He was a DP who was out shooting in the Middle East. He was actually shooting in Beirut and he called and said, I need you to get this lens, that lens, whatever lens on a plane over to me. And I had no idea what he was talking about. Importation bonds. Hi, welcome to How Much Can I Make? I'm Meravu Zeri. What does a TV producer actually do? I don't think it's an easy job because you constantly have to make decision under pressure, shaping stories, managing crews, hitting deadlines and keeping everything moving when things don't go as planned. So what does the job really look like? How do you break in and what skills matter the most? Today, we're going to talk about the job of the post-production producer. And with us is Robin Feldman. Hello, Meravu. Thank you for willing to do this and share your experience with us. I highly appreciate it. So let's dive right in and let's find out what is your job exactly in TV? I know I see your name every now and then. And how did you get there? OK, well, let's talk about what I do. There are a lot of different types of producers in TV and film, some of which are exact producers because they have helped to finance the project. The producer is somebody who helps to bring a project to life. And in my case, I am what you call a post-production producer. I generally get a producer credit or a supervising producer credit. But the idea for me is I am on a project from the very beginning to the very end. And what that means is I am the person who oversees everything it takes to get something to screen. So on a TV series, I start in pre-production, helping to put a budget together based on if it's a pilot, which is one episode, or if it's a series based on 612. And in the olden days, we would do 22, 23 episodes of TV a year. Primarily, I help to put together a budget that takes into account everything that it takes to get something to screen, meaning I oversee the editors, the assistant editors, music, visual effects. I, at the very beginning, start to work with the director photography who wants to figure out how he's going to shoot, what he's going to shoot on, what camera he's going to use, what our deliverables are for the studio or for the network, and we put together a workflow. Because that workflow ends up in editorial with our editors who cut our footage. How do you know how to do all of this? I understand now you have a lot of experience over the years, but did you learn on the job? I learned on the job how I actually started was in Vancouver. In the late 90s, Vancouver started to boom. We had shows like X-Files and Millennium, and I worked for a director of photography, Curtis Peterson, who actually specialized. Canadian director of photography still is, and he specialized in second unit photography. So primarily in BC, he shot big snowmobile movie skiing movies, all of the aerial photography, all of the interstitials, and I ended up there. But the interesting story of how I ended up with him is I moved to Vancouver. I didn't have a job. I banged on a ton of different doors. I handed out my CV, and there was this one company called Peterson Productions that I bothered so much that one day they fired somebody, and literally the woman, Rosanna, said hire the girl that bothers us all the time. And that's how I got the job. Wait, you knew you wanted to be in television production? I knew from a young age I wanted to be in storytelling. I've always, right out of the gate, as a kid, knew that I had an ability to bring people together. I had an ability to figure out how to get something done when it was a challenge. I liked working with people. I liked the creative aspect of it. I knew I wanted to produce. So if somebody wanted to start, is there any kind of school where they can go and learn? There's lots of film schools. Lots of kids go to film school, and they learn theory. They learn how to put together a film. They learn how to work with others. They are given a budget. They are given a task. And it's a really great place to meet people. It's a really great place to spend $100,000 a year. I personally don't think you need to go to film school to become a filmmaker. I think it's something that you love right out of the gate. As a kid, you want to be a storyteller. You know the power of the word. You know the power of a visual. But how I started really was being thrown into it and sinking or swimming. Or not even, or being so young, you don't even think about are you going to sink or you're swimming. You just do it. Curtis, I never met him for the first six months I worked there. Who is Curtis? The man who owned the first company I worked at. I never met him. He was a DP. He was out shooting in the Middle East. He was actually shooting in Beirut. And he called and said, I need you to get this lens, that lens, whatever lens on a plane over to me. I had no idea what he was talking about. Importation, bonds, all of that stuff. And I remember he called me in the middle of the night and I hung up and I was like, I don't know what to do. I have no idea how do I do this. And I figured it out. At a young age, you either figure it out and you face a challenge and you're scared shitless and you do it or you become paralyzed with fear and you don't. So I think those are roads that happen to you