Netflix's “Love Is Blind” Wants Unpaid Photographer for Five Weddings
Line producers (in film and TV in general, but doubly so for reality TV) are in the habit of asking for free services. Basically they get a production budget to work with. About half of it immediately disappears to production photography, because the director of photography is hired first (and chooses the gear, camera operators, and lighting crew). Next come locations and costumes, then catering, and finally things like sound, still photography and production assistants. Very often they overpay the DP somewhat and try to cut corners elsewhere. Trying to trade services for &#x27;exposure&#x27; is unfortunately a norm in the industry.<p>FTA: <i>While the series is funded by and will be aired on Netflix, it is unlikely that the streaming behemoth is aware of how the producers of the show are soliciting talent.</i><p>Nah, everyone who has been in the industry for more than 10 minutes knows this. So do the people at Petapixel because this is a longstanding industry norm - search for &#x27;unpaid professional&#x27; and you&#x27;ll see stories about the injustice of being asked to do professional work for free going back more than a decade. But you don&#x27;t want to burn your personal reputation int he industry so you say nice things about the executive producers (who sign the checks that get the ball rolling) while calling out the production companies (who roll the ball while clinging to as much of the cash as possible).<p>The sad thing is that the line producers themselves are poorly paid, but success depends on their demonstrating the ability to coax free or cheap work out of others. Once someone is an established producer, they don&#x27;t cold-call, they get people they&#x27;ve worked with before or who came recommended. In the meantime, they go through the ritual of trying to get something-for-nothing, and then either agreeing on a reasonable rate (if they are able to recognize a professional) or getting burnt (if they hire someone who has no idea how to behave on a set). They too are trying to get industry exposure; if they screw up by hiring the wrong person it seriously damages their career prospects.<p>For service providers, the tricks are as follows. First, ask how they got your contact details - if they got a recommendation you can ask for money, if they pulled you out of a directory or whatever they are probably winging it.  Next, get the details of the time and location, so you know what the production is already locked into. Ask how much the budget is - not for the job, but for the whole production, because there are fairly well-established guidelines for how the budget should be divided up. Also, whether it&#x27;s a union shoot or not, because if so there are established pay scales and contractual agreements in place (which why so much of this stuff is farmed out to production companies in the first place). Next you get the producer into a conversation about deliverables and put them on the defensive by burying them in technical detail from your specialized field. Then (if you are new in the industry) you agree to work free or cheap but beg for money to cover your expendables, charge a box rental (gear) fee, and moan about the necessity for two assistants so that you can get some money to pay one.<p>The line producer moans about how great the exposure is, the professional alternates between asking if they can pay rent with exposure bucks and describing horror stories about what will happen if the line producer cheaps out and hires someone who doesn&#x27;t know what they&#x27;re doing. Every pro has a fund of stories about shoots they were brought onto midway through after someone else had crashed and burned and jeopardized the production and the line producer&#x27;s future in the industry. The line producer&#x27;s bait is that this job will lead to more work, and the service provider&#x27;s bait is that the line producer will come back when they&#x27;re not poor and have decision-making ability. The first person to say no typically wins the negotiation; it&#x27;s a bluffing game of who needs it more. It doesn&#x27;t have to be an antagonistic bluffing game. The professional can decline the job but give some free advice on how to hire an (obviously inferior) competitor, thus creating a token debt with the line producer. When a line producer hires someone inferior and it goes badly, the money to hire a competent person magically appears, often with a gratuity for the rescue effort at short notice - ie can you leave <i>now</i> and be there in 3 hours, plus scenes X Y and Z will need to be re-shot and you&#x27;re probably working a bunch of 18 hour shifts (because if they fucked up one thing they probably fucked up a bunch of others).<p>Other tricks: if the producer doesn&#x27;t want to talk about the budget, ask about the catering. If it&#x27;s a first time director or producer, everything will be 50% worse. Production genres in order of prestige and earning power are theatrical film, serial TV, episodic TV, documentary, news, daytime TV, reality TV, and internet only. You need to know which one you want to be in because they&#x27;re not that interchangeable and if you get locked into one it&#x27;s hard to move out of it. If you like movie work but need to take a cooking show gig to pay the rent then you do it under a pseudonym or nickname.