One of the things that makes me who I am as a video editor is that I can visualize aspects of the project that haven’t occurred yet. When I see a scene or a picture, I know how it will work (if at all) with other footage I’ve seen. When I hear something, I know what I can use it for. Basically, I create the video while I’m reviewing the footage and then I basically trace what I already saw instead of building a video from scratch and wondering whether it’s going to work or not.

There are a lot of elements that go into making a video that don’t become important until the final output, yet if you don’t pay attention to those elements ahead of time (known as pre-production), you may end up needing to re-do all the work you just did. Elements include frame dimensions (16×9 vs 4×3), frame size (in pixels), data rate, codec, font, font size, lower 3rds, drop shadows, transitions… For just one example, if your video is going to be seen @ 320×180 (width and height, in pixels), you’re going to want to deal with your font sizes differently than if you were going to present in 1280×720 HD (high definition). If you act as if you’re going to output in HD, you might have to change all your titles when the client sees them in 320×180, because they can’t be read.

The reason I bring this up is that this ability increases my efficiency. I know the questions to ask ahead of time so I don’t waste time. Also, I can see my way clear through to the end of the project. I can basically “see” the finished video as if I fast-forwarded time to when I was finished. This is because everything goes onto a “checklist”. If I know what the video dimensions are, I can visualize the size that the final output will be. If I know the font, I can imagine what the text will look like…

OTOH… If I *DON’T* know what the background color is… That becomes apparent to me in my visualization and I ask the client if they want to use a background image or they have a specific color in mind. Same thing for font color or music selection. I have a good basic idea of what’s missing and what I need to figure out ASAP in order to efficiently get the job done.

What does it look like when I don’t know an aspect of a project? It looks…. blank. It looks like nothing. I can’t really explain it. It’s just a lack of data. It’s like in the movies when they’re trying to solve a mystery and you flip to the page you need and it’s torn out of the book. You can’t visualize what’s on the page, because it’s not there, other than perhaps a torn border on the inside.

What do I do when I have zero information? If I’m working on something for a client, I’ll ask them, and the project can resume when they figure it out. If it’s something I’m supposed to be in charge of, then I have to go through the process of research and selection, similar to Time, Part 04: “Spend Your Money”.

The reason that post is called “Spend Your Money” is that there are some things that it’s not worth your time to do. In the time you wasted reinventing the wheel, you could have cleared your desk of other projects and invoiced clients for your time. In that particular case, I searched all over creation for a better solution than was presented to me by a professional and then ended up buying that exact same application anyway, AFTER wasting a bunch of time.

The way I felt when I was trying to find a better solution was the same way I feel when I have no information about an aspect of a project. It’s basically that you’re in the dark and have no clue at this point in time how you’re going to get from point A to point B. IMO, That’s the time that you want to subcontract:

Main Entry:
2sub·con·tract Listen to the pronunciation of 2subcontract
Pronunciation:
\ˌsəb-ˈkän-ˌtrakt, ˌsəb-kən-ˈ\
Function:
verb
Date:
1842

intransitive verb
: to let out or undertake work under a subcontract transitive verb 1 : to engage a third party to perform under a subcontract all or part of (work included in an original contract) —sometimes used with out 2 : to undertake (work) under a subcontract

The goal of subcontracting is increasing your efficiency on a project and most likely your ROI as well. For instance, I don’t do 3D Modeling. If a client wants a 3D model as a part of their video, there’s NO WAY I’m going to waste MY TIME figuring out how to do it and slooooooowly creating what the client wants with my lack of skill. Nope. I’m going to query people that I know that do that type of thing, check their availability, their interest, the date on which they feel they can deliver the video and how much money they would need to do that. If the client gave me a definite budget for that section, that will be one of the first things I mention so that if the number’s too low, whomever I contacted won’t waste any of their time thinking about a project they’re not going to do anyway.

If there isn’t really a budget for an addition to a project and there’s not going to be enough money for me to bring someone in that knows what they’re doing, that aspect of the project gets VETOED. Period. It’s not happening. “Your budget doesn’t allow for this”.

The reason you want to veto these things (and sometimes the entire project, if the client can’t understand budget constraints) is that in the time you wasted making that model, you could have finished the entire project using skills that are actually in your repertoire. Actually, there’s another option. Bounce it back to the client. “If you want this part done, have it done yourself and get it to me in 1280×720, Apple Intermediate Codec (or whatever) and I’ll cut it into the video.