when you're growing up with whatever you do. You decide, all right. Well, I'm going to fuck up at some point and that's fine. And then everybody around you was like, I don't fucking know what I'm doing. And you don't know what you're doing together as a group. And that's really like anything. But in this particular industry, I feel like there is a collective of people that do that together. You knew that you wanted to get away from music videos and all that and get into television production. And get into something that was bigger, that was more dynamic. I think for me, if I'm going to be a producer, what does that mean? What does it encompass? And to go back to the beginning, all of these different kind of producers, what exactly did I want to do? What kind of producer did I want to be? And the foundation of producing commercials and music videos gave me a really solid base of budgets. I have this much money. This is how much it's going to cost. How am I going to get to my budget? Where do I cut? Where do I add? What's important? What do you fight for? Because once you do this enough, you know ultimately where the absolute dollars have to go to. So it was a really good experience for me doing something from the beginning to the end. And what post producers do, which a lot of people do not know, is they are on from the beginning of a project to the end of a project. Right. You mentioned before that you worked with the DP and all of that. And isn't it the director's job? And in television, it's really a showrunner writer DP medium. Film is a director medium, meaning on a film, a director is on, if he's lucky, from the very beginning to the end. Depending on the film and the director and the power, they're very different mediums. And post producers have a different role on features that they do in TV. A post producer's role in features is really very much of a post supervisor. They don't have, generally speaking, as much of a creative input as they do in TV. So it is a very different world. And I've been very lucky to have worked in both mediums. And depending on who your director is, being able to have creative input. I spent five years of my life with Michael Mann in features, which is a whole different category of everything. I learned the most working for him and that team. But television, if you're lucky enough to get on and work with a really great showrunner like Michelle and Robert King, who I've been unbelievably fortunate enough to work with for a very long period of time, they are so collaborative that you're allowed to have and you're encouraged to have creative input in edit, in color, in mix, in music, in visual effects. So without a doubt, they are my favorite showrunners to work with. But to back up in Vancouver, I started as a script coordinator, which meant I was in the writer's room and I helped to basically just coordinate all of the scripts that would go out on a daily basis. That's management. That's all these little things in your brain that help to teach you how to manage time, how to manage people, how to manage expectations. So a lot of it is really common sense. A lot of it is common sense and a lot of it is the ability to be able to stop for a moment, see what the problem is, how do you solve the problem, and it's collaborative. This industry is incredibly collaborative. You can't do anything in a bubble. Really how I got to post production, and I think this is really important, is I started in production and I was lucky enough to have the opportunity on a show in Vancouver. My boss at the time, we were moving a show back to the United States, to Los Angeles. There was a production executive at Universal, a very beloved production executive named Bob Mankoff, who asked my boss in Vancouver if she wanted to bring me to LA. That never happens. That's the universe looking out for you. That doesn't happen to Canadian. Hey, you want to bring your assistant to LA? Never happens. That happened to me. And what show was it? It was a show called Sliders, great show. And I remember Michelle, my boss, calling me and saying, Robin, do you want to come to LA? And I was like, wait what? Okay. And I remember calling my mom and asking her what I should do. And she said, get in the car and start driving before they change their mind. So that's how I got to the States. And then from there, the big move to post was on Felicity. So there was a TV series that ran from 1990, 1998 to 2002. And my boss at the time, Michelle, was like, what do you want to do? Because I had outgrown my role with her. I said I wanted to go into post because in order to be a good producer, you have to understand how everything works in the production from pre-pro to production to shooting to post-production. You have to be able to shut your eyes and understand how the whole machine works. And I was like, I want to go into post. I love technology. I want to be there now. And that's how I moved into post-production was on Felicity, which was an amazing experience. What other shows you worked on? Well from Felicity, which was all, you have to remember too, the industry has changed so much. We're in a digital world. When I first started, we were in an analog world, right? We've gone from doing tape delivery to file delivery, which for somebody