charging for nature shoots

[Radim Schreiber]

I am curious how would you charge for custom nature shoots. For example, client would like to have a specific waterfall or specific beach shot. It would be easy to price this if we had guaranteed weather conditions, but they are not. In fact it could take several days to get the right shot that the client desires. You can expect that you will have to travel to remote destination to get this done, so would you charge for downtime or increase price of the shot to accommodate the down time? Some subjects may have higher chances in good weather conditions (waterfall) and some much lower (sunny day with small puffy clouds), how would you factor that in your budget?

Thanks for your advice,
Radim

 

[Rick Burnett]

I can see how that could be pretty complex. Most of the people that need nature specifics that I have worked with end up buying stock footage only because looking at the cost for what you are being asked to do (and the overhead) they didn't find it worth it.

 

[Radim Schreiber]

Our product requires 1-4 hrs long un-interrupted scenes, hard to get as a stock.

 

[Rick Burnett]

Yeah, that would be hard to get that much footage as stock.

 

[Anson Fogel]

What we do

What we do

we have had some similar situations, in our case, we have stock, folks find it, then ask us for something more specific.

In those cases we either charged a single flat fee (when the desired shots were clear cut) that we knew would cover the variables of weather and time on our end. Or, we charged a day rate, with a range - you will pay us up to X days for these shots, paid on delivery. Day rates were pretty standard, the fixed fee was based on Getty's pricing for their use.

 

[Larry Gebhardt]

This brings up a question that came up a while back...a client wanted me to find some scenic type shots...mountains, waterfalls, etc. that were very long takes...up to 5 min. long, with very little camera movement...does anyone sell this kind of footage?...most of the stock sites I have researched only offer clips less than 30 sec long, for the most part.

Thanks,

Larry

 

[Anson Fogel]

Larry, our experience at least with getty is this - they generally want sub 30 second clips because a) that's what sells and usually the buyer only uses a few seconds of it, and b) customers browsing their footage clips online don't want to troll through 30 secs or 90 secs of footage to find the "best" part, so to speak. Finally, outside of stock agency practices, most of us out shooting for stock don't do multi minute takes of such static scenes - only action when its sensible.

We often shoot longer takes (especially overcranked, where we might end up with a 2 minute shot when only shooting for 20 seconds) but then chop them up into lesser or multiple clips for submission to stock.

FWIW, we do have long takes of various nature scenes, most of which is not online. PM me for details.