Producer, Director, Key Grip, Best Boy etc

May 18, 2012 3:07 PM

How to find someone to create a short business video for display in a public space.

I have a new healthcare office upstairs from a bank with access to a large TV in the downstairs atrium on which we can loop a video about our office to people coming and going to the bank.

We can also place a display with office brochures under the TV.

We have pictures, website, facebook, lots of great patient comments and a logo.

What we need is someone to pull this together and create it. Our website guy has never done this before but estimated a cost of about $700 (USD). Is that reasonable?

This will run on a DVD so we want several copies consecutively to reduce wear and tear on the player.

Questions: Any referrals? How do we find someone and evaluate their cred? Craigslist? Yellow Pages? Call Steven Spielberg?

posted by Northwest to media & arts (3 answers total)

I usually get recommendations from people in my industry who I meet in trade groups or various multi-agency task forces I'm on (I work for a transportation agency). I have several freelancers I've found this way. Also personal referrals sometimes work, but you have to be more careful with that and really check their portfolios.

For my area $700 is a low--it depends on what exactly you are looking for. I'd probably pay closer to $1500 for a very simple 30 sec loop. But I've also paid up to 15K and well over for more complicated stuff.
posted by agatha_magatha at 3:55 PM on May 18, 2012

Are you just going to do a looping picture/caption slideshow, or do you need to shoot testimonials? How long will the video be? Will there need to be background music?

$700 is extremely cheap, imo. Pro rates I've seen for editing run from $100-155/hr. If you've got a lot of content to pour over, you need to account for the editor's time sifting through everything - that'll be a lower rate, but it still adds up.

If you have a lot of source material, that budget will probably only get about 2-3 hours in the editing suite, and that won't be enough time to get your video done, especially considering you'll want a round or two of revisions.

I've yet to have any luck finding reliable professional services in web and video on Craigslist (this is in Florida and I am a professional in the field). I've evaluated about 3-4 dozen people over the past 2 years and all but 1 were total garbage in terms of both portfolio quality and work ethic. It seems the best people are in agencies, have good websites that bring in business (so, start Googling), or just good word-of-mouth (do any of your local restaurants and other places of business have nice looping videos?).

However you find someone, require samples of recent work and a detailed quote that accounts for materials review, general production (touching up graphics, logos, creating the supers), editing, any hard costs (like music), DVD replication, and amount of revisions included in the price.
posted by Wossname at 4:00 PM on May 18, 2012 [2 favorites]

Hey Northwest, the company I work for makes ad videos for small businesses. What we charge depends on what exactly you're looking for - length, what kind of effects, etc - but we've certainly done videos in that price range. I don't know if we'll be able to help you, but if you want to talk, mefi me and we can get a better idea of what you're looking for and if you're better off with us or with your web guy.
posted by Jade_bug at 9:27 PM on May 18, 2012