do you or have you made money with your gear?

[Erik Olson]

Production company. I stopped carrying business cards with a title because I honestly don't know what to put on them.

I have two shows in development (EP / Producer), act as DP for Road Rage, operated cameras on a Discovery series this summer and produced a UN live event just before that (through Principal logistics).

My sense is that quite a few others on this board keep a diverse book of business as well. I dunno - how would you describe what you do?

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[stickypod]

An inventor. When it comes to cameras, I'm an amateur. My camera mounts work great and I get plenty of compliments, but that doesn't make me a cameraman. How often are you actually behind the lens getting the shot?

I want to know because I obviously have a tremendous amount of research experience with mounting a camera to a car (anything for that matter), but I know I lack the experience of actually working the cameras to bring it all together. With that said, I get plenty of people asking if they can help me with a shoot. Unfortunately, I'm not a production company and I don't know what's involved in bringing everything together. I'm sure that I can, but at what cost?

How do you determine what to charge? Do you have some type of script presented to you?

 

[Erik Olson]

We budget for filmed entertainment based on script breakdowns. The sides are marked-up by location and time of day - consolidating set-ups wherever possible and further broken into departments (e.g., talent, camera, electrics, properties, SFX and so forth).

This process tells the line producer, UPM and or production coordinator what resources to allocate and when for each day of days.

A good line producer has infinite information resources at her fingertips for costing by department - labor, fringes, equipment rental, stock, processing and post - stopping just short of P&A in most instances.

e

 

[Daniel Rubino]

I was at a wedding last year and the video cost close to £1000 I guess that's about $1500 or so but it looked like crap. Ultra shakey handheld garbage and he was far too far away for sound.

I'd be too scared of messing up someones big day but this was a profesional outfit doing a lot of business and I could do a better job with my sony stills camera.

LOL! My sentiments exactly. I've seen the women in my family on their wedding day, and there is no way that I would get involved with that. What do you do if the person accuses you of making them look too fat in the video? There is just no way. I agree with Barry it takes a special kind of person to deal with that.

 

[Lensmith]

I have a lot of respect for wedding photographers in general.

I have a lot of respect for wedding photographers in general.

Folks who shoot weddings for a living earn every cent!

Give me a street riot or military action any day over a stressed out bride and mother in law to be!:shocked: