This article was written for Student Filmmaker Magazine.
As an educator and former Hollywood sound mixer, I really wish that universities would devote less time teaching calculus and more time explaining how to balance a checkbook! Students dedicate themselves to learning the aesthetics and technology of filmmaking, including production budgeting – yet they fail miserably when it comes to basic home economics.
Back in the late seventies, when I was just a mere tadpole breaking in to the industry – my starting wage for location mixing was $325/day, plus overtime, plus another few hundred per day for recording equipment. In those days, my mentors were commanding considerably higher.
I considered it a good month if I worked 2-3 days per week, or 10+ days per month, as a freelance sound mixer – and that was barely enough for a bachelor to make ends meet.
Today’s dollar goes only a fraction of the distance, yet beginning salaries have barely increased. Students and new mixers are still being offered, and accepting, gigs that only pay $500 per day.
And that is supposed to be for an OMB (one person band), INCLUDING an equipment package!
The equipment package alone is often worth more than the entire rate. Figure a state-of-the-art multi-track timecode recorder, companion mixing board (fader controller), four to eight premium quality radio mics, a few condenser shotgun mics, boompoles, cables, and a plethora of misc. items. To rent (or make the finance payments) on even a minimal package would be hundreds of dollars.
Subtract that from $500 per day, and what remains is less than you would make bussing tables at the new minimum wage of $15/hour.
Even if, somehow, the equipment package was paid for separately by the producer -- $500 per day for 10 days per month does not add up to very much money to live on. These days, even fifty thousand per year is considered poverty level. $1500 per week is still only 75 thousand per year, which does not go very far when one bedroom apartments are close to two thousand (or more) in most major cities. Add your car payments, insurance, internet/phone… and you are back to living in your folks’ basement.
Don’t forget taxes. Your gross salary is going to be reduced by 25% to 40% for federal, state, social security, and local taxes. If your payment includes equipment rental – included in your daily rate or as separate billing, then local sales taxes might or might not apply, depending on local regulations. Ask your tax expert.
It gets worse. Students have convinced themselves that working for low wages is the way to build up their names and break into this highly competitive industry. Work hard, work cheap – so that better gigs may come your way.
Or maybe they won’t.
When you sell yourself short, and scrimp on equipment and personnel (OMB means no boom operator), the quality of the product that you can deliver will suffer. Your reputation will go down the gutter.
You need high quality equipment; even more so when it is a low budget production with poorly designed sets, noisy locations, and inexperienced actors. A boomperson allows you to concentrate on live mixing the multitude of wireless mics, overhead boom mics, and planted mics. When you try to function as an OMB, you cannot boom and mix simultaneously. So you end up “setting and forgetting” your record tracks; leaving the sorting out for post-production.
However, editors do not have the time to mixdown your iso tracks until the final stages of post-production. Instead, they will sync dailies and create their rough cuts by playing all of your recorded tracks at the same time; and it will sound pretty bad due to phasing & overlaps.
No fear… there is always ADR to fix things. Editors usually have too many other things to do than take the time to meticulously assess all of the ISO tracks and, essentially, re-create a proper production mix. Marking the cue sheets for required ADR is routinely more expedient (at least for the busy editor).
So here you are, a physically exhausted and overworked OMB, underpaid, but laboring under the premise that if you worked hard enough and cheap enough – producers will reward you for your efforts by re-hiring you “after the pilot gets sold and we have a real budget for the next one”. But will they?
More often than not, the sad reality is that the bigger budget show will go to a “real mixer”, someone with proven experience who charges a whole lot more, brings a boomperson or two, a more capable equipment package – and can deliver usable soundtracks!
You delivered usable tracks, didn’t you? Sure you did, but no one heard them enough to appreciate them, because all they heard in the edit bay was a confusing medly of ALL your tracks played back at the same time. You did not mix; you merely recorded.
If you are going to succeed in this field, the first rule is that you have to always deliver a usable production mix along with your individual ISO tracks. To do that, you need top of the line equipment (either owned or rented), and a good boomperson (along with maybe even a Utility Sound Tech).
Quote a daily rate that is not an insult to your years of education, training, and experience. Budget realistically to cover the costs of your equipment rental or paying off creditors for the gear you have purchased.
In case you are wondering, union scale for a Hollywood grade production mixer is around $75-80 per hour for the first 8, and 1.5 that amount for overtime. Minimum call (in other words, a basic day) consists of 9 hours (8 normal + 1 overtime). Equipment is billed separately at market value (what most rental houses would charge you).
As a newbie, you will not be able to command that kind of salary, but don’t work for peanuts. Act professional, be professional, and expect to be valued as a professional.