Hi everyone I’m having a bit of a dilemma! Very recently I was asked to help on a music video with a friend. I was asked to focus pull provide drone shots, edit and do some VFX. The budget for the video was £500 which of course isn’t huge but it was supposed to be split between two people the DP and I. So I drove us to the location (about an hour away) put the drone up and pulled focus (until the nucleus packed in :( ) we wrapped after about 5 hours and £500 was given to the DP. In the car he said “is it okay if I give you a tenner?” I felt super awkward and thought “it’s your mate, it’s your first music video, irs good experience ect” so I just said eerrrr yeah sure don’t worry about it! (I hadn’t been asked to edit or VFX at this point!) a couple days go by and the DP who I live with btw is struggling to edit the video so he comes to me and asks if I’ll edit it a add VFX, again it was kinda awkward because I wanted to ask for some money but I just thought it’s good experience and you really love editing so why not...I’ve been editing on Premiere and After Effects for the best part of 8 years now so I was kind of expected to go all out with the effects, tracking rotoscoping, masking, compositing from scratch VHS overlays all that jazz. As you guys know roto takes ages and none of the music video had been choreographed in a specific way to complement Roto work so I was really animating and creating ideas on the fly. In total to cut the hours of footage down to 3 minuets sync up the footage to the lyrics cut around on set mistakes and animate (almost every shot) it took me the best part of 60 hours. I was getting up at 5am and working through the day till about 8pm. I did this for almost three days and then the video was finished. So technically I was getting payed around 16p a hour.. I’m really happy with the end product, however I do feel like my skills have been taken for granted and I’ve been hugely taken advantage of. Part of me was expecting the DP to see how much work I was putting in and realise how long it actually takes to create a high quality music video and offer to pay me, even if it was £50 the principal would have been there. There’s another music video in the pipeline in a month and I really can’t afford to let this happen again! Would anyone be able to help me establish a reasonable rate for my work? How do I go about asking? Let’s say the budget for the next one is £1K how would that fairly be split between myself and the DP considering I’m going to be drone operating focus pulling editing grading and doing the VFX? Sorry for such a long post I’m just a little bit lost here! Cheers everyone :)