On top of that, when you work more slowly and you’re not getting paid by the hour, the time you’re spending is becoming “worth” less and less to you and you’re decreasing your own rate. At the same time, if you ARE getting paid by the hour, I think you STILL want to subcontract, because a lot of customers return not only because of your pricing and attention to detail, but also because of your speed of delivery. I think it’s better to spend some of your project’s budget to get a better product than you would have delivered and get it way faster from someone who knows what they’re doing. Also, it’s good business. When you look out for people and pass them work, they’ll look out for you through passing YOU work they find out about that isn’t in their realm of expertise and also by going above and beyond to provide you with excellent work, completed on or before your proposed deadline.

All of this stuff needs to be worked out during pre-production, and you need to put down in writing what you intend to deliver to your client and approximately when. This comes in handy when, down the line, they go “Oh… Can you make it like this?” or “Oh.. Can you change that?”, because they get to see very clearly what you agreed to in the beginning, and you can explain to them how much extra it’s going to cost them to make these changes or bring in subcontractors to replace that photo montage wth a 3D model.

Of course, there are lots of other aspects to deal with. Website creation. CSS Coding. Video Compression for web, television, DVD, etc. Publicity. Community Growth & Management… All these areas and more can bring your production to a grinding halt, so you might want to consider making professional alliances and subcontracting. If you can make a video but you’re not good at making websites, hire someone else to do it. If you can make the site but not tweak it, hire someone to code. If you can get a video to look good in its native format but you’re no good at compressing video for the web or DVD, hire someone else to do it. If you spend all your time creating your show and you have no time to have a presence on your social site and interact with your community, hire a community manager and have them create a list of things for you to do or respond to so you can efficiently maintain a presence and make people feel like they’re actually communicating with YOU and not just on some fansite.

So take a long, hard look at your projects to see if there are areas where the time you’re spending isn’t worth the money you’re getting for that time. Get in tune with your actual strengths and weaknesses in your chosen field. Search for areas where you’re just not that good, and you should really hand the ball off to someone else who can do the job better than you can. Seek out opportunities to turn those empty spaces in your business plan into something that makes sense as far as your ability to complete the project on deadline and within your budget constraints.

~ Bill Cammack

Twitter: BillCammack
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Social Media Category: billcammack.com/category/social-media
Time Category: billcammack.com/category/other/time
 

Related Posts

• Business, 2010 [Time, Part 09]
• Time, Part 06: “What’s Your Budget?”
• Talkin’ LOUD, and Sayin’ NOTHIN’! (sayin’ nothin’)
• Time, Part 05: “Focus & Motion”
• Time, Part 04: “Spend Your Money”

Check it out… If you want to be seen as a businessperson and not a HOBO (read: bum, derelict, vagrant), stop contacting people about projects without including budget information.

Here’s how the process works… When someone with 1,200 Facebook Friends and 400 Linkedin Contacts and another 1,200 MySpace Friends and 2,300 Twitter Followers clicks on your email, that email is going to be scanned for a number. If there’s no number, that email is going to be IGNORED.

There will be no action AT ALL on your email, because there are too many requests coming through every single day to sit around brainstorming about your budgetless project. The thought process is a) “How much are they trying to spend?” and then b) “How much work do I feel I’ll have to do on their project for that amount of money?”. If there’s no indication of “A”, then “B” can not be calculated. It’s like asking a soldier how long he can hold a position and not telling him how many bullets you’re giving him. It’s not worth thinking about for even a split second.

If you HAVE no budget, say so. That means that your project will be dealt with during favor-time, which is NEVER.

Even if favor-time isn’t exactly NEVER, it’s your best bet to assume that the other 5,100 people in Social Media contact with that person asked for a handout just like YOU DID and y’all are all in the same soup kitchen line, so take a number.

On top of that… If you HAVE a budget, it’s in your best interest to say what your limit is. If you don’t, you’re asking the person you want to work for you to waste their time calculating what they could do IF you had more money than you actually have… Because it’s ALWAYS more money than you actually have. So save yourself from getting ignored and if $500 is all you have, say so. You will receive an estimate, outlining what can be done (if anything) for your current budget. You might also receive estimates of what can be done if you somehow procure more money than you have right now.

‘Matter of fact… Even if your budget is $0, it’s in your best interest to say so. You might receive credit on the Government Cheese Line for being up front about the fact that you can’t pay but you’re still looking to have your project dealt with by a professional.

