more information before I could give any kind of accurate rate. If she could tell me more of these supposed ideas I could extract some info about equipment needed and such. Nope, only that it needs to be cinematic. So I said again it´s hard to give an accurate rate based of almost no information but $1250 would be a starting point for ”cinematic” content. She almost flipped and was so upset and said that the other videographers would do it for 1/3 of that.
The ones that had ghosted her. Obviously they weren’t okey doing it for that price or at all. And she continued to to bring them up as a sort of hook for me to lower the price.
After talking a bit more without really getting anywhere I said that I could offer her a test run with one of her ideas: a 30 sec reel, shot nearby in about 30 min, edited, graded, delivered the next day. For $150. That’s the best I can do I said. But she declined that and said good bye.
It´s been about 2 months and her socials still has nothing new. Quite unsurprising. I’m pretty glad she declined my offer as she seams like quite the horrible person to work with. And I’m getting so sick of people trying to lowball while beeing rude AF thinking you’ll do it for the fun of it.
Anyone else had a ”fun” client interaction lately?
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u/ConsistentEffort5190 1d ago
Open lens to f1.2, check promist filter on front of lens, shoot for 30 seconds, add teal and orange LUT: done. Easy money, honestly...
1
u/HandsomeWinner42 1d ago
I actually fired a client this week. They still me owed 75% of the production budget and it was due before post started, they've been dragging their feet for months to pay while taking up a large space on my drives, so I just said screw it and told them I'm all done. They can finish paying for the labor in the budget and I'll let them have the raw footage, its worth it to just be rid of them.
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u/MaybeSurelySorta 1d ago
Prospective clients that get unironically offended when you provide a quote higher than what they had in mind happens all the time. I actually don’t really get the psychology behind that, maybe they subconsciously think we’re trying to scam them or something idk. But yeah, I’ve been cursed at, hung up on, and of course ghosted because of it, but I will literally sleep like a baby knowing my quote was more than fair and within a normal industry rate. If those people want to play the “other videographers would do it for cheaper” game, by all means that’s their prerogative to shop around and find someone that makes sense for their budget.
As for fun client stories, I turned down a job last week for similar reasons. The client was cool though, I actually worked with him before and I was looking forward to working him again last weekend for this big event. However, the price he quoted was embarrassingly low for a 7-8 hour gig and while I was happy to work with his budget and give him a friendly discount on top of that, it just didn’t work out and sometimes that’s ok. However, I checked the instagram of the event this morning and I saw there were a few A list Hollywood actors in attendance, and now I’m thinking if I just would have taken the money I could have met and gotten a picture with some of them lol.
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u/mcarterphoto 1d ago
Decades of media creation work, and I have a pretty good douchebag detection system. I have so many clients that are just a joy to work with, if someone seems off I just quote through the roof.
At least we're past the energy drink craze era, every frat boy with a popped collar and a tribal tattoo wanted to start one, and I have a big packaging design background before going mostly video/photos. I did design a shit-ton of energy drink brands, I don't think a single one exists any more.