like me who's cross thresholds, it's been a fascinating run and experience to see how that's changed. So Felicity, then we did the alias pilot. That went on to be a huge show. A bunch of other TV series, lots of pilots. And then I landed in Michael Mann World. He really pushed you beyond what you thought your capacity was. One of my favorite films growing up was Last of the Mohicans, which was a Michael movie and Thief, which was a Michael movie. So if you would have asked me back then when I was watching those films that one day I would be working for him, I would have been, that's the most craziest, ridiculous thing I've ever heard. So it was those moments that I was like, oh my God, I'm sitting in this room listening to these people and somebody's asking me my opinion or I'm sitting in this room and Michael's asking me to do something that is literally 99.999% impossible to achieve by a Monday, but you figure out how to do it. And that relates back to the very beginning of saying get these ice lenses on a plane to Beirut and me going, what? I don't know how to do an importation bond. What does that even mean? So you start to thread the needle of experiences that you know it doesn't matter how terrified you are or how shitty you feel or how tired you are. There's that part of everybody that is like, I'm going to finish what I started. This is what I wanted to know. You said you wanted to be a producer. Is that because producers make more money? It's not about the money thing, although the money certainly, you know, it's part of it. Of course, you want to make a living and you want to be paid for your services, but I never wanted to be an editor because that was not my forte. I did not want to be in a room for 12 hours a day staring at computer screens, cutting footage. That was not what I wanted to do. I know where I work best and I work best being able to lead teams and being able to see those teams thrive. How many people in your team? I have three editors, three assistants, an apprentice, my second coordinator, a lot, 10 people maybe. Wow. And then you have music, visual effects. If you're lucky enough to have a VFX team on your show, if there's enough money, you're working with them. And on smaller shows that don't have that budget allocation, then you're not only the post-producer, you're the VFX producer. Sometimes you're the VFX supervisor. So having your hand in all of these different elements can make you really good. Sometimes it's really hard because then you get spread too thin and you're always worried that something's going to fall through the cracks. I saw your name on shows like Evil, The Good Fight, and those are really very successful network shows. That's Robert and Michelle King. They are brilliant. What is it like working for such a hit show and is compared to smaller shows, which I'm sure you've experienced also, right? Yes, of course. I would say that the thing about working on The Good Fight, Evil, Brain Dead, which is one of the first shows I did for the Kings, which is still my favorite show, they're smart. When you're working with smart people who are inclusive, it's very rare and it makes things a lot easier. And that's a big difference than working with Astros. But that's just a matter of luck. It's just a matter of luck. This whole business is luck because I haven't worked on succession or big, huge. I'm always like, I want to do this. I want to do that. And then you have the opportunity, like I have to do those kinds of shows and you're like, oh my God, no thank you. I want to know the difference between working for television and streaming because the world has changed. Changed and it's changing again. Why is it changing again? Because we're going back to linear format, which is a broadcast. So the big three, ABC, NBC, CBS, traditionally we would do 22 episodes a year. Series would run for years. It's different because you have more episodes to deliver in a shorter period of time because you're hitting air dates. In broadcast, you're shooting and delivering all at the same time. And that can be really challenging because you have a much shorter post period between the last day of dailies and when you actually have to deliver an episode. Remember too, in network, you are tied to a time. We call it your total running time. Most network shows are like 42 minutes in change. Streaming shows can be like 55 minutes. They're much longer because they're not tied to a programming, a schedule, an advertiser. So before we get into the money, walk me through a day in your life on your job. So it depends. It depends on if we're in pre-production, if we're shooting and if we're in post-production. So pre-pro, you have your first script, you're breaking it down. Your first AD walks us through the script. We talk about the concept, what it takes. So every department will have a meeting where they go through what they need in order to be prepped, pre-pro, for the first day of shooting. And we do that for every single episode. And on a daily basis, when production starts shooting, we get our dailies, which is everything that is shot that day, which is why we call it dailies. We get our film the next day. The editors start working. They start putting the cut together. And then we have to spot the episode. You