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Is the a policy for bad handling payment of bad cameramen
I just had the worse production experience of my career.
It was a low budget 4 camera shoot. HVX-200 with firestores. I hire 3 extra people to shoot (2) handheld and one wide on sticks. The 2 handheld are almost totally unusable, framing, focus and not hold a shoot for any length of time. the wide lock down is slightly out of focus. Because of the budget there was no directing other than telling them what I wanted before hand. Which no one delivered on.
Personally if I was the cameraman that did this I would never except payment, if fact my client will not be getting a bill or just want I would charge for b-roll random footage and not a concert production.
So other than venting I wonder if there is kind of a policy that a producer would not except to pay for this type of performance or would except them to take a 1/2 rate.
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3 Replies
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To answer your thread title. No! Unless you had something in writing prior to hiring.
Your second sentence had an indication of what was to come with the words “low budget”.
That usually means you dont have the money to hire professionals. So you take your chances with someone that has bought a camera so is therefore a “cameraman”. On the other hand there are people that have talent and will work for a lesser rate, so it is up to you as the producer/director to find those people. So did you check out anybody’s work prior to hiring them? -
while this was a low budget project, everyone was paid fairly well, $600 and up 7 hour day. The low budget was no truck, no monitoring with a director.
One guy I worked with before and did a very good job, but I had a director for that he just fell apart for this one. The local guy I didn’t just talk to him several times and said he does concerts handheld all the time. Unfortunetly put this together in about 3 days for an out of town shoot. The 3rd guy all he had to do was focus a wide shoot that got zoomed in and out once durin the concert.
This was the perfect storm of video production. I’ll put it down as a learning experience.
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Yeah unfortunately you are kind of screwed on this one. I would definitely call the guys and explain the situation to them and let them know you’re not very happy with their work. If need be, send them a tape of some of the footage so they can see what they did or in this case, didn’t do. You may also want to let them know it’s probably not a good idea to put you down as a reference on their resume.
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