Advice on how to deal with this client please.

Searcher

Searcher

Well-known member
I took on one of those pay you peanuts type of jobs where they keep adding to the job every chance they get. Driving to the gig I actually thought of turning back but I thought what the hell. The job was making a recording of a music concert. How hard can that be right?

So the shoot was meant to go for 3.5 hours and ends up going for 7. Because I had a job following I was in a mad panic afterwards and accidentally deleted one of the sd cards. I have never done that in my life and to say I was furious is a massive understatement (card is already recorded over) It was the wide shot for about 2 hours of the concert. Because the concert went 3.5 hours over time I could probably negotiate with a reasonable person. I was thinking I could offer a free teaser edit of the video or something. (The thought of having to negotiate when the pay is so ridiculously low is very frustrating) I still got decent footage with tights and even some wides with the a camera so not all is lost...

To put this in perspective the pay is $250 all up for a 7 hour gig and editing 5 hours of footage. Peanuts.
(So of the actual 5 hours of the concert for 3 hours I have proper coverage with two cameras and the last 2 just the one camera)

So I have not spoken to the guy and this morning I get an email asking me to provide him with a teaser of the concert. He is not an idiot. The job started off with the simple advertisement of "record a concert" and then he keeps adding to the work and hours every chance he gets. Of course I could say "sure that will cost you $1000... "

There is no contract just some emails between us. I certainly have proof that the original time he gave me was 3.5 hours not 7.

But basically I know this guy is going to use anything he can to get out of paying or getting me to do more work for free. I know I stuffed up by deleting the card but it would not have happened if he had been honest with me about the length of the concert (yes he deliberately misled me- you'll just have to take my word on that). Of course I take responsibility for my mistake but I have zero faith this guy won't use it against me to his advantage.

Obviously I have learned a lot of lessons out of this... contracts or at least a discussion about overtime needs to happen next time.

So now I would love to just throw out all the footage and be done with it (I would never do that but just saying). Basically by deleting that card I lost all leverage to ask for more money which I was planning on doing because of the massive over time. And also I believe he will reject the edit job unless I spend days making it a hell of a lot fancier than the money deserves.

So what are my options? Should I tell him deleting the card happened because of the massive overtime creating a mad rush? Should I just send him the footage and tell him to find someone else to edit it? I don't really want to spend another second on it because I feel like this will just turn into a saga. My gut tells me to not spend a second more on this than I have to. Maybe I should just make a rudimentary edit with a watermark on it and ask him to pay me before I send a copy without a watermark?

Thanks for any help. I guess the two parts of this are what to do when you delete a card of a live event and what to do with an problematic client who probably is never going to pay you?

Also at no point in any discussion did he tell me when he wants the footage by so I have that advantage I guess.

Thanks heaps for any advice.
 
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Clients asking for it all but just want to give you peanuts are a pain to deal with. The other day I sent an email to one of my clients telling him that future work are on my terms. Doing this you loose some clients but they are not worth to put any time into anyway.

It's to bad you deleted an original recording but that's a human error that anyone can do. If you have full coverage of the concert and didn't promise to do all angles in full you could just hand over the footage and be done with it. Make it as easy as you can and back out slowly from dealing with that client again.

I made a promise to myself to set my own terms and never give them up unless I want to. I wont budge to the usual price dealing or when a client wants it all but wont pay for it. Sure that'll make me do less jobs but it'll feel much better and save me a lot of frustration.
 
Thanks for that. I guess I'm just starting out so it's hard to say no to jobs. I did agree to "a two camera set-up" but I got a lot of footage at a far higher quality than what their $250 should give them. Maybe I should just spend a couple of hours doing a very quick edit and burn that to DVD.

I guess I'll start by telling them what happened. Ugh.
 
If your original agreement was $250 for a 3.5 hour concert I would do no work for him until you are paid. I would also not give any footage until you are paid. He is already paying you peanuts and lied about the length of the concert, you do not owe him anything until he pays.
 
Also you should not have to discount your rate because you accidentally deleted a card. It only happened because the guy lied to you about the scope of the project. I would say your mistake and his lying cancel each other out
 
So is the final deliverable just a teaser?
You had an "agreement" of sorts to record a 3.5 hr event with 2 cameras. The event ran twice as long as you were agreed to shoot. You shot the first half with two cameras so the extra time it ran over you only have with one camera, which wasn't part of the agreement anyway.
You do have footage of the whole event, right?

