[Fmpro] Reverse Engineering

[Claude Castonguay]

Hi everyone,

need to vent here. These days i'm scoring a documentary and having  
serious questions about what to think of the whole thing.


Here's the chronology:

Get called to pitch on a 48 minutes doc. They have 3 000$ and i just  
made 5 000$ on a 30 second jingle...hum?!?
I think what the heck i have nothing in sight for the next month why  
don't i do a pitch in 1 day and if they want me, we'll negociate.
I won the pitch. Lucky me!
I tell them that i can't see how i could do it for 3000$ and the last  
time i did a low budget feature doc i had 7 000$.
They call back and offer 5 000$. I take it.
I receive the film. I spot it. 40 cuts totalling 44 minutes. 125$ per  
cue. 113$ per minute of finished music.
The temp track is loaded with all the best music from around the world  
for the last 50 years.
They had told me that they needed me to be close to the temp track. So  
i was warned.
3 weeks later i still have 8 minutes to go and the final mix starts  
today, i've already ftp'd 40 minutes to the mixing house but i'm still  
waiting for approval on the first 30 minutes.
Let's be real positive and hope there won't be 2 pages of  
recommendations but the film editor has taken control of the  
production and he's the maniac that put all that temp music in...
Bet he will pick up that i forgot to put that little sound in the back  
that goes great with that leaf that's wiggling in the far background.  
True i did not see it because i use a 17" LCD monitor for scoring not  
an Imax theatre...

I should have done my homework before starting on the film and pick up  
that 40 minutes of music, a lot of it symphonic,- some of it à la Ravi  
Shankar ouch...!- is way too much music to produce for a 5000.00$  
project.
Why 5000$ isn't enough? Well for many reasons but mainly because what  
is long and costly in scoring a film is not the actual writing, more  
like reverse engineering in this case, but producing the music. With a  
low budget you can't get other people to help you(musicians,arrangers)  
and have enough money left to pay the electrical bill of your studio....

Moral to this story. I don't have time to find one, got to go "reverse  
engineer" 8 more minutes of music for the end of today, more like  
beginning of tomorrow. Oh and let's hope the producer's  
recommendations aren't too lenghty arghhh...!

Best,

Claude