Rental Houses

[Sol Train Saihati]

When dealing with rental houses, its always quite obvious that their list price does'nt mean too much and a discount is always available, the question is: How much? Mainly working on low budget films, the money available to us is usually little to none and we always manage to convince the big houses to give us either around a 50%-65% discount or try and get equipment for free (rarely happpens).

 

On higher budget features (Esp those in shot the UK) what kind of discount are you generallly looking for when compared to list, or do you not even bother asking? What's the cheekiest thing you've managed to get away with?

[Lars.Erik]

Well, the "cheekiest" thing, I don't like to call it that, but since you've thrown out the ball...

 

I did a 2-day commercial shoot. The production office who did it, is run by a friend of mine. He wants to do more heavy commercials. He's done lots of them before, but then he's done it when employed in another firm. So we got a basically free rental of all our lights. The rental house also wanted to expand. So they agreed to lend it to us, with the conditions that we would call them on our next job.

 

We got 1 4kHMI, 3 2,5kHMI's, 3 1,2kHMI, 2 4ft 4bk Kino's, 2 800w, magic arms, light stands, cabels, filters, etc.

 

But in my experience, I always go to a rental house, tell them what I want, and tell them how much cash I have. And if I can't afford all the gear I want, I usually talk to the rental house people and ask for advice on how to achieve the same effects I want with maybe cheaper lamps, other setups etc. In most cases, they are very helpfull, if they aren't, they just don't come off as very seroius nor professional in my eyes.