posted on Thursday, August 18, 2005 by For the last year & a half, I've never been able to fully cross off "restart video business" from my 'to-do' list. It's sat there, half on - half off, the back-burner for far too long.
To explain: When living in Michigan, several months before spontaneously deciding to move to North Hollywood, I ran a business out of the house that consisted of taping theatre performances or sporting events and editing them onto DVDs. It started off very small, but was beginning to branch out to "new" business, I even began taking away clients from longtime Ann Arbor video-services simply by word of mouth... it wasn't much, but it was starting to pay the bills. And then, I left it all behind to get away from the snow and move cross-country to sunny California.
It's not simply that I enjoyed [very, very much] editing day in day out from the comfort of my own "home office"... it's also that the cost of living in Hollywood can get a bit rough sometimes on a "minimal salary". Editing for myself again would, on-top of allowing us to not live paycheck to paycheck, benefit several things:
Most importantly, it would free up a lot of time for me, and time is something I'm always in need of - time to edit, time to write, time to train for our next big ride, time to focus 100% on 'pedal'.Right now I'm in the middle of putting the finishing touches on the website, designing and purchasing 5,000 6x9 postcards to advertise everywhere I possibly can. Along with selling both my eMac & Canon GL2, only to turn around immediately and by a Mac mini & Panasonic's AG-DVC30. When all this is done, I'll be able to relax, cross one more thing off my 'to-do' list, work full time on this current "short-doc" and patiently wait for [at least] 1 out of the 5,000 postcards to land me some kind of editing job.
It would give me the resources and the justification to buy all the "toys" I just can't seem to afford... dual G5... Sony HDV camcorder... high-end fully manual digital still camera... etc.
It would generally leave me in a better mood. Maybe that should be the "most importantly" reason.
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Very cool. Congratulations. I hope it goes well for you... You might have already done it, but, if not, you might want to spend some time calling others who are doing it now and finding out how much they charge, etc. The biggest mistake you can probably make in starting out is pricing either too low or too high... For instance, do other people charge for mileage, etc... Also, I imagine, given it's LA, that there must be a huge amount of competition... Anyway, good luck. -Mark
7:50 AM, August 25, 2005Post a Comment
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