so i had a job last week for a real estate developer, pretty standard stuff, they wanted aerials of a new subdivision they're building out on the edge of town. i get there, everything's good, wind is calm, light is perfect around golden hour and then the project manager shows up and starts adding stuff to the list. suddenly they want footage of the road leading in, the neighboring lake, and some random signage that wasnt even mentioned in the brief i sent them like two weeks before the shoot.

i did my best to get everything but honestly the light was gone by the time i got through all the extra requests and some of the footage i really wanted from the original plan suffered for it. i dont want to be the difficult guy on set but also this kind of thing eats into my time and battery packs and i flew like 6 batteries that day when i planned for 3.

do you just absorb it and move on or do you have some kind of system for handling scope creep on location? ive been doing this for about two years and it still catches me off guard sometimes

yeah this is one of those things that took me an embarrassing amount of time to sort out. what i do now is the brief they sign off on before the shoot becomes the actual deliverable list, and anything added on the day gets noted and billed as an additional line item after. i dont make a big thing of it on location, i just say something like "sure i can grab that, just know i'll add it to the invoice" and most clients are totally fine with that. the ones who arent were probably going to be difficult anyway.

also started building a buffer into my quotes, like i assume there will be at least one or two extras and price accordingly. used to underbid constantly trying to win jobs and then end up basically working for free on the back half of the day.

omg the road leading in and the neighboring lake lmaooo yeah ive been there. honestly i just started carrying extra batteries as a matter of course now because clients ALWAYS do this, doesnt matter how detailed the brief is. the scope creep thing is real though and i should probably be more on top of the contract side of it like you said