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We Really, Really Want You to Be Happy, so, we’ve put this long-winded section together, complete with an inside look at the intimate workings of the Shadow Productions machine. Reading through this section will make your Shadow Productions experience infinitely more pleasurable.
Price, Timeframe, Quality—Pick Any Two Some clichés never get stale. This is one of those, and we really, really like it. Here’s the scoop: We can give you great quality for a great price. All we need is a reasonable time frame. Deal? How do we define “reasonable time frame”? Think in terms of the Rule of Two. If you’re an agency or media rep who’s written a spot and we’re lining up talent, generally a week is enough time, plus TWO days to produce afterward. If you want to be on the safe side, TWO weeks is a guarantee. If you’re a business for whom we’re creating animated TV spots, a radio campaign or doing some web site work, think TWO months. Can it take longer? Sure. Can it take less time? Yep. We do emergency work all the time, but that’s where the biggest rule of TWO kicks in (see the title of this section). The more time we at Shadow have to start with, the more options we have, and, really, options make the world go ‘round. Here’s what helps: Timeframe: Let us know when your spot or spots need to be on the air, project needs to be complete, or your web site needs to be finished. Script Approval: Have the spot entirely approved at least a day before coming to the studio, and e-mail us a copy at least a day early. Project Approval: It’s always helpful to factor in time for the approval process. How many people need to sign off and will they be available to hear or see the project before the air date? Remember that if you want your radio spot to air on a Monday, radio stations like to receive it by the end of the previous Thursday. Same goes for TV. Would you like your project delivered on a CD? Via e-mail? Letting us know as many of these details as possible helps ensure a smooth process, and helps us hit your deadlines. Flexibility and Ownership: Be ready to tell your client that the changes we jointly made in production were necessary because, oh, for instance, “thesaurus” is a really hard word to say eight times fast (no matter how much they like the word, “thesaurus”). This is Not Morocco In many countries, you can’t buy an orange without bargaining for it. We’re not like that. Shadow Productions is, as they say in Massachusetts, wicked cheap. So, if you’re a media rep or an ad agency and your client is like the little old lady who has the kid clean out her attic and mow the lawn and cut the hedges and get chased by hornets, and she gives him a nickel, well, see, it’s this way: Shadow Productions is, as they say in Massachusetts, wicked cheap. You just can’t get this kind of quality for less money. So, please, no bargain hunters or early birds. We don’t discount from our rates because we already have truly awesome rates. Our Project or Your Project One easy way to save money and hassle is to decide if you want us to spearhead your project, or whether you want to. What’s the difference? Read on. We Spearhead It Shadow Productions calling the shots for your project means two main things: Cost assuredness (the estimate is guaranteed through the first client revision), and an added level of care (read: anal retentiveness). If it’s our project, here’s what we’re responsible for:
MAJOR TIP: The cheapest thing we do at Shadow Productions is to hold meetings and write up ideas. Once scripts are approved and we go into production, changes become exponentially more expensive. Here’s the thing to remember: If you place your faith in us, we will deliver you a cost-effective product that gets results. If you decide things by committee and involve Mel from accounting plus your mom in the decision process, you might get a great product, but you also might get what we fondly refer to as a Frankenproject.. Estimates—Our Way If you hire Shadow Productions, we’ll give you an estimate and, provided you don’t change scripts once they’re recorded, decide on new voices after they’re already produced or ask for extra work that wasn’t discussed in the original estimate, we’ll stick to your estimate. That means that if we choose your talent, for instance, and they’re just not getting it done and we have to hire more talent, you don’t pay for that; we do. More than once in the past, Shadow Productions has gone over budget and taken the loss in order to get the job done right. We’ve done it even when we know the client wouldn’t know the difference between what we consider an OK job and a great job. We’d know. You Spearhead It If you’re calling the shots, you will not find people more eager to give you exactly what you’re looking for. If it’s your project, we’ve set up this web site to make it as easy as possible for you to make your project a success, from animation and radio spot samples to voice and music samples to pricing information. Tell us who you like, what you like, what style you like, what you’d like your project to be like. We’ll follow your instructions to the letter. Clients occasionally like to use existing music beds with their projects. Some of this music is in the public domain, but in general, it’s good to assume it’s not legal for you to use someone else’s recording without paying royalties. We don’t recommend using anyone else’s music for a number of reasons (we’re glad to talk with you further about this) but if you want to use someone else’s licensed music without paying royalties, here’s the reality: It’s illegal, though you probably won’t get caught. If we can’t talk you out of using licensed music, we request that you provide for us in writing a request that we use the music in your spot, as well as an acknowledgement that you are supplying the music to us, and that you accept responsibility for this decision. We’re not being glib when we say that your project can take as much time or as little as you want it to. We