Retaining quality on a low budget and high time restraint

One of the issues that we face in the video business is that budgets and time restraints are becoming ever smaller. In a time of economic worry, and an ever increasing amount of competition and market saturation it is perfectly understandable why budgets are often becoming lower in some sectors. As a result, if we are to keep working at a rate that will allow the bills to be paid, and business overheads to be covered, the number of days allowable to complete a project will also have to be reduced.

This is not exactly the rule, but it is becoming more common. A recent project I was involved in has hit it home for me that while clients are often willing to spend less and less on video production, they still expect the same high quality. At the same time we, as the video producers, still have to pay bills. In other words, our overheads do not decrease just because clients have decided to pay less for the same work!

The way around this conundrum is embedded within the entire video production process. At the end of the day it all comes down to project organisation, and importantly, project clarity.

The two are equally important. One common reason why video production jobs can fall on their face is because there was no clarity to the project. There can be a number of reasons for this. 

• The client wasn't clear about their objectives for the project.
• The video producer didn't ask enough, or the right questions to clarify the clients objectives.
• The client kept an objective to themselves and only revealed it late in the project development.
• The video producer misinterpreted the clients objectives.
• The video producer did not clarify in black and white what they will and will not do for the money that is being paid.

The latter point can be crucial, especially with regard to clients who are inexperienced with video production. You absolutely must clarify the limits of what you will do before requiring extra payments. This can solve one heck of a lot of issues if the client is a bit flakey and decides to change things at the last minute and you end up in an ever increasing circle of 'minor changes'!

Importantly though, both you and the client must be on the same page when it comes to project objectives. This will give you a good framework with which to work with each other. Don't just assume that you know the project objectives. Make sure you clarify things early on and ask a lot of questions that will probe into what the client really is thinking.

This will save a lot of time in the long run. With limited timescales a lot of low budget operators mistakenly assume that skipping early stages will save them time! This is absolutely *not* the case. If a client wants to skip some of the initial stages of production, it is up to you to let them know that it could compromise quality and lead to problems further down the line. With good planning you will maximise the time you can spend getting the shots during actual production right.

Lets take a basic interview with the company director of a small business as an example of how good planning can help in spades. Quite often when I shoot an interview I am often asked "do we really need to light it?" The answer is, 90% of the time, yes. A lot of people don't think of outdoor interviews as needing to be lit. But to think this is a false hope. Even if you are using natural light, it can still be 'lit'!

So, if you are asked to interview a subject such as the director of a small business you should go through a few stages. Small businesses are quite often in buildings that are not the most impressive looking of places. Often the office space is small, and in many cases quite cluttered. Now I realise small business owners will jump on me for saying that, but I know from a lot of experience that keeping a tidy office is often not on the main list of things to do for many of them! If the planning stages are not carried out then arriving at the location ready to shoot, only to find that you can only just about get the camera through the door is not a good thing to happen. Worse still you do not know what type of existing lights are in the building, where the power points for your own lighting equipment are, or window positions.

Very often I have seen low budget corporates shoot interviews with such business owners with no thought to the composition of the frame, the desk and background has been a cluttered mess because nobody has cleared up for the last year, and there is a big blow out window in the background. These are the people who just turn up and shoot.

However this is not even the beginning of the story, because with limited time constraints there are other factors to consider first before you think about locations and actual shooting. You have a limited amount of time and budget? You do have a script right? No? Aha, then that will cause huge issues too!

"Oh, but with interview based productions I can't script it" I hear some people cry. Wrong! If you are working on a corporate or industrial video with a clear message you must have a script. Even if the interviews are supposed to appear spontaneous and unscripted you still need to know the main points and answers that your interview subjects will give beforehand. Knowing these things will allow you to script voice over more effectively, or to plan how you might intercut several interviews in advance. From an editing perspective you do not want five different people all to give pretty much exactly the same answers! Unless you want to be clever and get them all to make a cohesive point by editing them together. But then this is what planning is for, so that you are given the power to make these decisions early on.

This type of early planning and scripting, even if there may be some leeway in what the content might be in the end, will allow you to make more stylistic decisions too. How often have we heard the cry that a particular project "doesn't need to be anything special"? Most people translate this into meaning that the video doesn't need any creativity. In reality though, all videos need some sort of creativity, or defined structure. Low budget, highly time constrained videos may need this even more than others. Quite often because planning stages have been cut the video can turn out to be a muddled mess, and if this happens then the message that the video is trying to deliver could be lost. The client will have wasted their money, and you will gain a bad reputation.

Early on you need to make sure that the client understands fully what is involved in video production. A case in point is a client I am working with at the moment who I have found out has not informed the potential interviewees that he wishes them to take part in the video. Obviously this is unworkable because it hinders my ability to script out how the final edit will flow. Given the nature of the project it is imperative that I can deliver a cohesive message to a layperson in the subject in question. Further more if I attempted to write out a full script based on the hope that someone would say yes to be interviewed, and then they declined to take part, much of my preproduction work will have been in vain.

So, this all comes back to clarity of aims and objectives. Everybody must be working from the same page of the same book. Making sure that the planning stages are thorough will ensure that your shooting time potential is maximised, and clarifying objectives and aims will help to ensure that any revisions needed at the end of a project will be minimised or eliminated altogether. In turn this means that the client obtained maximum value for their money, while at the same time you didn't work above and beyond the rates you were charging. 

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