I was breaking all kinds of traffic laws driving to
different reception venues and frantically looking for my camera bag. I tried
calling the photographer and he wouldn’t pick up. I tried calling the bride and
groom but they wouldn’t pick up. The whole episode was straight out of a
nightmare.
Thankfully, it *was* just a nightmare and waking up from my slumber
put the world back into place. This, apparently, is a fairly common nightmare
that we in the wedding industry have. I saw recently on Facebook that a couple
of my friends mentioned they woke to the same or similar nightmare.
But what’s worse than this nightmare – that goes away when
the sun comes up – is the real-life nightmare that a client is unhappy with how
long they have to wait to receive their wedding movie. Most of the time, the
disconnect happens when the client’s expectation for what is a reasonable delivery
time doesn’t match what the boutique wedding filmmaker think is a realistic
delivery timeframe.
So what is a realistic timeframe within which to receive
your movie? To answer that, we have to first get a sense of what a filmmaker’s
workload looks like. Take a look below to see the following tables that compare
a client’s typical work year to the wedding filmmaker’s.
Client:
# of Annual Work Weeks
|
# annual work days at 8-hrs each
|
Annual Work Hours
|
50
|
250
|
2000
|
(I took a really
rough survey and just plugged in the different ranges that people reported back
to me)
Filmmaker:
# of Wedding per Year
|
Hrs of Post Production per Movie
|
Annual Editing Hours
|
20-30
|
30-60
|
600-1800
|
As you can see, sometimes a boutique wedding filmmaker (and
by “boutique”, I mean companies that have just one or two employees) can spend
up to 90% of his work-year editing wedding movies. And that only leaves a few
weeks to handle ALL the other aspects of their job. There are a lot of other
things to do!
Most boutique company owners also serve as their own
webmasters, PR consultant, marketing director, graphic artist, sound engineer,
disc duplication technician, office manager, tax accountant, payroll manager,
receptionist, head buyer, IT guy, secretary, and on and on and on…
We answer all our own emails and answer every phone call
that comes in. We process all the paperwork that comes across our desk and we
still find time to create an artistic wedding movie for the client.
So having said all of that, what’s a reasonable timeframe
within which a client should receive a wedding movie?
I don’t know.
(read on for the happy ending...)
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