When you are ready to present your work for the first time (assuming you are working by yourself until then), I advocate making the presentation to the client in person. This encourages an immediate dialog with the viewer, gives you a chance to watch their reactions, and to show other material instantly. You will also have a chance to personally defend your work, but that will be covered here separately. The point here is that you do not want to be perceived as a creative commodity in the absence of the other members of the creative team. If directors, writers and art directors have the honor of personally presenting their work, so should you. If you can arrange for your clients to attend a screening at your studio, make an attempt to do so.
If you are working with an advertising agency, your work will have to pass through the agency team first before their client is allowed to come in and make comments, so expect there to be lots of hurdles towards approval. Depending on his or her contract, you may be obliged to satisfy the director before you even present to the agency.
When it comes to presenting the edit, play your cut down twice in a row without a significant pause in between (unless it’s a longform project, but you get the idea). Your client can’t always absorb everything they see in one screening. Do not make any prefatory comments unless absolutely necessary. You can include mentioning things such as there are placeholder graphics, that the sound mix is rough, or that certain footage is not available yet. But do not say “I could’ve done better,” or that you thought the footage stunk. Do not apologize, make any excuses or be defensive. Remember, you did not write the script nor shoot the footage. You are only the editor. You can do miraculous things sometimes, but then there are other times where you can only go so far with the material you have.
When the client starts asking you questions about the edit, do not take it personally. This is extremely important for a couple reasons. First, you will go insane if everything you make is “flesh of your flesh” because it will be molded into whatever works for the benefit of the project, not you. So get over it. You have nothing to gain by fighting with your client as if what you did is perfect. It’s not. You can always do your version on the side if you want. For now, your goal is to present your work as an extension of your vision, and then to expect that other people – even people who clearly don’t know what they are talking about – will change it. Second, your clients will pick up on your attitude in some way, non-verbally or otherwise, and they will feel uncomfortable. They may feel as though you are stonewalling their responses out of ego rather than being collaborative.
You can defend your work as a representation of an overall concept, but be prepared to explain every shot or technique in terms of that concept. Sometimes people will buy into it, sometimes they won’t. Don’t get hissy about it. It’s their nickel. Let them go with it any way they want, but be mindful of what your job is – You are the advocate on behalf of the footage to communicate a particular message, for a certain purpose, for a particular audience. When the client starts to make comments, you had better take notes. If you don’t take notes and you forget to make a change on something, you will have hell to pay. This creates the appearance that you don’t take the project seriously. While that may be true, it’s unprofessional to be overt about it!
Remember, your client may have lots of political pressure to deliver something that pleases his or her superiors or their client. There could be jobs at stake in this video’s success or failure. Sometimes clients take their video project way more seriously than a reasonable person would, but that is beyond your control and you have to manage around it. Part of doing that is by diligently taking notes and paying close attention to what they say.
When everything has been said by everyone in the room, you should go over all of the points that were agreed upon so that it is clear what is going to be done on the next version and when. I believe, arguably, that it is the producer’s job to take notes and provide emails with summaries of revisions, etc., but I find that some of them don’t, and you must take over this task (or your assistant). When you present revisions, be sure to include a list of all of the changes you made according to the notes you took. Most people will have forgotten what they said by the time they get your new revisions so you should remind them.
If you have multiple versions to present, be sure to label them the same in your bin as you did on the DVD or compressed file. That way, when they say, “I liked number 3A” you actually know which one they are referring to. At some point, you will achieve levels of approval such as agency approval, director’s approval, client approval, etc. Keep track of this by commenting or distinguishing your versions, because everyone is going to also want their personal versions kept aside for their reels too.
When you finally achieve total approval on a particular edit, clear out any other previous version out of your working edits bin so that only the approved version(s) are left. Name them as “Approved” or whatever it takes to make it obvious which one is The One. Then select SAVE!