The darker side of the job

A few months ago, I had a voiceover recording session for a one-hour long documentary. The director was to do the voiceover himself, and it was my first time working with him. He has acquired a lot of clout in the business, due to the controversial nature of the subject matter in his projects. So he arrived with an entourage of three producers, all of them carrying laptop computers and Blackberries, and they started handing out copies of the script and setting up their stuff.

We sat down to work, and within a few minutes, it became clear this would be a long session. Usually, a voice recording of this nature takes between three and four hours, depending on how well prepared the script and how good the talent are. After seven hours, we hadn't reached the halfway point of the documentary, for several reasons. There was constant talking on the phone by one or more producers, so we had to wait to play back a take for everyone in the room. Then, everyone had a wildly different opinion of the way a line should be read, frequently with one person in disagreement with the rest. And, to make matters worse, the director, not being a professional voiceover actor, had to take frequent breaks to rest his voice. Then he would listen back to his last read lines and he would realise they sounded different to the first ones because his voice was tired and croaky. So we would need to record those again to maintain an uniform sound throughout the documentary.

This would have been a bearable although very tiresome session, up to this point. At six o'clock, the scheduled cutoff time, and also my time to go home, I politely announced we would need to stop and continue the next day. Immediately, the director went berserk and demanded to know why they were being thrown out, saying they were the clients and would keep going until needed - that's what I was paid for. I bit my lip as one of the more sensible producers tried to explain that they had booked the studio until six, but they had also booked the following day as a precaution. After a lot of complaining and whining, the director and his posse left. I got very little sleep that night, laying in bed thinking I had another session with this bunch the following day.

I ended up getting through the whole thing uneventfully, but I just went through the motions, cold as a block of ice. No love for the work at all, no extra mile run. And it made me sad, because to me, there is nothing like doing a session that is energetic and positive, where the whole room is full of great vibes and a creative atmosphere, where the clients walk out shaking my hand with a big smile on their face and a heartfelt 'thank you'. It sounds very corny, but I think that's a huge reason many of us do what we do – we like to feel that clients are happy they spent their money working with us, and we like to feel we accomplished something special. Those who are in this field for fame and money are kidding themselves. There aren't that many sound people who have palatial mansions and appear on the covers of magazines. The average person doesn't care who the mixer who won the Academy Award for Best Sound this year is - they don't even know what a mixer is.

For many of us, the only choice is to grin and bear it. Unless you are an established freelancer or have a lot of weight within a facility, there is no option but to put on your best foot forward and get through the session. That doesn't mean you have to take everything that an abusive client dishes out at you, though. No studio manager with half a brain will let clients abuse their staff, and they will either ask the client to tone it down, or they will send them away if they don't. If the studio manager decides to hold the client in higher regard than their own engineering team, it's probably best for you to start looking for a job somewhere else, or to go freelance and choose your own clients and projects.

It's no wonder I see so many jaded and surly guys behind the board. They have gone through years of difficult clients and taken truckloads of abuse from them, ranging from rude indifference to foul-mouthed screaming. Hopefully there will come a time when these particular directors, producers and executives will understand that, without us mixers, editors and recordists, their projects don't get finished, sold or shown.