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I am concerned by the number of jobs I have seen recently on the UKScreen website with individuals asking for Make-up Artists and other crew members to come onboard projects without any renumeration whatsoever. I have been prompted to write after seeing one such ad earlier today.
I understand that as a crew member, especially those new to the industry or college graduates, it is often necessary to undertake unpaid/low paid work to build up experience, cv, portfolio or whatever, however, to do it with no renumeration of expenses is simply exploitative!
Regardless of whether the job is low budget or a student film, no-one should be expected to cover their own travel costs/accomodation/kit expenses. By offering no renumeration what you are essentually doing is expecting the individual to pay to work! I can think of no other industry where this action would be even fleetingly considered, let alone tolerated.
If you are responsible for the finances of project and cannot afford to cover basis expenses, then I feel that you should seriously consider whether the project is at a stage where it should be made or even if you should be in the industry, as it shows you have very little respect for your crew and their skills.
As an experienced Make-up Artist, with extensive experience in the low to mid budget end of the industry, I speak from experience when saying that a Make-up kit is an expensive consumable and takes a long time to build up. Anyone who expects to work with a Make-up Artist and not compensate them for the use of their make-up kit is simply insulting and be-littleing Make-up Artists everywhere.
When you employ and Make-up Artist to work on your production you MUST ensure that you either allocat a make-up budget - after discussion with the Artist concerned as they will be able to give you a realistic figure, or be prepared to pay a basic daily kit fee for the use of the make-up kit.
I am essentially very supportive of the low-budget industry, however I feel that this issue has gone unchallenged long enough. If no-one accepts these no-expenses positions then people will stop advertising them, however if individuals keep applying for these jobs then the cycle will continue.
I strongly urge crew members, at whatever grade (from student to HOD) or department, not to accept these positions. NO JOB is worth paying to do!
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