plenty of lazy ultra-wealthy people would probably pay a service several grand to do the work for them. If you can work out the labor costs to hire people and material costs to install systems for individuals over one or two days, you might be able to swing it? But this sounds very complicated, so you probably need to spend the time working and designing set packages, where there is maybe a choice between 5 or 10 different programs so that it can be deployed quickly from client to client. But then, everyone's house is a bit different, so I'm not sure how much further that complicates things. And then, how many clients would you need per season to make the costs and time worthwhile?
Differences in layout are a major time consumer and hurdle for “recycling” shows between different houses, parks, or commercial buildings. We do have a solution, however it’s 100% novel and would require a LOT of software development.
We were approached by an HOA to do a light show on their clubhouse. To give you an idea, our first year on our house cost us about $500 and we had about 2500 lights. Their clubhouse would have had about the same amount of lights, but we quoted $25k. It’s for various reasons.
One is because all electrical components and enclosures in a commercial installation must be RoHS compliant and the entire installation must be inspected by a fire marshall. This isn’t a technical issue, but we’d have to hire a subcontractor to build/assemble all the electronics to spec, and they need to then pay another contractor to get the RoHS compliance certification. We save time and money on our own house by skipping all of that. It’s not any less safe; it just isn’t inspected or certified. In fact, we believe our build quality is superior to most, given that out of the 31 light shows we’re aware about in Florida, ours was the only one to not have an outage during our insane weather. So to hire the right contractor that matches or exceeds our build quality, while also ticking the other boxes, is not cheap.
Then there’s the design and engineering. You can’t just string a bunch of lights up and call it a day. Every single light is very intentionally placed according to measurements, electrical outlet locations, viewing distances, viewing angles, etc. We need to account for distances of transmitted data, wire gauges, wire lengths, power consumption, voltage drop, and many other factors. Then there’s the actual placement of each individual light, taking into account view obstruction, projection angles, and other light things. We call this entire process “physical modeling,” as opposed to the higher level design that we call “logical modeling.” Essentially, the physical model is used for the engineering and assembly/building aspect, whereas the logical model is used during the creative process and they’re somewhat decoupled. Anyway, we don’t bill ourselves the time it takes to do this, but we’d have to bill a client. Take our salaries and do the arithmetic, account for differences in taxes between employer income and contractor income, and that’s our cost per hour. And there are many hours involved here.
Then there’s our storyboarding process, similar to how movies are prototyped before they go into production. This depends entirely on the client and how decisive they are, or if they’d just give us free reign.
For commercial installations, intellectual property licensing is also an expense. It also places certain restrictions on the creative process, depending on the license.
Then there’s the sequencing. The lights need to receive instructions and we need to program those instructions. If you want sequencing at the level of quality of our Star Trek show, that’s about 1 hour for every 10 seconds of music. If you want it at the level of our Frosty The Snowman sequence, which is by far our lowest quality, it’ll be somewhere around 1 hour for every 30 seconds of music.
If we were to break even and not make a profit, doing the show for that HOA would cost about $25k. And that also means we’d be killing our social life in the process, taking up ALL of our spare time. For the right project, we’re willing to do it, though.
Their budget was $500. After spending about 4 hours on their quote, they tell me that. Yay.
I'm guessing a lot. I don't think this something that could be done on a small scale with minimal personnel. He'd have to make up the salary of two engineers with sales including purchase/maintenance of gear. I could see it as a side money project for small shops/bars/whatever assuming the work's enjoyed, but for a living, he'd need a big professional setup, with big professional expenses.
You pretty much nailed it. But if we do get approached for the right project that is artistically interesting and would provide good exposure, we’re ready to take the risk and do something amazing, hoping it’ll lead to something greater.