2 + 4 + 1 + 7 = $12,000

The foundation of Epoch's business philosophy has been in building talent. It has increasingly become a challenge but never more so than this year.  Even in these transitional time, we have managed to faciltated several low budget jobs with young non-roster directors. One of these directors is Eric Fensler.

Eric is a former creative who worked at Droga5. He is currently working on Adult Swim's late night program "Tim and Eric's Awesome Show", as a writer/director. His work is a mix of retro odd ball comedy, animation remixes, and some conceptual music videos. Check out his reel. He's a real original and one to watch.

A few weeks ago, Tara received a call about a small quirky internet project from a NY based agency. She pitched Fensler. We helped steer him through the bid process but it would not be an Epoch production. Eric would produce it himself. On the very low budget projects, Epoch's official presence only hinders the production. Unions. Vendors. Etc. When helping Fensler, the agreement we made with the agency was it had to be a low impact DIY production. There would be limited agency and client involvement, one or two people. Also, Eric needed to get paid the full amount in advance. They agreed to almost everything as they were excited to get two days of shooting for so little money with such a talented director. 

Here's the math of what actually happened. 

2 shoot days. 4 crew people. 1 talent. And, 7 agency and clients equals 12k through locked offline edit. It doesn't add up. Whatever the agency travel expenses were they were 5 people too much. And did I mention they didn't get the check to Eric until the morning of the shoot.

Fensler understandably was not prepared for the type of politics these seven people bring to pre-production and a shoot. Thankfully, we had a freelance producer that generously donated his time to help him out on set. 

After a rough shoot Eric began the edit. Before editing we asked for two things - an approved voiceover and approved music. Both were in flux. The VO was rough and didn't really work well to time and there were 8 pieces of music they wanted to try. Eric cut anyway. During the cutting, they wanted various versions. They also wanted changes made within a few hours to be posted for a demanding client. Eric was a good sport and did all that was asked of him. It was still not enough. They complained to me about the process although it was not an Epoch contracted job. I helped because of our obligation to Eric.

This production was suppose to be a fair value proposition. Fensler continues to evolve his reel and gain experience. The agency gets their film for 12k. Everyone just needed to realize the limitations and compromises to get there. Instead the agency treated it like a 250k commercial shoot. 

It is a small shop so I'm sure this spot meant a lot more than they led on. I would've appreciated more honesty but I'll give them the benefit of the doubt, maybe they just didn't know better. In retrospect, I feel we should've realized what we were getting Eric and ourselves involved in. We should've written a much stronger assumption letter and policed the process. The goal was to get him more experience unfortunately we achieved that through negation. 

Another lesson learned on the new methods of developing talent and new modes of production. We hopefully won't make the same mistake twice.