A Barking Dog

I wanted to take a bit of a break from the wedding tale with the guys with big furry hats and Cossacks to offer a bit of advice to a young chap on the other side of the pond. Chris Hinds has been posting on the LAB for a while recently attempted to broker a gig for a kick boxing event and was surprised when he told the promoters it would be about the eqivalent of about US$35,000. It would be difficult to get that at a high end corporate in Vegas for that package. There are events that go for that, but this particular event isn’t that. Chris’ blog post is at http://blogs.warwick.ac.uk/cjehinds/entry/you_dont_do/ . Go over and check it out yourself but in part he says…

For that the promoter was getting:

* 12 Stacks of D&B C7 covering the majority of the audience (a system with small fills was going to cost more to put together)
* 12 Martin MAC700s on the ring for audience and ring use
* 8 Mac 250 Entour for the entrance and dancers
* 8 Mac 250 Wash for the Dancers and Entrance
* 72 Pars trained on the 600sq.ft ring.
* 2 Juliat Follow Spots with Ops
* Avo Pearl 2004 and ART 2000 Dimming
* Smoke Curtain
* Trussing for entrance with drapes
* Central lighting truss flown with 1 ton motors
* Distro from CAMS to the necessary
* 15 Crew setting up the venue from totally bare to rigged and back again in just under 24hrs.

I started to post a comment there but a few hundred words into it I figured it would make more sense to post it here and do a trackback. Here is the comment, read his full post for all the background.

Chris, the lighting guys are out of their mind. You want to rent the gear, not buy it. The fact that they were willing to half the price when it looked too high is the first sign that they aren’t really serious about working with you. This is show biz, “unsocial” hours are the norm. You pay for the time you have the gear. It doesn’t look like your vendors took you seriously and you should have shopped the bids anyway. A better way to do this is offer your services as a production manager and then bid directly to the producer. Anything you get on the back end from the provider is between you and them.

Trucking: Looks a bit high. Are you renting trucks or hiring someone like Redburn or EST? For that price I could go from Dover to Glasgow. How far is it? If it’s a truck each from each of the vendors it’s not so bad but still this should easily fit in an 18 ton if not a 7.5 ton due to the way y’all maximize the packaging of your gear over there.

If I ever saw insurance as a line item it would be a big red flag. Insurance needs to be covered not as a line item but factored into the rental.

The hourly rate for labor, (sorry labour, we almost speak the same langage) looks good but do you really need 15 crew for 24 hours straight? Use staggered and split calls to maximize the value. A crew of 15 should be able to wack this out in six hours or less given an arena config something like the NEC. Riggers = 3, 2 up 1 down; 1 electrician doubling with lights, audio = A1 and A2, squints = LD + tech programmer with the rest used as truck loaders, pushers and deckhands as needed. Not counting you as prod/stage mgr. For 15 @ 8 pounds/hr that’s 720 pounds for the in. Lets say four on the show call for 4 hours and its another 128 for the show call. If a 15 guy call can’t this this out in 4 hours or so, they need to be looking at another line of work or call some pros that can. My labor is about half of what yours is not counting taxes and all the other fun stuff that comes with hiring people. Still though, you don’t need 15 the whole time and I bet you might be able to save a kiloquid by better labor management.

Lighting: Tell them to fuck right off, chap. That’s what us septics would do. They aren’t providing truss, rigging, trucking or labor and they still want that much? They want to charge you a week for a one day one off then magically halve the price when you grimace. If they can’t get the gear to you the day or night before or have it at your gig that morning, that’s a cost they should eat, not you.

On a side rant, not to offend the good men of tea on that side of the Atlantic but that sort of attitude is why some English production companies have taken it in the shorts over the last decade or so. In the olden days you had to use a Brit company to get acceptable results. The Germans got pretty good at it, as did the Dutch and the French, well, they’re French, but they’re pretty good at it. Lately the Spaniards and Italians are getting pretty good at it. It used to be that you didn’t go to Spain or Italy without a Brit or German production. Not so anymore but there are some Brit production companies that seem to still be in the olden days and not able, willing or both to compete with the newer companies in the EU.

Rigging: I don’t know the exact quantity so it’s hard to say but having a head rigger involved is always a good idea. Why aren’t the vendors providing the hoists and rigging?

Audio: There are a lot of different ways to skin this cat, but that seems a bit steep, considering no rigging, operators or transport. Certainly you weren’t getting cut a break. The audio design (and the lighting design for that matter) had a lot to do with the price, considering the promoter gave rough expectations and not a rider or gear list. I’d knock it down to 1000 just because it’s so bare bones and they aren’t including a guy or truck.

Let’s recap using Dave numbers as target budgets or negociating points.

Lights/FX: I sure you could either trim the design or find a vendor to do it for a couple thousand pounds. For four or five grand in the states I could get a package like or identical and they’d likely bring it to me and staff it. Let’s say 2000 GBP. Might be a bit low when the market or quality of the provider is factored in but the lighting guys already pissed us off so screw ‘em.
Audio: You don’t need d&b or Meyer for this, though it would be nice. A nice little K&F rig distributed on a truss grid over the rig that houses both audio and lights, a Venice, some playback a couple of radio mics, a few wired mics and “Robert’s your father’s brother”, as you chaps say. 1000 GBP

Rigging: If we do have use outside rigging, I can’t see costing that much other than that’s what they wanted to try to get. It’s a 50m x 30m room so I can’t see how you’re going to be overboard in points or truss. Worst case you have 160 m of truss and drape and 40 m of light/audio grid. Let’s say another kiloquid.

Labor: Manage it better, pay a fair wage for a fair days work. 8 GBP/hr sounds a bit low, let’s budget 10 GBP/hr and kick the budget to 2000 GBP total. Another way would be to work bids with a guy from the PA company and a guy from the sound company and knock the crew call down to 10 or 12, plus you.

Trucking: If you do have to do the trucking, I can’t see it’s going to take more than a couple (or even one) of a 7.5 ton Iveco from Sixt. Maybe one and a transit van. I’m going to target transport at 300 GBP but would see about the vendors doing thier own.

Lighting 2000
Audio 1000
Rigging 1000
Labor 2000
Transport 300
Chris prod mgr fee 400
Total 6700 GBP and that’s still pretty steep for this gig.

What I didn’t see that you did was qualify the client. That’s why he was surprised with the price. Find out who he used before, and how much he expected to spend. Design the production accordingly. Approach several vendors and get a few bids. Be fair but firm. I think his 3000 GBP target he could probably get, but with what vendor? Depending on the venue and complexity, I could do this for around US$5000 all in for something respectable, about US$10000 for something pretty good.

If nothing else though, you got a learning experience though it may have come at the expense of not being able to work with the promoter because your bid wasn’t realistic.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 30th, 2006 at 3:46 pm and is filed under Barking Dog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.