I'm not suggesting doing clients a favor of reducing crew so they can save money; I'm suggesting make more money for yourself instead of hiring unnecessary crew.
Yeah, I'm quite happy with how things are now. I really like driving and traveling, and sleeping in a car is kind of like camping, and I enjoy that aspect as well. The last two or three years I only drove 20,000 miles per year, compared to the 30,000 the previous year, and I didn't feel like I was driving as much as I would have liked, so I was hoping to get back to driving more, and now this year I'm on track to drive about 50,000-60,000 miles. I may have actually reached a point where it's a bit more than I'd like, maybe 40,000 would be ideal, but it's been good overall. I moved to Atlanta a few months ago, haven't established much in terms of local clients, so most of my jobs are out of town, within a 0-7 hour drive in all different directions (Memphis, Raleigh, Atlanta, Charlotte, Greesnsboro, Nashville, Birmingham, Cincinatti, New Orleans, Tampa, Jacksonville, Orlando, etc.). Atlanta being centrally located compared to where I used to live in Tampa has been great for me. I would like to get more local clients, but haven't gotten around to working on locally marketing myself more yet.
I'm not suggesting doing clients a favor of reducing crew so they can save money; I'm suggesting make more money for yourself instead of hiring unnecessary crew.
Let me give an example beyond a PA of how one-man-banding can be a lot more profitable. Say a client comes to me with a $3600 budget for an interview shoot. Now, say I don't know their budget, but I can quote them two ways. The first one which may be your preferred (or typical) way...me (DP), C300 Mark II, L-series lenses, lighting, tripod ($1900), sound operator w/gear ($850), gaffer/grip ($600), PA ($250), for a total of $3600. Perhaps I'm up-charging the crew rates for a total of $250, so I'm getting $2150 from the job in profit.
Now, the second, much more profitable way for me to quote this job is as a one-man-band, which would be me, Arri Amira (or two C300 Mark IIs), Canon cinema zoom(s), lighting kit, audio, tripod, for a total of $3600, all for me. Now, if they happen to have a bigger budget, then after they've hired me with my best gear at my top rate for an interview, then they can ask about adding crew in.
Whenever a client asks me for a quote, I rarely quote crew into the quote unless they specifically ask for crew, otherwise I just assume one-man-band, and try to get the best rate I can with my best equipment. I typically upcharge crew rates by around $100, so if I'm booking and paying out a three person crew for one day, I make around $300 off of that, and I find it takes me around an hour of time per person, so, I'm making $100 per hour for crewing. Now, contrast that with if the client decides to book my higher end equipment instead, which since it's a bit larger and heavier, may take another 5 minute trip, and may take a few more minutes to prep before the shoot...so, all told, I'm making $1500 extra off of the higher end equipment for about 15-20 minutes of work compared to $300 for three hours of putting a crew together.
Now, with this strategy of choosing equipment over crew, I get to make more money, have justification for owning more expensive equipment, my client gets better equipment for the same price, and I believe I'm actually able to provide the client with a better product than what a crew would have done with lower quality equipment. As far as sound, I own top of the line mics. Heck, I hired an audio guy for an interview shoot a few months ago, paid him a decent $800 rate, and he puts up his Sennheser ME66 mic for the indoor interview. And here I'm thinking, I have a Schoeps CMC641 sitting in my car which is a far superior mic, as well as a Sanken CS-3e which is also much superior, as my mics are often superior mics to what the pro sound guys have.
And then the lighting guy is typically not going to come up with a better lighting scheme than what I find myself capable of doing since I'm quite capable of lighting an interview, so at that point I'm really just directing them to do what I could have done on my own as far as setting up lights. And the PA really just helps with carrying gear in and out, which I also could have done. So, assuming there's no big hurry to setup this interview (which there typically isn't on my shoots (just sometimes)), not to mention I often setup on my own about as quickly as crewed shoots, then me taking a little extra time to setup is not going to result in a lower quality end product for the client. So again, I get to own better equipment, make more money, and provide the client with a better product at the same price.
Obviously I'm not saying no shoots should be done with crew. For example, I'll insist on a sound guy when one is actually needed. I just feel many shoots have unnecessary crew and there are better ways to get profit from clients than by paying other people, particularly if the client doesn't have an unlimited budget.
I recall a couple or few years ago this producer wanted to hire me to DP for a really low budget feature shoot - said he could maybe do $300 per day with gear (I had a C300 Mark II at the time and other good gear). So we were discussing rates and trying to figure out how to make it work, since he had limited funds and any extra money he gave me would mean some other part of the budget would need to be cut. Eventually we concluded I didn't need an AC, so I was able to negotiate to $500 per day for myself. And it worked out fine. At the time I hadn't really worked with an AC before, so I was like, "What is the point? I can pull my own focus. I do it all the time." Since then I've had AC's pulling focus wirelessly on crewed shoots and it does make things easier, and of course for Steadicam work makes various shots possible. But I still feel like when an AC is not pulling focus (such as the shoot not having a wireless follow focus setup, or some reality TV shoot where there's no follow focus, etc.), then the AC does what? Helps change lenses? I can do that with L-series lenses so easily, in like 5-10 seconds. At this point I feel like they're glorified PAs, but getting paid AC rates. I typically have specific ways I rig my camera, so don't want to trust an AC to get it right.