Either way, understand that you look CORNY asking people to discuss doing work for you if you have NO budget information in your correspondence. If you want to be taken seriously, figure out the parameters ahead of time and come to the table as if you’re trying to do business instead of with your head bowed and on bended knee with your hand out.

~ Bill Cammack

Twitter: BillCammack
Subscribe via RSS or Email
Social Media Category: billcammack.com/category/social-media
 

Related Posts

• Time, Part 07: “Subcontracting”
• Time, Part 04: “Spend Your Money”
• Business, 2010 [Time, Part 09]
• Time, Part 05: “Focus & Motion”
• Time, Part 02

Continued from “Time”, Parts 01, 02, 03 & 04:

Life is easy when you 9-5 it. All you have to do is go where they told you, do what they told you and leave when they told you. Two weeks from now, you get a check and then the cycle starts all over again.

As a freelancer, your time has to be divided amongst several things every day, and it’s up to you to get proficient with selecting what to focus on and how much time to devote to it.

Efficiency

The selection process is actually critically important. I already discussed micromanagement of time, but it’s just as important, if not more so, to minimize the time that you waste DECIDING what to focus on. For instance, it might take you one minute to read someone’s email, but it took you 30 seconds to DECIDE whether you were going to read that email. Perhaps a more efficient style would be to jump right in, start reading and if you realize it’s something you don’t care about, bail.

I know that 10 seconds or 30 seconds doesn’t sound like much, and a year or two ago, it wasn’t much to me either. When you get to the point of receiving 100 emails every day of varying levels of importance, those seconds can add up to a major time sink. Consider the process to respond to a “new Twitter follower” notification (assuming you don’t use a program to auto-follow people who follow you):

1. Hear the background notification
2. Take your mind off your current project
3. “Feel” whether this is a “check the email” moment or not
4. Type the shortcut to toggle to mail
5. Read the title
6. Click on the email
7. Find and click on the link
8. Wait for the browser window to open
9. Check their friend/follower ratio
10. Check what they’re talking about on Twitter
11. Decide whether to follow them back or not
12. Close the window
13. Toggle back to the program you were originally using
14. Get your mind wrapped around your project again

So now, because you chose to have your mail client open and polling for mail, however much time was just extracted from your focus on your current project. Sometimes, it’s necessary, like if a client emails you that there’s a change in plans or an unique opportunity comes up that requires your immediate attention. Other times, it can be put off until later (or never), so making that decision quickly is in the best interest of your time, productivity and focus.

Focus

Mainly what I do is edit video. If I’m just assembling something, I’ll probably have mail and instant messaging open because I’m really just organizing items and doing quality control. If I’m doing a “real” edit, all of that’s shut off, because I need to live inside my project and be immersed in it in order to provide the eventual viewer with the same level of immersion when they watch the show. I can’t afford these micro-interruptions affecting my focus, flow, disposition, mood…

This is why I can’t understand how some people have literally all day to be on Twitter. They supposedly have jobs and responsibilities, yet you see them on Twitter 24/7. Now, I understand that there’s work that doesn’t require your full attention, like I said about when I’m assembling something… But how much time that you’re supposedly working for a company are you spending passing notes in class? What do those notes have to do with your actual BUSINESS? If your employer checks your Twitter or Friendfeed accounts, are they going to see you engaging in water-cooler drivel banter? How do you reconcile this time? Is it like smoke breaks? Are you addicted to Twitter like other people are addicted to cigarettes and need to be let out of the building for 15 minutes every hour to get their addiction on?

Focus is extremely important, because you can either move forward a little on several projects in a day or you can move forward A LOT in one or two. It might be a good idea to shut it all down and have designated periods where you enjoy “Social Media Time”. Similarly, it might be a good idea to have “email time” and “telephone time” and “respond to inquiries” time. That way, you could have specific segments of your day devoted to ‘distractions’ and the rest of it spent on knocking out the projects you’ve decided are most important or whose deadlines are approaching the soonest.

Motion

The days of meetings are OVER. Period. Over. Done. I noticed this back in my experimental year, 2008, because what people knew me for changed. When I was known for editing, I would get contacted by people who needed editing. Once I became known for Social Media projects, all of a sudden, I had information that lots of people could use for their businesses, and they began contacting me, wanting some of my time.

That’s all well & good, but when I would run through the obvious video chatting options, it was always “well… I don’t have this set up…”, regardless of how large or successful the company was. This was when I realized how far behind most companies really are.

So I went to a few IRL f2f meetings. My take-away was that A LOT OF TIME was being wasted in transit. Granted, this was before I bought my g1, but I’m way faster on my Macbook Pro than I am on my gPhone, so even today, the time is essentially wasted, or at least slowed to a crawl.

The problem with moving is that as soon as you stop thinking about your current project, it’s completely stalled. It’s stalled while you THINK about going to the meeting. It’s stalled while you get dressed. It’s stalled while you head for mass transit. It’s stalled while you wait for mass transit. It’s stalled while you’re ON mass transit (at least in NYC, because you’re not going to have your laptop out on the subway and if you did, you wouldn’t have wifi anyway). If you took the bus or a cab, traffic’s ridiculous and you either wouldn’t get there on time, or you’d spend $20 to slowly get downtown. It’s stalled while you walk to the restaurant. It’s stalled while you meet with your client or potential client. THEN, it’s stalled all the way back in reverse.

So, not only do you ‘lose’ the time that you’re physically meeting with someone, you lose literally hours surrounding that meeting. This is entirely unacceptable, when all you have to do is set a time, remain efficient until you get the chat notification on your computer and click “accept”. When the meeting’s over, you click “end” and go back to what you were doing. During that time, you have the exact same functionality as a face-to-face meeting, except you can’t shake hands when you’re signing off. I’ve had more efficient meetings with people in GREECE and ISRAEL than I’ve had with people in Manhattan, NYC, USA. :/

Obviously, these issues are multiplied in situations where travel’s required. Entire DAYS can be wasted getting from one state to another. Most of the day can be wasted moving from location to location when filming something.

This is something that needs to be worked into your budgeting. It’s not just the number of hours that you work on the project, but the number of hours that traveling to and from that project remove your ability to focus on OTHER projects.

Solutions

Maximize focus by increasing efficiency and decreasing motion. Accept projects that fit into your flow and reject projects that don’t. Make exceptions for situations that compensate you properly for the entire amount of time that they take away your ability to clear your desk of other projects.

Pay attention to and note all the time that’s devoted to a particular project… Phone time, IM time, email time, video chat time, IRL meeting time, travel time and time that you actually worked on the project. Make sure people know they’re “on the clock” and will be billed for your time before interacting with them. Get your payment up front if you don’t trust them to honor your invoice. If they don’t have your money now, they probably won’t have it later either, so don’t allow people like this to owe you money so you have to waste even MORE of your time trying to get paid.

~Bill Cammack

Twitter: BillCammack
Subscribe via RSS or Email
Social Media Category: billcammack.com/category/social-media
Time Category: billcammack.com/category/other/time/

Related Posts

• Business, 2010 [Time, Part 09]
• Time, Part 07: “Subcontracting”
• Time, Part 06: “What’s Your Budget?”
• Time, Part 04: “Spend Your Money”
• Time, Part 03: “Office Hours”

Continued from “Time”, Parts 01, 02 & 03:

Free Stuff

“The best things in life are free… But you can keep them for the birds & bees… Now give me money (that’s… what I want) that’s what I want…”

“Your love will give me a thrill… But your lovin’ don’t pay my bills… Now give me money (that’s… what I want) that’s what I want…”

“Money don’t get everything, it’s true… What it don’t get… I can’t use!… Now give me money (that’s… what I want) that’s what I want…”

Everybody loves free stuff! *FREE* *STUFF*!!! :D

How free is “free”, though? Did you ever stop and think about how much free stuff costs you? Right now, you’re thinking “A-DUH!… It costs me NOTHING, by the definition of FREE!”. So let’s take a look at why some “free” things cost you more than the money you SHOULD have spent on them.

While you think about that as we go through a few examples, consider whether your BUSINESS can afford to utilize “free” goods & services.

Enhancing functionality or productivity

A few weeks ago, I wanted to enhance the functionality of my computer/music/editing setup. I knew exactly where I was and where I wanted to go, but I wasn’t sure about which software I wanted to add to my system.

The first thing I did was think about it myself. Let’s say I thought about it for 10 minutes. I decided that I didn’t have the information “on me”, so I started searching the net.

There are lots of people in Google results that don’t know what they’re talking about, which is what some people say about my dating advice blog, but that’s neither here nor there. :) Searching Google didn’t help me much, because there weren’t people already doing what I was planning to do, so I didn’t consider any of them AUTHORITIES on my particular situation.