spot for sound. You spot for music. You spot for visual effects. What do you mean spot? Spot means we all sit down. The sound team all sit down. And we watch the episode and we look at the scene. What's going on here sonically? What's happening in the background? Is there a storm? It depends on what the create, what's the story about. So there's a lot of subtext that goes into making a TV show. All the little nuances that you might hear, that's all discussed. So this is sound spot. Then there's a music spot where the score come in. So we spot that. Literally we watch, we talk about it, we move on. So the whole team makes this decision? I thought it was a director. No, and TV the director is usually done after the director's cut. TV is a showrunner medium. So the kings. And then sometimes depending on how long a show has been going on for, they wouldn't even be, Robert and Michelle wouldn't even be involved. It would be the editor and myself who sit there and talk about it. It's so show dependent. So it sounds to me like somebody who has your job needs to be highly organized. Very. What are the skills or character traits? I'm really going to say it's people skills. It's the ability to bring all sorts of different people in a room and to be able to have an agenda, get through that agenda and make everybody in that room feel like they've been heard. It's also problem solving. You have to be able to be a problem solver. You have to be able to delegate. As a post producer, being able to delegate to your team is imperative because there's so much that goes in to getting a show done. Like my second on this show is like he deals primarily with visual effects because I'm dealing with music and sound and budget and schedule and so many other things that if I was to do everything, something's going to get missed. You have to be able to delegate. You have to be able to empower your team to do what they do. Our coordinator schedules all the ADR, which is when all the actors have to come in and redo some dialogue, all of the credits, opening credits and credits, those all have to be documented, tracked, approved. It's a big job. So every person on my team has a specific set of tasks that they have to do on a given day or whatever kind of producer you are, even out of television, you're only as good as your team is. You mentioned line producer, executive producer, producer, post producer. Can you briefly just explain the difference between line, executive and… Well, so a line producer in TV is generally the, like they're at the top. They are responsible, literally it's a line producer. So you have the budget, every budget has a line. They are responsible for the whole crew. They don't oversee me, but they oversee production. But I work closely with the line producers. The line producer has a much bigger job because they're grips and electrics and costumes and wardrobe and transport and catering. They have a huge crew to run and post is a very small part of that. But essentially I would be the line producer of post production, right? Just on a smaller scale. So give me an idea. How much a line producer can make? Well, they're under the guild. You have to remember too that the majority of this industry is unionized. How do you get into the union? Producers are not union. We are not in the union. A lot of us have what we call, we're called non-union affiliate producers, meaning that we get benefits from motion picture. We get healthcare. We get money towards our pension. But post producers were considered management. Oh! Which is okay, but so are all of those producers in production. They're all management. You line producers are in the director's guild. UPMs are in the director's guild. The whole crew is unionized. Do you know what is their pay? I do know. I mean, you can look it up, but they get paid significant amounts of money for doing hard jobs. So when I negotiate, I look at what those rates are. I know what my rate is and I know what I will work for and what I won't work for. You calculate your rate by the hour, by the week, by the month? I'm on a weekly, but I also, like stuff for me that's non-negotiable is my MPI benefits. Like if a show. What is MPI? And motion picture. So motion picture is how I get my healthcare and how I get paid into a pension. So if a show came to me and said, Oh, we'll pay you your rate, but we're not going to pay your benefits. I wouldn't do the show. That's how studios save money. They save on the fringe, quote unquote. The fringe is what it costs a studio to pay the benefits. So are you an employee? Or are you at 10.99? I'm not a, I'm a loan out. I'm my own company. So I, you know, this business is all freelance. So once you hit a certain amount of money, it behooves you to become a loan out so that you get all that money back so that you manage it properly, which means that I'm not taxed at source. I get all, I get whatever my rate is, that's what I get. And I deal with my own quarterly finances. Yes. What happens if you work on the show that you don't like? Oh, well, I mean, that happens all the time. It does? Yeah, of course. Not necessarily to me, but I have definitely worked on shows that I don't like. I don't like how it's run. I don't like the show runners. I have a hard time with the