That's extra frustrating since you erased the card on accident.
As you now know, making a contract with a time allotted and hourly rate beyond time allowed must be future practice. That doens't help the current situation though.
 
Searcher said:
There is no contract just some emails between us.
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Emails may be regarded as a contract. It's hard to advise without knowing exactly what you offered and what was promised. If all you undertook was to record the concert, you seem to have done your part and you need to negotiate for the extras, keeping it friendly and reasonable on both sides.
 
Dear grinder, I suffered a catastrophic hard drive crash and all of the concert footage was lost. So sorry for the inconvenience.

Now go find a paying client.
 
the pay is $250 all up for a 7 hour gig and editing 5 hours of footage.
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I don't know how valuable $250 is to you, but I'd walk away from this one. Can you get the media to him on a drive? (that's a drive you'll never get back, right?) Just say you picked up a gig in Dubai and have to leave town, ASAP.

Clients or grinders....give it some time, you'll figure it out. But as for the present moment, I don't envy you.

A quick aside, I recently agreed to a very low budget cable spot in a moment of weakness. Clients grinded the ever-loving crap out of me, but I got it done. Once you reach a certain point, it's easier to finish the job than bail out. Be thankful for existing, great clients that you don't have to play games with!
 
Did you record anything to the SD card after deleting it? There's rather effective (and free!) recovery apps that can save it. If you have recorded to it afterwards it's more of a crap shot...

Also, if you have the first 3.5 hours covered, just tell them that one of your cameras ran out of space as you were told it would just be 3.5 hrs. Make it their fault you don't have all the footage.

Did you already get paid the $250? If not, it's a bit more delicate situation.
 
It is simple. What have you actually agreed to do for him on your end. From your posts I gather that it was two be two cameras shooting a 3.5 hour concert along with some form of edit of the material. So in theory you could have packed up your bags after 3.5 hours and said, "Sorry, I have another gig booked."

That there is only footage from one camera for the second half of the show is not germane. It was never in your agreement to shoot it at all, much less shoot it with two cameras.

I do not actually know if the above is correct or not, as it is gleaned from your posts. Perhaps there is more to the agreement of which we are unaware.

You are actually in the position of power here. The event is over and you have the footage. You can now let him know what you believe is fair based on your understanding of the agreement.

Send him an email stating what you agree to do for what you have already agreed to be paid. This is called defining the Scope Of Work. It should include your timetable, any and all deliverables including what formats and what physical materials, such as a hard drive. You can then note that if he wishes for anything extra then you can quote it. But first HE must ask for the extra (such as a teaser clip) and then you respond with a new, complete Scope Of Work email that includes this extra work at a new proposed rate. State that he must agree to this new offer in order for you to proceed.

And be sure to put into all of this a schedule for payment. At this low rate I would suggest you be paid in full before proceeding further.

In the future, I do all of this type of work when first dealing with a client. I will generally do a few emails or phone calls so that we both know what we're really discussing, perhaps a physical meeting depending on the scale of the job. Sometimes an entire proposal for the production would be in my hands if I am effectivey acting as the producer or even complete production entity for the job (as it appears you were). I generally ask for payment in thirds: one third upon the client accepting my proposal for how I will execute the job (that is generally a basic budget, a time table and a Scope Of Work document), the second payment at commencement of production (as in "hand me a check before I pull out the camera) and the final third upon completion and delivery (when I hand over the finished work, often in the form of a hard drive).

It doesn't matter how small the job or how green you are. Work is work and we must all strive to be professional. For a smaller job this could probably all be handled in a short email of a paragraph or two, but the basic information is the same.
 
just tell them that one of your cameras ran out of space as you were told it would just be 3.5 hrs. Make it their fault
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Wait, hold on....this may negate any "promise of future work" :grin:

seriously, "make it their fault" 100% backed. Don't apologize to this bozo. 3.5 hours over the proposed time. Friggin' musicians. You know he's not gonna pay anyway, right? At least not in a timely fashion.
 
Wow thanks for all the help guys. Truly awesome. Learnt so much right here.

I didn't give all the details in the initial post because it's complicated. It's that classic example of where the initial agreement was made and he kept adding new twists ("please arrive at 1.30 to check lighting"- I was already scheduled to arrive half an hour early so I ended up being 2 hours early when 30 minutes would have been more than enough), And then just before the shoot he adds that he wants behind the scene shots of musicians getting ready, shots during intermission etc etc. It will finish at 6.30 then 7 then 7.30 then 8 then it actually finishes at 8.40. And like an idiot I kept just getting on with it. They kept performing and performing and performing.

