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Comment by Keyframe | Hacker News Reader

Shyamalan got good out of it. Usually it's ~5% of the budget for director, but he did write it as well and then some. Hefty fee. Looking through the budget I guess only surprise would be music composer at 4x Deakins' fee; That's interesting. Always weird to see Hollywood sheets like that, they're so inflated in some ways. For example, 50k for someone to run a generator on-set for three months and then also 30k for same generator rental. Or, matte shots/plates 50k apiece, 50k wrap party allowance, DI at 350k (jesus, yet whole of foley was 112k), titles at 160k, 2 AVID machines rental at 270k (even then one could've bought several times over several full systems for that), 20k for MIDI file transfer :P And all that's in 2003 money.

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Generators on film sets aren’t the type of thing you power your house with in an outage; they are a truck sized, high power piece of specialist equipment. Running one of those generators safely with zero downtime is absolutely a job. People think of movie sets as dangerous places due to stunts, fire and explosions. I was always weary of the electricity.

I worked on a few films back in college. It's a huge deal if the generator goes down. It completely stops production, especially when shooting at night with giant lights. It's not possible to run most productions off of the normal power grid due to the voltage and amp requirements of the lights. At least that was the case before LEDs. I'm not sure what the large studio production lights are using these days.

And then you’re stuck paying for every cast and crew for the time they are not working. If you end up having to shoot another day, you’ll have to pay that too, which may not be budgeted for. This can easily put the value of a few lost minutes of power into the tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars.

It’s very similar to the discussion of self hosted vs cloud providers. Business people are willing to pay more for a predictable cost, rather than save a significant chunk of change but run the risk of having an unpredicted event that ends up with a large extra cost (such as replacing a whole rack tower

I was on a number of film sets, you are right, but it's also not a job that warrants that much of a compensation and it usually is included in rental fee. Rarely will rental company of a genny give out generator itself without a guy or two.

Not only that, but rain and wet environments, it takes a skilled person to keep everyone safe, and also be able to wrench on a large diesel engine...while starting at 3 am, wrapping 14hrs later.

And in some large film unions, you need to pass a test just to get into the department, let alone run a generator.

Those costs remind me of the cost for dealing with emergency water damage.

They would be extraordinarily cheaper if they were working nonstop, but the asks are so intermittent they have to charge enough to maintain availability of the service. This becomes especially true and high cost-of-living areas.

>2 AVID machines rental at 270k (even then one could've bought several times over several full systems for that)

You aren't paying for the machine, you're paying for a guarantee that there will be a working machine when and where you need it.

The did pay additionally for AVID technicians

The technicians are good at configuring and fixing issues but they don’t have the ability to call up Avid and demand a new machine get overnight courier carried to replace one

Yes, but neither is AVID or resellers. Ask me how I know XD

DI probably also involves at that time the cost of scanning it into film. I worked in the industry a little after this and some of the DI theatres rent out for 1K+ per hour, plus there’s conform artist time, incorporating new cuts, etc. I could see it.

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