Complaint Review: Armand Gazarian - Internet

I have had reason to use Mr Gazarian's services on approx. seven occasions in the last five years. I have found him to be a talented, trustworthy and reliable editor. As both an editor and a DP, he is able to recognize shooting errors immediately and set about rectifying them. I have found his tone to be overwhelmingly friendly, helpful and educational rather than the views expressed by the complainant. 

I have been a professional video producer for over 25 years and can recognise amateurs in a heartbeat. Mr Gazarian is a pro who knows his business.

Unsurprisingly, this complaint is the sole negative review of Mr Gazarian on the web, which is in itself, an interesting contrast to the track record of the complainant. 

The only mistake I made was not doing a thorough investigation on Armand Gazarian's previous work. If I had done that, I would have known that he has a whole failed career of low quality films. He keeps talking about the "quality" of our unedited film (the quality of our film is fine). These comments are coming from the man who has made horrible D list movies since the 80's. Go look up his films Games Of Survival and Prison Planet. Look at the reviews for these films. These are garbage movies that Armand completed.

Basically Armand is a 60 something year old failed film maker in Hollywood who is very passive aggressive. He has to try and squeeze and scam money out of every editing job he gets. Even before Armand saw my footage, he was trying to tell me how much he has to charge if we go over a certain time limit. In the ad I placed looking for an editor, I was very specific about us offering a FLAT rate for what we needed . So that should have been a red flag when Armand was talking about overtime rates BEFORE he saw our footage. So he was already planning to put his scam in motion. So now he's trying to use the "I did a bad editing job because of the quality of the material" excuse that makes no sense.

Just to set the record straight, instead of doing it right, his program was shot with 2 non-matching DSLR cameras - operated by amateurs - I assume to save money. An unwise decision right off the bat!

Any professional in the business knows, when you don't do things right during shooting, you spend a lot more time in post fixing it. 

The program was shot double-system, meaning the sound was recorded on a separate device where the audio and the 2 video tracks had to be synced up in post. Again, this was a 100+ minute program, so that alone took hours to accomplish. In addition, most of the shots were dark and needed to be brightened. The B camera was shot handheld on a long lens, very shaky; a pure armature move. The A camera was super wide which made him look small on the screen (which was probably ap per po!) and was inconsistent in levels. In short, the audio and video tracks were all of inferior quality and needed massive fixing. Tariq disregarded his production mistakes and kept demanding excessive amount of work from me -  which was way beyond our original agreement - without willing to pay for my time. No one should be forced to work below minimum wage rates!

Seeing his videos, I can only assume he is not used to working with professionals.

Professional or not, be careful dealing with blamers; folks who don't take personal responsibility. Tariq acted no different than a hypocrite evangelist who preaches integrity but practices unjust slandering, uses foul language, blames everyone else, does not engage in fair, win/win business practice, publicly lies, belittles people who work for him and threatens not to pay the full rate.

If his video ever comes out, you can compare what he preaches to what he has written here and you will easily tell who the real scam artist is. 

You may find you would have been better off listening to 5 minutes of Brian Tracy than 100 minutes of BS.

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This is Tariq Nasheed. I have always paid what I told people I would pay them. And I do what I agree to do when it comes to business. Unlike Armand, I'm not at a point in my career where I am reduced to pulling scams on Craigslist to supplement my income. I hired Armand to do a simple job and he PURPOSELY did a lousy job so he could try to squeeze more money out of me for doing it correctly. I was asking him to do very simple things and he repeatedly would not do it. Then he would pretend that he was putting so many hours into the work and he wanted extra money after we agreed on a set rate. Armand has a reputation for scamming people. Just google his name. Other have accused him of the same thing.

How often have independent contractors agree to open-ended contracts only to be cornered into unfair and unreasonable deals by unscrupulous people?

I have. That's why I signed an agreement with Tariq.

My agreement said I would provide up to 20 hours of editing service for a certain amount of pay. He gave me a drive that contained poorly produced, amateur and inferior quality material which required a lot of fixing in post.

Instead of 20, I provided over 40 hours of diligent service to Tariq on his project which included editing, motion graphics, rendering and uploading. After I finished the 3rd revision of his 100 minute program, he continued to demand more changes. We were looking at numerous additional hours of service with no end in sight. At that point, I told him I'd be happy to continue revising his project and reminded him that we had already exceeded the number of hours we had originally agreed to. Additional pay would only seem reasonable for the additional work required from that point forward. THERE WAS NO UPSELL. THERE WAS NO SCAM - At least not on my part.

Now, lets talk about CHARACTER.

Tariq Nasheed pretends to be some kind of a leader, trying to teach folks about relationships, money and race. We've all seen "evangelists" who speak of integrity yet when it comes down to their own personal gain, integrity is meaningless. When the matter of additional pay came up, Tariq went belligerent, yelling and cussing out of control, using belittling language and reminding me how rich he was. These folks don't seem to care about win-win. It's all about them.  Well, I warn freelancers who are tying to make an honest living to be carful when agreeing to work for people like Tariq. He showed no respect for my time and was expecting me to work for below minimum wage. That's NOT acceptable.

At the end, in addition to the work files, I also gave him a number of my own stock footage, music, sound fx and After Effects files. I made sure any competent editor can pick up where I left off on the project. I gave this guy exceptional service as I do with all my clients.

Instead of appreciating my efforts and my time, this character runs home to slandered me immediately. I assume it would hurt his ego if he didn't feel he won by making me lose. 

My opinion; this guy is no leader. He is immature, unprofessional and a FAKE!

At this stage of his personal development, he should not be trusted let alone be considered a leader.

Armand Gazarian
[email protected]

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