In the agency world and production it’s long been a trope that there’s a triangle with three sides named good, fast and cheap. You can have any two sides but you can’t have all three. Agency professionals understand this just as well as those of us on the production side. If you want a rush job, well, you have to pay for it.

Too bad clients don’t get it. The pressure is on to deliver more, for less and faster. I call this bending the triangle. Agencies have long been learning how to do more in house with fewer resources. Higher-end production and creative finish has suffered. There’s no longer six weeks to produce a photo shoot. The client has one third of the budget they had 10 years ago and they need it tomorrow, dammit. So they have a junior art director assigned to do an image search on Getty, or worse, iStockphoto. While somewhere, a commercial photographer cries and his kids starve.

Fortunately or not this paradigm won’t work in the commercials or web video advertising world. But clients still need it now and they’re awful reluctant to pay for sabaticals at the Shutters. This means the agency is too often stuck with a videographer or a local corporate video shooter and the in-house final cut guy trying to make shit shine. What’s a creative to do?

This is the gap in the market that I founded Fluid Films for. A creative led production company using state-of-the-art technology but with a guerrilla approach. We deliever high-dollar production values that I expected when creating award winning television spots as an ad agency creative.

How do we do it? How do we bend the triangle? It’s not magic, it’s mostly experience – knowing what can be done cheaply and what can be done quickly. You won’t find a lot of perks and extras on our set unless it’s really in the budget. But you will find Red cameras, Mole Richardson lighting and people who know how to work fast without sacrificing quality to truly get the most out your clients money.

Have a ridiculous budget, timeline and expectations? Let’s talk about it.

Posted on: November 19, 2012, by : Jimmy Gilmore