editor. But what if you don't like the story? Oh, that happens all the time too. I think you look at, you look at what you do like about it. It challenges you for sure, because it's hard to work on something that you're not engaged in. So you have to find elements of the story that you do like. You have to challenge yourself, maybe not creatively in the story, but with the budget and the schedule and your team. And it's always a learning experience. So sometimes I've learned more on shows I don't like than shows I do like. But for me, the idea that I have an out, meaning eventually the show finishes. I love that if I'm working on something I'm particularly challenged with for whatever reason it ends. It ends. So what happens when it ends in between shows? How do you survive money wise? Well, I've been very, very knock wood. I've been very lucky. I've only had two times in my entire career where there was a law because of a strike or something else that was going on in the industry. And it never lasted that long, maybe a couple of months. The writer's guild strike and the director's guild strike has been very challenging. The streaming direction has been very challenging. There's a lot of shows going to the UK and overseas right now because they're predominantly non-union shows. So their budgets are smaller or they're bigger, but they don't have to pay the union rates. So you have an opportunity to make money on the side at the same time? I call it the perfect side hustle. And for me, the perfect side hustle at this point in my career is an awesome series and like a small indie feature. You can actually work on both projects at the same time. And how do you handle tight deadlines? Well, like I had said earlier, being a doing post on a feature is very different than series because you're so much more involved in series than you are in features, post supers on features, or at least the kind that I choose to do are helping the budget and schedule, just getting things done. You're not, I'm not in with the editor. I don't really care to be because that's like that. It's the directories with the directors with the editor, the first assistant editors there. There's certain things that I'd like to be involved with. If I have the opportunity, if I'm, if I'm included or invited to, sometimes it's just a matter of a low budget film that needs somebody to help keep everybody in their guard rails. And that makes me feel good. Right. But how you manage it? If you work like 10 hours a day, because, because if you have a really well oiled machine and you have a really good team in the TV end of things, then everybody's doing their job and you can have those moments. It's about knowing how to bobbin weave. It's about like in the morning, maybe I'll start out on the features. Everybody up and running, where are we at in the schedule? The other thing I'll do is if I'm on a series and I'm asked to do a feature, I have to look at what the schedule is on both. Like if they're too parallel with each other, meaning if I'm really into heavy finishing on a series and at that same time we're starting to mix and grade color on a feature, I might not be able to do it because they run too parallel with each other. But on a big first year series, you might not want to have a side hustle because you want all your focus to be on the series. It just depends where and what it is and who it is. Like I'm not just going to do anything. It's got to be a script. This is where I'm picky. It has to be a script I really like that I'm really interested in that I really want to see done. And sometimes if they can't afford me, then I'll come in. And I did this on a film called Ezra, which was a beautiful film. And I'll come in and I'll set up the film. And then I'll have my coordinator who I work with a lot. Excuse me. When you say set up the film, what do you set up the dailies, the budget, the schedule, I'll get all the pieces on the chessboard in place. Okay. So, and if they want, they can always call me for other things, but somebody maybe not as experienced will come in and run the day to day operation. What are the possibilities of growth in your business money wise? If I'm looking to increase my yearly income, is that what you're saying? Yes. Well, I think then it's about the side hustle. You know, I get paid a healthy wage, so I shouldn't be and I'm not focused on extra bits. I've been fortunate enough with the Kings that a lot of times we've had overlapping shows. There was four years that I was working on multiple shows at the same time. Still 10 hours a day or was it? I mean, sometimes longer because you have to get caught up, but then you're getting double and triple paycheck, but that's very rare. That happens very rarely at the most. Maybe a show, Ronald will do a pilot and finish a series at the same time. This does not happen to most people. What project is your favorite project that you worked on? Oh, Felicity. I've rewatched that series so many times. If I look at it all together, I think working for the Kings has been my favorite because of the team that I've had. Do you get to meet the stars of the show? Sometimes, and, you know, people don't like it when I say this, but I don't really care. I mean, I really don't because, you know, that saying, like, never