Working with a vendor
What to send, what to ask, and where a subcontracted environment package is won or lost. Written for the person who signs the purchase order.
Environment work is more frequently bought than understood; typically the buyer is a production with no environment artist on staff to ask. That is a normal situation and not a barrier, as long as the package you send out contains what the job needs. Most of what goes wrong between a studio and a vendor is settled in the first ten minutes: what got sent, what got left out, and which questions nobody raised. These pages cover the brief, the questions to put to a vendor before a shot leaves, and what a subcontracted environment package consists of when it returns. One of them takes the question every buyer asks first, what a shot will cost, and answers it the only honest way available here: by naming what moves the price and what barely touches it, so that a bid can be read line by line. They come from the vendor side of that boundary, the side that sees why a delivery gets sent back. This is not a sales argument, and no rate appears here, because rates are quoted per project and a published rate would be a fiction. Two pages step back from the single shot to the whole arrangement. One follows a bid from the package a production sends out to the change order that arrives when the cut moves, and explains why the assumptions written under a price matter more than the total. The other explains what a vendor is in the first place, why a show spreads its shots across several of them, and how one vendor quietly passes part of its share to another.