Let’s say I spent about an hour (I probably spent more than that) on searching the net. I came away with a good idea of what the most common software was that people were using to their satisfaction.

Next, I hopped on Twitter and tossed a question out to whomever happened to currently be paying attention out of my 2206 followers. Relatively quickly, I got an answer from Rob Blatt, which confirmed what I had gathered from my Google searches. The difference is that I know that Rob knows what he’s doing and I trust his opinion when it comes to things that he’s already done that I’m currently trying to do.

The time I spent on Twitter was the amount of time it took me to think up the post, post my question and read Rob’s response. Let’s call that 5 minutes, though it was probably less.

What to do with the info?

By now, I’ve spent an hour and 15 minutes on this issue, buy my own guesstimation, and I have EXACTLY the information I need to move forward and BE PRODUCTIVE with my time……. EXCEPT…….

The information I received indicated that I needed to PAY for the software. *screeching tires*… This is where we get to the point of this post. :)

Option #1 would have been to spend the money and move forward with the added functionality and productivity that I KNEW was right there in front of me.

Option #2, which obviously I TOOK, or else I wouldn’t be able to write this post, was “There’s got to be a better way!… Now that I know the functionality I need, there has got to be a *FREE* software solution to this!”

Stop being cheap!

I’ll tell you right now why I selected the wrong option. The software that I needed cost < $50. I had already spent more than an hour researching & asking around. Let's say I made a plan to only spend 45 minutes trying to find a free solution. That means I've taken myself out of the game for two hours in return for ~$50. I can't do ANYTHING other than search for this "free" solution during that time. Not only that, but I STILL don't have the enhanced functionality I wanted for my system until I solve this issue.

Of course... I did NOT put any type of time limit on figuring this out, and I actually DID find free software that does a limited amount of what the software I should have bought right then and there does. This turned out worse for me instead of better. I ended up adding the time that I wasted trying to make it work properly to the time that I wasted searching for the software I was utilizing.

In fairness, I did end up with a really good and free solution to a side-issue function that I wanted to add, and I'm going to use that solution going forward, but the point is that I never found anything better than or even COMPARABLE TO what a) I figured out from my research on the net, and b) what someone who knows TOLD ME I should use.

Ultimately, you may as well say I paid myself McDonald's wages to NOT find what I needed AND to end up paying for what I already knew could have hooked me up from the giddyap.

How does this apply to my business?

Hopefully, in my tale of wasted time, you saw a parallel to something that YOU wasted time on that was key to your business. Maybe you thought you knew how to shoot, edit and compress video for the web, but you found out you were wrong. Maybe you thought you could DiY (do it yourself) when it comes to website creation, but you found out you were wrong. Maybe you thought you could create a professional-looking sign for your office….

Whatever it is, when you’re considering cutting corners, make sure you consider whether your business can afford that or not. What does it end up costing you down the line? If the answer is “nothing”, then you’re golden. In my case, I got SOME of the functionality I needed, but ultimately realized it was too much of a hassle as well as a time sink that might have led to absolutely nowhere anyway to try to get the entire functionality of the recommended software.

Another business example

A client of mine wanted me to pick up (continue working on) a project that someone else had started. The had already made a completed video and he wanted to make some changes to it. The way the project was pitched to me, it was simple enough, so it was going to be inexpensive. All I would have had to do is plug in the external drive my client supplied, which had the project files, the video & audio files and the finished video on it, open the project, make the changes and output a new video. Piece of cake.

Except….. When I opened the project file, there weren’t any video files to be found on my client’s drive. Final Cut searches for footage when you open the project and then gives you a list of files it can’t find, complete with their last known location. Every file in that list said “Macintosh HD:”, which meant that whomever my client had ?hired? (read: Probably got to do the work for free) had loaded every single second of video to their INTERNAL DRIVE instead of the external drive that I now had attached to my computer.

Obviously, whomever started the project didn’t know what they were doing AT.ALL. Notice how all of a sudden, there’s a cost to “free” stuff? Not only should they have loaded the footage to the external drive, but they STILL could have consolidated all the footage to the external before handing it off to my client, so they blew it TWICE!