A few months ago a potential client said they had $1500 in the budget for me and an audio guy. I said my rates started at $1500 at the time, so I could do audio and take the full budget. They considered it, but ended up not hiring me. But sometimes these cases do work out, and it's cases like these, where the clients have limited budget, but still enough budget for you to make good profit, if the crew is cut down. Again, only crew that isn't actually needed. Most shoots I can handle my own audio, and when I can't, I make sure we have an audio guy.
Yeah, I'm quite happy with how things are now. I really like driving and traveling, and sleeping in a car is kind of like camping, and I enjoy that aspect as well. The last two or three years I only drove 20,000 miles per year, compared to the 30,000 the previous year, and I didn't feel like I was driving as much as I would have liked, so I was hoping to get back to driving more, and now this year I'm on track to drive about 50,000-60,000 miles. I may have actually reached a point where it's a bit more than I'd like, maybe 40,000 would be ideal, but it's been good overall. I moved to Atlanta a few months ago, haven't established much in terms of local clients, so most of my jobs are out of town, within a 0-7 hour drive in all different directions (Memphis, Raleigh, Atlanta, Charlotte, Greesnsboro, Nashville, Birmingham, Cincinatti, New Orleans, Tampa, Jacksonville, Orlando, etc.). Atlanta being centrally located compared to where I used to live in Tampa has been great for me. I would like to get more local clients, but haven't gotten around to working on locally marketing myself more yet.
Call me weird, but I like sleeping in my car, find it comfortable, convenient, free, and time saving. I sleep better in my car than in hotels, and get nice 7-8 hour sleeps. I'm able to lay down all the way in my car, legs fully stretched, on a few layers of comforters, so about as comfortable as a bed. Photo....
My jobs pay enough that I could afford a hotel, I just feel that hotels to me are a waste of both time and money. Consider time - you spend 30 minutes finding and booking the hotel, then get there at 10pm...30 minutes checking in and unloading any equipment you don't want to leave in the car, then spend a good amount of time getting settled into the room, get your laptop out, browse DVXuser, reply to topics, turn the TV on, catch some movie on HBO that you get hooked on, two hours later the movie is done, get ready for sleep, and now it's 2am, four hours after you got to the hotel. Call time is 8am tomorrow, and you want to wake up at 7am to catch continental breakfast, plus you have to spend 15 or so minutes bringing gear back to the car. So, all told you get 5 hours of sleep and wasted five hours awake at the hotel.
Now on the other hand, sleeping in the car, you pull over at a rest stop or travel station where there are always lots of people also sleeping in their cars, you're probably not going to waste time watching a movie or browsing DVXuser, so what do you do? You go right to sleep, at, say 11pm (you left home a bit later since you knew you wouldn't be wasting so much time at a hotel). Wake up at 7:30am, grab some fast food (5 minutes), eat on way to shoot, and then you arrive with a good sleep and not having wasted so much time at a hotel.
Now, the mentality of travel. Client asks me to do a job for say $2,300, it's six hours away, and I'm working as a local. 12 hour round trip. My mentality is, no wasting time at a hotel, no loosing money by going to a hotel, 12 hours of driving is fun, so not exactly work, the gas and vehicle wear and tear is around $150, so I'm making $2150 in profit. If the shoot ends at 5pm, I can be back home at 11pm, and ready to go for another shoot the next day, so even though there are 12 hours of driving plus an 8-10 hour shoot, I'm still only giving up one day of my time, and making $2150. Good money. I'm happy. Now, since I have the ability to travel cheaply and efficiently I can market myself in several major cities, and perhaps succeed at what a lot of freelancers struggle with, which is staying regularly busy with full rate jobs. Which is what I've been doing with this, regularly getting booked at around $2k and upward per day, driving a ton, and making $100k in the first 5.5 months of this year, and $26.5k in May, just from shooting (no editing). Not bad money for a single 31 year old.
Now say someone has a different mentality toward travel. They get offered a $2300 job, but with 12 hours of travel, they think of it as a two day job, so $1150 per day. Then they spend $100 for hotel, and decide to get two hotel nights, so $200. They calculate their gas and wear and tear at the government rate instead of their actual losses, so imagine they loose $300 on that. Then instead of either packing food or eating cheap fast food, they go to nice/decent restaurants and spend $100 on food that would have been cheaper had they stayed home. Now, this $2300 per day job suddenly becomes a $850 per day job, which, if they own a lot of gear and are used to making $1k-2k per day, suddenly don't feel like they're making enough money. So what do they do? They pass on the job, sit at home, and make nothing. Because travel is too much for them and they're not able to enjoy it, do it efficiently, and cheaply. Nothing wrong with that; to each their own. I'm just saying it's been working well for me.
Now a bit back to the original topic, as you can see from the photo above, there's not a lot of room for a full-size cart in there. The Remin Kartmaster HD-500 does look decently small, though 44 lbs seems a bit heavy. That could possibly work.
I think my current cart could work too, and I just need to slim down my lighting kit. It's in a big, long Manfrotto bag now, so I'd like to get some smaller lights and put it in a bag half the size. Then with proper arrangement I could fit everything on one cartload, either with my current cart or a new cart.
Yeah, perhaps just 5%-10% of my jobs involve really long hauls through parking garages, elevators, security, etc., and often in those cases there's either a PA or producer to help with equipment. More often it's some corporateion in the suburbs, a residential home, etc., where the round trip may take just five minutes or less.
