Another Corporate Video

I’m currently in the middle of a fairly big corporate video project. The shoot included two days on location at a conference, brief b-roll shooting at a variety of retail establishments, and a whole lot of editing. We shot testimonials at that conference in early April, and we won’t have the project wrapped until September.

The project was put out for competitive bidding, but the environment was flexible. The low bidder wasn’t automatically getting the contract, because there were going to be some creative opportunities that might mitigate an otherwise higher price.

As it turned out, we were the low bidder, with pricing in line with the company’s expectations (they’d done similar projects for several years, but wanted a new video producer). The company rep told the non-winners what the final bid price was. One of those bidders, whose original price was about double what our price was, offered to match our price. That’s from the school of “too late”. If you have that much padding in your bid, you come off as not needing, or not wanting, the work. If you do want the work, submit a competitive bid in the first place.

The entire project has some interesting dynamics. The client is based in California. The conference where we shot the testimonials was in Boston. We needed to get transcripts of all 20 interviews, so I emailed the audio file to a woman in New Jersey, who emailed the transcripts back. The editing will also be done in NJ, and the retail establishments (for the b-roll) are all over the country. The video segments from the project will be hosted on the company web site, but also will be put on a DVD for trade show use.