So when I inform my client about what happened, his response is “Well… I have the tapes right here, so we can reload the footage”. Now, not only did his cutting corners have him walking all over creation with a drive he didn’t know was completely empty, but now the specs of the job have changed. Now I have to charge him for the time it takes to load all the necessary footage from four one-hour tapes. He’s just added (at most) 4 hours worth of my time to how much making a change is going to cost him, because he didn’t hire a professional to begin with (he said after the fact that it had been a student who did the original work for him and gave him the drive).

Insult to injury

So now, while my client’s project costs are doubling… I decide to sample a few random clips from the timeline. The information about where a video starts and stops is in the project file, but it won’t actually show you anything without an accompanying video file. You can still get a lot of information from the clips in the project, such as how they were loaded. This is important for when you want to do a reload or change the resolution of a project or send the project itself to another location so they can do a reload using the actual tapes.

So I click on some random clip, and look for the tape name (reel name). The reason you need to fill in the tape/reel name when you load tapes is that if you’re not using a format that lays down timecode that you get to specify yourself, every. single. tape. you. give. me. will have the exact same timecode on it, generally from 0 minutes to ~62 minutes. This particular project had four tapes associated with it, so I should have seen something indicating Tape 01, 02, 03 or 04.

What I saw was “001″. I clicked on another absolutely random clip and checked it… “001″. Another one… “001″. “001″ is Final Cut’s DEFAULT reel name. If you FAIL to designate reel names for your tapes, everything you load ends up with the same name. Same thing happens if you change it once and then forget to do it again while you’re loading.

What this means is that the tapes you have in your hands are absolutely useless, because when you go to reload the footage, the only tape Final Cut’s going to ask you for is “001″, which actually refers to any one of your four tapes, but FCP will be content to make your entire video out of one tape, because it can find the timecode it’s looking for from whatever tape you put in.

So now, it’s literally impossible to “make changes” to this video. The only thing that can be done is to start over from scratch, load all four tapes (4 hours), and build the video by A/Bing it against the finished video that was already on the drive. A project that “on paper” was going to take a couple of hours to complete is now looking at a couple of days, which is completely outside of the client’s budget range, so project = FAIL.

Starting to see some costs now? :D

Business costs vs. social costs

Bill Cammack & Kfir Pravda

So… “Free” isn’t always free. Actually, there are times when “free” is actually more expensive than going ahead and spending your money on something or someone that you know is more advanced than you are at whatever you’re trying to do.

Sometimes, you end up spending time learning, researching and doing trial & error that you could have used to make money doing business. Sometimes, you end up with your project going down a dead end street, where it’s going to cost you more to fix it than to start all over. Sometimes, you end up with inferior goods or services. Sometimes, you end up missing your deadlines, because people didn’t know what they’re doing when they told you they did.

Sometimes, you get up to give a presentation and nothing shows on the screen, because you thought you were going to have wifi so you didn’t bother to bring all your files with you on your computer. Sometimes, you shoot really beautiful HD video and when you compress it for the net, it looks like garbage and it’s too late to try again, so that has to be the representation of your company’s best effort and potential.

Those are all business costs. Next time, we’re going to think about what it costs you socially if people start to perceive you as someone always looking for a handout.

~Bill Cammack

Twitter: BillCammack
Subscribe via RSS or Email
Social Media Category: billcammack.com/category/social-media
Time Category: billcammack.com/category/other/time/

Related Posts

• Business, 2010 [Time, Part 09]
• Time, Part 07: “Subcontracting”
• Time, Part 06: “What’s Your Budget?”
• Time, Part 02
• Thoughts about the “Fast Company Influence Project”

Roxanne & Shane, founders & owners of Bare Feet Studios & Beachwalks.tv have been consulting and in the internet industry a lot longer than I have and I was fortunate enough to receive some vital coaching from both of them concerning Time, specifically relating to being a freelancer.

I physically met Roxanne Darling two years ago in November 2006, but I knew her already from the Yahoo Videoblogging Group. We had some great and important conversations and I knew she had her finger on the pulse of what was going on in this new “New Media” world I was diving into from my Corporate and Broadcast video background.

Rox & Shane did their own show, Beachwalks.tv, but what I didn’t know at the time was that they were also very, very, VERY busy with their consulting business where they have 12 years of experience working in internet technology, streaming media, audio & video podcasting, new media creation and consulting, content management systems, event production, and public speaking.

Fast Forward to March 2007, and I accompanied Rox to NYC’s BlogHerBiz ’07 conference. We were filming or attending discussions all day, which probably amounted to 6 or 8 hours, tops, before we shut the productions down and got ready to socialize for the rest of the evening.

