[Fmpro] composer as executive producer

[Claude Castonguay]

When i started out circa '87 working as a session guy, for National  
Film Board(NFB) documentaries, there was enough money in the budget  
for at least 20 musicians and 200$/hour studios plus 48 tracks of  
Ampex tapes running at 30inch/second wich came to about 600$ per 15  
minutes of tape. AFM pensions were paid by the producers and the list  
goes on and on...

Talking with older guys at the time they told me that the music  
budgets in '87 where already skimpy compared to the 70's.

One question: Where has all that money gone today!?! Now we get 1 or  
2% of the budget and we need to pay everybody and everything from our  
pockets including AFM/EPW pension for the musicians we hire. Of  
course you could do everything yourself but that means working 24/7  
creating mock-ups that even my non-musician wife knows it's fake...So  
you'll end up sounding cheesy and before you know it your competing  
with DJ's, using Acid or Garage Band, to land porn filmmusic gigs ; )

Best,

Claude


Le 08-01-29 à 22:54, Louis King a écrit :

> I know of  3 Academy nominated docs that the composers got about 5k
> for ..  not that odd
>
>
> On Jan 29, 2008, at 10:42 PM, chris at alpiar.com wrote:
>
>> Michael I know you have worked a lot but are you telling me that
>> when you do a film with a 300k budget that you take 3k to write and
>> rewrite for 5 or 6 weeks and pay for all production costs out of
>> pocket to boot?
>>
>>> -----Original Message-----
>>> From: Michael S Patterson [mailto:doc_absynthe at yahoo.com]
>>> Sent: Tuesday, January 29, 2008 10:19 PM
>>> To: fmpro at nxport.com
>>> Subject: Re: [Fmpro] composer as executive producer
>>>
>>> I do think that 10% of a production budget for a score is quite
>>> a bit on the large side. I think with the exception of  
>>> documentaries.
>>> But a fully funded (but not michael moore money) documentary
>>> is $500K but more likely $300K and I mean a funded doc...
>>> not a doc with Œfestival potential¹ that is self funded.
>>>
>>> There are so many dynamics to budgeting a low budget film.
>>> Say you are under $500K but choose to shoot on film.
>>> The stock, camera, processing...etc. will eat up a substantial
>>> amount of the production budget.
>>>
>>> It¹s quite enlightening to look at a films actual production
>>> budget...there are so many expenses that we all over look.
>>>
>>> Realistically or at least from my own experiences, a norm
>>> Budget for a score is 1%-3% I shoot for 5% most of the time
>>> and don¹t get close.
>>>
>>> Michael S Patterson
>>
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>
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>
>
> _______________________________________________
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> Hale Music
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