Every now & again an opportunity crosses my path (or my path crosses an opportunity) and despite detesting spectator sports (especially rugby!) I am going to use a rugby metaphor here: if someone passes you the ball, best you catch it & run like hell for the try line. So for the second time in the past twelve months I was asked if I am interested in scoring a film. Now this is very obviously not a task to be taken lightly and as with sound design, it is almost more dangerous to under-budget a project & live with the consequences than to over budget. And really, no one is going to give you more money than they have allocated… I have already thought through the creative side of things many, many times & am totally confident that skills that I don’t have but need for the process I know people to collaborate with. But how to budget music for a feature film? It doesn’t matter who you are, most people will never divulge how they go about establishing their rates & budgets as it is obviously commercially sensitive information based on experience & there is only one way to get experience.
Relatedly one of the most valuable tasks I have done financially was to analyse the last dozen films that I have worked on, and calculate the ratio of total sound editorial budget vs total budget of the film. The range was interesting; obviously budgets are informed by content – an action film will be heavy on sound effects, a period drama will be heavy on dialogue/ADR/foley etc… But going through this gave me a basis for negotiating on future projects & it also provides an early warning system when someone asks me to be involved in a project but then reveals that their post budget is vastly disproportionate to the required content and/or their total budget.
But how do you budget music? In my early days of budgeting sound editorial for films I would always prepare three quotes (the dream, the bottom line & the middle ground) & go into a meeting with the aim of discovering how much they actually had pencilled in their budget. I have always believed in trying to find the right projects to work on & establishing that you want to work together, because then budget becomes secondary: it is primarily about the art, not the commerce.
Anyway here are a few sites I found & am researching, I definitely have a few books at home that I need to revisit too but I’d appreciate any advice or salient links?
via Andrew Ingkavet’s blog: who also reccomends the Yahoo film Budgeting group
“There are no standard union rates for Composers as there are with editors, DPs, actors, set designers or just about anyone else. Somewhere I’ve seen a range of 5 to 10 percent of the overall budget(For a $250,000 film, this is $12,000 to $25,000). Of course, if this film requires a soundtrack of epic proportions with the London Symphonic Orchestra, this won’t even cover the orchestra salaries, let alone the recording sessions and Composer’s fee. Or if this film was made for $5000, this may not work. On most independent films, the budgets are barely enough to cover a Composer’s fee and live musicians (besides the Composer) are a luxury.
What usually happens is a combination of cash and a structure for back-end payments should the film actually make some money. This could be structured on a sliding (“step”) scale where as certain levels of success occur, the rates of payments change accordingly….. continues…”
Some scenarios via a music supervisor who also publishes a very relevant newsletter
Some funny advice from The Orchestration Forum: “One method is to base your fee on the value of the car your client drives or the home in which he/she lives.”
Hmmmmmm…… not that I’m working on films of this scale, but the entire US$70million budget for M. Night Shyamalan’s film The Village (2003) appears to be online (80+ pages worth), for example here is the production sound budget and here is the music budget and here is sound post…
Ah a boy can dream….