When Rox turned her computer on, she said something about having 80 emails since she had last checked this morning. I remember laughing at that, thinking “ha ha, you have all this spam/bacn to get rid of, hahaha” To my shock & horror, I found out she had 80 actual legitimate BUSINESS emails, with more coming in.

At the time, I was probably only getting 30 emails a day… like, meaning in a 24-hour period… and those were mostly garbage. There was something about Rox’s email situation that told me to pay attention, because I was looking at my future. We headed to the socializing events with both of us knowing that by the time she returned from having a good time (and, less importantly, business networking at the same time), even MORE email would be stacking up…

Vaporware & Future Money

I became bored of the Broadcast/Corporate video world and found out about putting video on the internet/iPod from my good friend & colleague, Athina Krikeli one day when she showed me a commercial she created, one day after a session of Emmy Award judging.

Athina Krikeli & Bill Cammack

As soon as I watched Athina’s work and saw how clear it looked on this little box-thing, and how the stereo sound was perfect, my mind instantly expanded as I considered an entirely new form of self-expression.

It was suddenly clear to me that I didn’t have to put my work on television and watch it disappear. My news articles showing for an hour or two, then disappearing. My commercials playing until they rotated them out for the next big thing in the focus groups, never to be seen again. My segments disappearing forever once they cancelled Studio-Y or GameFace or changed the focus of a channel from Youth to Sports and then to Fashion. Suddenly, I had the opportunity to do good work, put it “on the air” and have it STAY THERE. Also, I was no longer restricted by local or even national broadcast limitations. People could watch my videos in France or Japan, anytime they wanted to and as many times as they wanted to! Amazing! :D

This is how I became involved in the world of vaporware & future money.

In the real world (IRL, in real life) budget comes before production. If you don’t have any money… you don’t get anything done. Period. If you have a little bit of money, you can get your job done poorly and slowly by someone that doesn’t really know what they’re doing. In the internet world, people come up with ideas and then try to figure out how cheaply they can make that idea a reality. This is because (which I didn’t realize for a loooooong time) we’re living in a “startup culture”. Everybody’s always working. It’s never enough. You don’t get paid NOW, you get paid when your company gets funded and eventually gets bought. It’s all about the bottom line, because everyone’s scrambling for funds and then scrambling to prove that they deserve ANOTHER round of funding. Meanwhile, everybody knows this is all “future money” and could collapse at any time, so every dime needs to be accounted for in terms of ROI.

That’s all well and good, except a) like I’ve been saying for two years already (“Monetizing Digital Video” February, 2007), there’s no revenue stream for monetizing internet video because you can’t prove demographics, and b) video, as far as internet communications are concerned, is only ONE of SEVERAL formats in which you can get your point across. You can use SMS, email, RSS subscriptions, text blogging, audio recordings, static websites… If you want to put something on television, there’s only one way to do it. You HAVE TO make a video. On the net, the question is “Why should I spend the money to make a video when I could just type some words and get the same number of hits to show to my advertisers?”.

This is why professionals avoid web video. There’s normally no budget at all, and if there is, it’s whatever allowance was afforded that group by a sponsor or they’re hoping to make their money back via CPM (= impossible). Of course, there’s money in doing Corporate Video that just happens to be on the internet, or, at least, inTRAnet, but that’s the same-old same-old for me *yawn* and I wanted to pioneer something like JetSetShow or SomethingToBeDesired.

So basically, instead of having an actual REASON to do videos which would cause them to have an actual BUDGET to do videos, you have a lot of people and groups that know that internet video is hot and only getting more and more popular, and they want to be involved, but they really have ZERO idea of what they’re doing because it’s only another business concept to them. They’re not actual artists. They’re not actually media makers. They have no idea AT ALL about what it takes to bring a project from concept to completion. This would seem to be a good thing, but it isn’t hahaha.

Handout-Based Environment

This combination of lack of funding, lack of ROI on video projects and this “We’re all trying to make it with a startup” mentality has created this weird, handout-based environment. I was introduced to a woman at a party (so what’s new about THAT? ;) haha) and literally RIGHT AFTER she was told what I do, she goes “Oh… if you have some free time, blah blah my project!” I don’t remember her exact wording, because I go to networking events to hang out with my friends, not to field sporadic questions & comments about business in the middle of the night when I obviously have a drink in my hand and I’m tryin’na chat with the ladies.