estimate how long it would take US to do your project, but we don’t know how long it would take for YOU to have us do your project. So, we don’t offer guarantees as to when your project will be finished. If this sounds a bit uppity, here’s an example of what we’re talking about: You pick a voice from our roster to be in your spot. We record the session and you then decide this voice wasn’t right, and we need to record another voice. Will we do everything we can to stick to your original time frame? Yes. Can we promise that we’ll hit your original time frame? No. Estimates—Your Way If you want to hear us tell you what we think is the most efficient way to get your project done at Shadow Productions, we’ll tell you, but that may not be the way you like to work. No problem. We provide estimates, but unlike with our own projects, we don’t bind ourselves to them. This gives clients the option of guiding a project based on many criteria, chief of which is price. You want to spend more, you can. You want to keep to a tight budget, you can. We’ve found that this helps our clients become more fully collaborative in the production process. And, naturally, this helps your new pals at Shadow avoid getting keelhauled. Let us give you an example of what we’re talking about. You pick a voice from our roster to be in your spot, but it just doesn’t work out. Hey, it happens. Talent is a little like the weather. You know what a July day or a January night in Vermont should be like, and in 99% of the cases, they’re just like you thought. But one percent of the time, it’s 50 degrees in January. Maybe the talent is off that day. Maybe you thought you heard something in the talent’s demo that wasn’t there. Maybe your client for indescribable reasons just plain doesn’t “like” the voice (for instance, he thinks she sounds like his ex-wife—don’t laugh, this happens). No problem, but Shadow Productions doesn’t assume that cost, and so it’s always a good idea to include a little room for this in your estimate to your client. And, we encourage you to refer your client to the talent section of this website to aid in the selection process (if you don’t want ‘em to know they can listen to our talent on-line, don’t worry; your secret’s safe with us). Music Now, while we won’t re-sell your music, we are big on recycling here at Shadow. So, we came up with a handy policy, which went into effect on August 1, 2005. It goes like this: When you purchase music from Shadow Productions, you buy the exclusive rights to the music for two years. If you’d like to own the music for four years, we charge an extra $500. If you’d like to own it for the life of your business, we charge $800. These are not cumulative charges. In other words, if your jingle cost $3000 and you want to own it for life, we charge you $3800. The reason for this is simple: On a regular basis, we have clients in need of music who don’t have the budget for it. These include non-profits, one-shot situations, pull-a-rabbit-out-of-our-hats deals, etc. And generally, on our shelves there sit years of music beds no longer in use by their owners. In these cases, we play matchmaker. So if we can pull someone’s bacon out of the fire by recycling a music bed, we’ll do it. Talent We are proud to offer a varied and talented roster of voice actors to our clients. However, it’s important to note that the talent we hire are neither employees nor representatives of Shadow Productions. They are colleagues and sub-contractors. So, on the extremely rare occasion that you’re not pleased with a voice, we consider it part of the cost of doing a project, much like writing or re-writing a script. While we rave about the quality of the local talent here in Burlington, we are also happy to offer out-of-market talent on our roster. In general, we can offer pretty near anything you’d get in a major market for the tiniest fraction of the cost. For instance, at Shadow Productions, in most cases, talent works on an hourly--not per-spot—basis. This makes things much more affordable. For your convenience, we have edited the work of our talent into small segments and posted them on this site so that you can listen to what they do and decide for yourself if that’s the voice you want. And if you want an opinion on someone, please ask us! In many cases, we have several years of experience with these folks, and we’ll be happy to help you find the right fit. If you want to bring in your own talent, great; we always like to meet new voice talent. Likewise, if there’s someone out of market who you like to work with, we can easily work with that person as well. You can direct the session from our studio, and the talent can send us the voice tracks electronically. Your Budget There are two words, which, unlike any others in the English language, conjure up images of big trouble. No, these words are not “Middle East.” These words are, “the budget.” When you come in with a fixed budget, we know how to nail it. In fact, we promise you we’ll nail it, and, boy, have we pulled off some miracles in the past. So, what’s the problem? If we hire a painter and get him to agree to do a job for x-amount of money, we have to assume that we can’t interrupt him every 10 minutes, change our minds about the color halfway through, later ask him to put on six coats instead of three, and still have him be able to stick to his estimate. If you get this analogy, we’ll be very great pals, indeed. Billing Here’s where you can peek at the Secret Business Strategy of Shadow Productions! Very exciting stuff. Shadow Productions was designed—and is continually re-designed—to be both very high quality and very affordable. We call this the Vermont Model in that, if we want to produce really good work in Vermont, we’d better figure out how to make it affordable for the people who live here. Our business model (business majors, take note!) is to Stay Busy All The Time. Think of that old song and sing along: “We work hard for the money, so hard for it, honey.” If you’ve shopped around for similar services, you’ll know what we’re saying is true. So, it’s very bad mojo when: Our clients declare bankruptcy owing us lots of money (for fun, check out the Shadow Productions Deadbeat Hall of Fame!) Our clients ask for discounts just ‘cuz it’s fun Our clients ask for all sorts of stuff after the budget or estimate has been approved Shadow Productions’ studio fees are $120/hr. for radio production, $60/hr. for writing, and $150/hr. for animation.