I can't throw the footage out because it was mostly kids and teenagers performing and I would feel bad deleting the footage but if it was just some interview with him I would have no qualms.

The agreement was for me to edit the footage (the whole concert) and put it onto a dvd but I'm loathe to do that. I just can't sees him being happy with it until he has bled me dry.

Hopefully I'll have some clarity later soon about what I should do. Maybe I'll start just by seeing what his reaction is to the missing footage. And let him know I'm not making that teaser.
 
A different view:

The biggest issue here is you deleted the card. That is unforgivable. A total fail. You need to man up and tell the client the truth instead of looking to the internet to find ways to weasel out of your responsibility.

And, so what if the guy asks for behind the scenes shots? Get on with it and stop moaning. That's normal practice.

If you failed to manage your client's expectations, that's also your fault. If you failed to properly assess how much work you'd need to do to shoot and edit the job, that's also your fault. You could have said NO, the fact that you didn't is also your fault.

The concert ran on a little, big deal, you worked until 8:40, it's not exactly 5:00am, concerts overrun, it goes with the territory. Stop clock watching and stop moaning. Try working with real rock stars.

Bottom line is; this is a children's concert, don't turn it into a drama...
 
Liam Hall said:
A different view:

The biggest issue here is you deleted the card. That is unforgivable. A total fail. You need to man up and tell the client the truth instead of looking to the internet to find ways to weasel out of your responsibility.

And, so what if the guy asks for behind the scenes shots? Get on with it and stop moaning. That's normal practice.

If you failed to manage your client's expectations, that's also your fault. If you failed to properly assess how much work you'd need to do to shoot and edit the job, that's also your fault. You could have said NO, the fact that you didn't is also your fault.

The concert ran on a little, big deal, you worked until 8:40, it's not exactly 5:00am, concerts overrun, it goes with the territory. Stop clock watching and stop moaning. Try working with real rock stars.

Bottom line is; this is a children's concert, don't turn it into a drama...
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I think you make some fair points. I don't think I deserved the condescending tone but I can understand why you might jump to conclusions without knowing all the intricate details or what kind of person I am. If you knew some of the stuff I have done without pay over the past year or so then you might see that I'm not the kind of person to count the seconds. I had a gig to get to (which I ended up being an hour late for) and that's the reason I was clock watching. Although I don't think doing 7 hours work when paid for 3.5 is fair even it it didn't end at 5am. And yes you are right that it was my fault not to be clearer beforehand and for taking the job in the first place. I would have thought the fact that I'd stated how much I'd learnt in this thread showed that I knew I'd made mistakes. There has been some very good advice on how to approach a client next time.

After I wrote my last post I actually just sent him an email telling him about the lost footage and that I didn't have time to make the teaser and I would get the DVD to him soon. I'm going to make a simple edit of the DVD and send it to him. If he doesn't pay, whatever, I'll chalk it down as lesson learned.

Probably plenty of people in this thread have expressed feelings that have come from personal experiences and have projected their own worst client onto my one. It's only natural. And perhaps I'm guilty of being a little over emotional. Having never deleted a card in my life accidentally it was the worst feeling. And knowing that it basically turned me into the bad guy was incredibly frustrating.

Well I'll edit the video, send it to him and see if that's the end of this.
 
I had a drive going south with all material for one overseas client without having had time to make a backup. I felt really bad and didn't charge anything and I never saw that client again. Totally my fault and lesson learned. I now do dual recording and backup asap. I believe this was back in 2009 and I've never lost any material since.
 
I didn't mean to be condescending. Apologies for that. I meant to be brutally honest. Chalking it down as several lessons learned is the best outcome. Take your pain and move on to better things.
 
Hey, you live and learn.

I have been doing this a very long time, and just learned a lesson recently.

I was asked by an ad agency for footage, designs and setups for 2 of their clients I was doing broadcast commercials for. I have known these guys for many years now and worked on a handshake. They claimed they wouldn't be producing any broadcast work with this, just a couple of social media pieces for Facebook and the like. So I said OK. What do they do? Hire their own in-house video person, start producing broadcast TV commercials, and stiff me for work going back to last November.

All I can say is… Karma can be a real *****!
 
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