Video Crew Hire provides video production services for corporate and broadcast clients in Central and Eastern Europe. Our area of coverage reaches from Germany to Russia. We are embedded in all the 14 countries. Our local crews are seasoned media professionals equipped with the latest film gear on the market. We all speak English beside our native tongue. Our video crews are time-tested and reliable.
Video Crew Vienna
This is important, especially when so many internet “video crewing agencies” are mushrooming today and offering video production services of questionable quality. These “global” “agencies” most of the time do not have anybody or anything of their own on the ground. When they have a client who is looking for a video crew in a foreign city, they do what everybody else does: search on Google.
How we know this? We got several requests out of the blue from these people and they were most interested in our pricing. They never asked for a CV or showreel, just for availability and price. On their websites the story of course looks totally different. “Best local crews” and “we carefully selected the crew for you” etc. etc. This is all plain BS.
These “providers” are very different from the established, solid camera crewing companies, like Assignment Desk or Crew Connection from the US. These traditional companies did their homework and have a very clear picture of what their video crews are capable of.
Couple of years old web based companies (offering video production services) run by few people, can not know local video crews all over the world – their qualities, gear they use, language they speak – this is simple impossible. They would need many many years and lots of personal contacts to build such a register. Many of these companies state, that they are the UBER of the video production world. What a nonsense… Video production is far more complex, than transporting people from A to B. At UBER you need only 3 things: the app, the driver and a car. Thats it. Quality hardly matters. The driver can be absolutely mediocre driver, still will get you from A to B.
In video production services the quality of the people and the film gear is everything. This is a visual business, all mistakes are immediately obvious. Mediocre talents will produce average or worst services. The numbers game is important here. Out of 10 cameraman on average 3 just plain bad, 6 mediocre and maybe one is really good. That’s the reality. Not mentioning the video equipment they use. In our region – Central and Eastern Europe – this is usually battered rental gear, serving surprises when clients do not expect.
We at Video Crew Hire know our people and hiring new video crews (with their own film gear) only via the recommendation of our people on the ground. Unlike these “video crewing agencies” we do not hire people “from the street” let alone from googling. That would be irresponsible and a betrayal of our clients.
Very interesting to read some of the comments of the creatives who were approached by these internet “video agencies”. This is from their FB page, where users can comment. We replaced the name of the agency with (company) due to the obvious reasons (we can send a link to the original quotation, if anybody wishes to see it) :
“Communication is not good, prices are low and everything is done in a rush without any care on selecting collaborators based on the quality of their work. Anything will do….Once I was also asked to film interviews with kids for an insurance company that offers insurances for mobile devices (such as phones, tablets, etc.) for situations like kids destroying or breaking mobile devices. They wanted to produce video commercials using these interviews with kids. (company) requested me to find people / families who were willing to be filmed for free. They requested me to find kids among my friends and family. It was I who had to request (company) for the papers regarding image rights and authorisations for the parents to sign ceding their kid’s image rights, because (company) didn’t sent me any documents.
After I questioned (company) regarding those documents they sent me a document that was such a mess no one could understand. It looked like a bad automatic translation of some template. As far as I able to understand (company) wanted these people to cede all the possible national and international image rights they could get from these kids for free and they would be able to reuse the images whenever they wanted for whatever they needed for an unlimited amount of time. I decided not to work in such conditions once things were not clear. It was I who had to ask friends and family to film their kids for this project and it was me these persons were trusting. The project was canceled, at least for me. Not sure if they had other collaborators doing the things this way and working under these conditions but they probably had.”
Here is one from a person who worked for such a “video agency” on Glassdoor:
“Worst Company Culture and Management”
Former Employee – Anonymous Employee
Doesn’t Recommend
Unstable management. CEO is an egomaniac who surrounds himself with yes-men and micromanages every aspect of everything. We change directions at his whim constantly. He thinks we’re producing a ton, but at the end of the day, we’re just running around in circles.”