* Compared with lawyers, this is cheap, and lawyers don’t have all the really cool equipment. Plus, we don’t charge for phone calls and paperclips. Talent generally runs between $80 and $200/hr. CD’s are $10 per. And, our goal is to never throw anything away, because you just never know what someone might want six months or six years later. So, we charge a $25 archiving fee. Your spot and even the unedited tracks for your spot become a permanent part of the Shadow Productions library. Just imagine. Your Invoice Your invoice has a little note mentioning that we request payment in 15 days. Naturally, we also know this doesn’t always happen. However, while this has absolutely nothing to do with you personally, we have had the unfortunate experience in the past with certain individuals (if you want to know who, just ask!) who have been happy to take advantage of our trust in order to run up big bills that they never paid and which, in retrospect, they probably never had an intention of paying. Therefore, we do two things: If you’re a new client, we will ask for one-half of the cost of the project upon script approval. Projects in motion for three months or longer will be billed on a monthly basis as work is completed. And, if you’re a regular client who is 30 days behind, and you request additional work from us, we’ll take that icky step of nicely requesting payment on the current invoice before we do any further work. Like dad used to say at spanking-time, this will hurt us more than it hurts you. We would be happy to put your next project on a credit card as well. (Did we mention that if you want to know who’s a defaulter, just ask?!) Instant Estimates We’re asked for estimates all the time. In our never-ending efforts to save our clients money, we’ve included this handy do-it-yourself estimate form because when we’re not writing you an estimate, you’re saving money. Here is our rate sheet:
What’s this mean to you? Read on:
Don’t Look Now; Your Hair’s On Fire Shadow Productions has a unique policy on last-minute work: If we’re not busy, we’ll climb greasy smooth walls for you. If we’re already booked and we tell you this, you can safely assume we’re already working nights and weekends, so don’t look for flex time there. Nevertheless, we realize that sometimes, things simply must happen. For these cases, we have created our own anti-suicide tool known as a surcharge. Hence, if we’re squeezing you in where there’s simply no room, our audio studio rate is $150/hr. Our animation studio rate is $170/hr (STILL cheaper than lawyers!). Now, we know YOU would never do this, but would you believe that some people ask us to work the night shift but then aren’t available when we need approval or to ask a question? If it’s crunch time and we’re squeezing a project through, all we ask is that you be available whether it’s a night, weekend, or vacation. It’s simple: If 8:00-10:00 pm is the only time all week to finish your project and we can’t reach you then, we can’t finish your project. Assume that if you give us two weeks’ notice, chances are we can fit any small project in. If it’s a week’s notice, we’ll let you know when we’re in surcharge territory. We Believe in Pro Bono Work Shadow Productions likes to do our part to make a better world. One way we do this is to produce radio spots and do web design work for non-profits. If you’re a non-profit, feel free to call us. Here’s our policy: If you have a budget, we’ll work with it. If you don’t, we’ll work without it. All we ask are two things: One, if you have a budget, please say so. In addition to the fact that it’s always more fun to get paid than not, there’s also more we can do for you if you have some cash to work with, including possibly making you a TV spot. And, two, if you’re not planning to pay for air time on the radio, we ask that you make a sincere effort to ensure that your spot will get played. Radio stations receive PSA’s all the time, and they don’t have the room to run them all. Therefore, your personal lobbying of station program directors will vastly increase your chances of getting your spot played. We also humbly ask that you include Shadow Productions as a sponsor in your event or your literature, and we will happily provide you with a file of our logo. We’re Really Good At This Yeah, we’re laid-back; yeah, we’re friendly; yeah, we believe in collaboration and not throwing our weight around. No, we don’t go around with our top buttons buttoned. But our clients tend to think we do a great job for them. It’s because we really like what we do, and we work really hard at it, and if someone thinks differently, we want to know so we can do better. When you’ve been in business nearly 20 years, you start to accept certain things: How much you start to look like the people you work with. That you’ll probably never be president. And that it’s OK to tell people the easiest, cheapest, fastest and most efficient way to get something done. They don’t have to believe you, but you do owe it to them to tell them. Over the course of producing close to 10,000 spots over the years, we’ve worked with just about every kind of business imaginable. So, say you’re a bank, or you work with a bank. Yes, yes, you know more about your bank client than we do. But guess what? We’ve also been working with banks for 20 years. We know bankers, we know where their comfort zone is, and don’t worry; we won’t try to sell them hula hoops. So, you can feel safe entrusting us with your project. We can help you a great deal if you let us. |
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