Chrissie, Leora, Flo & Bill

So anyway… I exchanged contact information with her… Meaning that I took her business card and told her to Google “Bill”… I sent her an email the next day, and her response had nothing about budgeting in it. ????

That’s when I accessed my visual/audio memory to try to figure out EXACTLY what she had said to me. I believe she had said “If you have free time, maybe you can help me with my project!”. I’m assuming the operative word was “help”, which, to me, implies “I can’t do this, so I need someone to help me”, as in “My car isn’t running. I need someone to help me fix it”, which would be the MECHANIC, who is going to BILL YOU for the time he spent working on your car and the materials he utilized in the process. It was clear from her correspondence that she meant “do it for free”.

I had another situation where I had just come from a REAL job out of town and I went to a party. At the time of my arrival, I had nothing planned for the entire rest of the week. A friend of mine asked me, in the course of conversation “What are you doing tomorrow?” to which I replied “nothing”, which meant to me “Nobody’s offered me my day rate to do anything tomorrow other than EXACTLY. WHAT. *I*. WANT. TO. DO, so I might do ANYTHING or NOTHING AT ALL tomorrow, and that’s the way I like it”. His response to finding out that I had nothing to do the next day was “Oh.. I’m doing blah blah event tomorrow. Could you come to the event and film it? :) ” After I finished sipping my brew, I said something to the effect of “Nah”. He looked incredibly perplexed by my answer… Almost as perplexed as this guy.

I attempted to explain the situation to him by saying “I just worked three days in a row. I’m not doing [jack] tomorrow”. Of course, this only confused him EVEN MORE because of this startup mentality that we all have of “everybody’s always working” and “everybody’s always scraping to get out of the barrel” and “if you’re not working on something that makes you money, you may as well spend YOUR time on something that improves MY life”. I’m not saying that’s what HE was thinking. It’s pervasive. Every time I ask someone what’s new or how they’re doing, I get some kind of report about their business endeavors. Meanwhile, people are hiding “Significant Others” left and right and either don’t want to talk about them AT ALL or will bring them up while specifically avoiding saying even their FIRST names!…. “the person I’m seeing, blah blah blah”.

It’s not just individuals either. Companies… Like actual well-known companies that have tens if not hundreds of employees that are all drawing salaries… want handouts. The reason they need guidance is that they JUST found out what I knew in 2006 and people like Jay Dedman & Kenyatta Cheese knew in 2004 if not earlier, that internet video is the wave of the future.

Because nobody seemed to notice this while we’ve all been putting hundreds and hundreds of episodes on the net for years already and handing out entirely free information that entire time to the entire world in the Yahoo Videoblogging Group, NOW, companies are scrambling to try to get on the bandwagon and nobody that they’ve already hired knows what they’re doing AT. ALL.

So it took me a LONG TIME to figure out what was really going on in the space, because I didn’t imagine it was going to take them this long to figure out how to monetize digital video to the degree that they could afford to pay professionals to handle the business. In the meantime, I watched my daily email count rise and rise towards Rox’s level and I stopped using my phone entirely. I literally did. not. have. the. time. to. waste. listening to the long-version of what people wanted from me. Put it in an email and I’ll get to it when & if I get to it.

Time

Rox & Bill

At some time during this period, I ended up speaking with Rox & Shane individually about TIME, because I knew that they had already been living the life I was now living for years. I needed AT LEAST a starting point or some kind of foundation that I could build my own concept of TIME on.

People with staff jobs have it easy. :) You go to work when they tell you to. You come home when they tell you to. You go back to work when they tell you to. You get a check every other week.

Freelancers in the real world have it easy. Here’s my rate. You can afford it or you can’t. You have my money or you don’t.

Freelancers in an handout-based society have to work with the lowball budgets presented to them or pass on the project entirely (as not worth spending the time to even THINK about) while constantly fielding ?deflecting? ?deleting? all kinds of RFCs (hahaha I made a funny! hahaha Requests For Charity! hahaha) from acquaintances AND NON-ACQUAINTANCES!

Just 11 days ago, on January 01, 2009, my ideas about TIME completely solidified for me, and that’s what this series of posts is going to be about. How do you efficiently organize your time so that you can do the REAL work, do what YOU want and/or need to do, accommodate lowballers and hand out charity all at the same time? :D

~Bill Cammack, January 12, 2009

Continued in “Time, Part 02″

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