meet your heroes. I'm, you know, the gang on Felicity were great because they were all new. They were coming. It was the WB years. It's like a completely special time period. Kerry Russell is one of the nicest human beings I've ever met. Scott Speedman, Scott Foley, like all of those guys, like it was great. The cast on the Good Fight were next level. Christine Bransky, you know, Arjun McDonald. But did you get to meet them? Yeah, of course, of course, of course. But I've never wanted to get. It's never been my thing. Why? It's never been my thing because I never want to be disappointed. I'm more interested in who's directing. I'm more interested in the show runners. What can I learn from them? What's your dream to become a show runner? No, no, no. My dream is what I'm doing is just to is to keep working on good shows with good people. That's that. I feel like I've achieved that dream. Right. Whatever dream I have to do separately, you know what my dream is. I want to find a great script to make a great movie that. But I don't have the time and I don't have the bandwidth and my brain hurts. And that's a really hard thing because the danger of what we do is you're so busy. You're bandwidth is really spread that sometimes we forget why we got into this business in the first place. The things that we really want to do, the interests that we have, they get sidelined to help other people realize their dreams. Right. And I hope for myself in the next four or five years that I will be able to put a little bit more focus on what I want to do creatively. However, with that said, I also recognize that if that day ever comes, the collection of people that I have, the vendors included, I know that I would be able to turn around and say, Hey, I'm doing this now for myself and I need help. And I know that people will be there for me, whether it be processing your dailies for free or a couple of days on a mix stage or some VFX help or some showrunner guidance or some script feedback. Those are, I feel like the bonus points that you accumulate along the way. If you're a good, kind person to be able to at some point turn around and ask something from somebody, you know, the funny thing with all the different people that I interview, every single one of them say you have to be a kind person to get whatever you want. It's like the key and genuinely kind, not manipulative. No, no, no. So if you could give one piece of advice to a 20 year old that is trying to break into the industry, what would that be? Don't. It's hard. It's hard, but it's great pay. It's very sexy. No, no, no, no. It's it's it's that's all from the outside. It's sexy from the outside. It's great pay. Once you hit something, it's harder and harder and it's like any generation, right? And it's like any field. It's harder and harder to get into. There's more and more people doing it. There's a lot of people doing it that shouldn't, that don't have the talent that aren't good at what they do. I would say to anybody who wants or thinks that they want to do this, whatever this means, you really have to do it because you love it. You have to have faith that the money and the accolades will come and they have to be tertiary. They can't be why you do this. You have to want to do it because it's something that you really feel passionately about and you have to allow yourself room to fail. I think you also need to be really specific about what it is that you want to do. And at the same time, I think you have to be open to doing anything you can so that you understand the business, this business and this business. Only works when you have an appreciation and an understanding of what your brothers and sisters do. And what would you say is the biggest challenge? The biggest challenge is working with people that you do not like. Oh, wow. How do you handle that? The biggest challenge is working with people you don't like or working with people who have far less experience than you do and don't have the or can't put their ego in their back pocket long enough to be able to say, Hey, can you jump in and play with me because this is really hard and I'm not quite sure. That's the biggest challenge for me. And what would you say is the biggest reward? The biggest reward is when you see your post coordinator being an editor or when you see all the people that you like mentored move up. Like that's the biggest reward. My biggest reward this year was like Emma Jane, like producing her first legit feature that got a great write up in the reporter that's going to go to market. Like that's the reward. The reward is seeing that people makes me cry. That's the reward. The reward is seeing those people do awesome things. I thought you were going to say the reward is to see my name on TV before the show. I don't care about that. Like that's hilarious. My mother still like takes a screen grab of it. I mean, that's nice. But you know, the reward is also being asked back. Right. Very good. There you go. All right, darling, great advice. Thank you so much. My God, that was like going to a quick school about the TV industry. That's a wrap for today. Thanks for listening. If you ever wondered what it takes to produce the shows that you love, now you know. And you may want to check out the other TV jobs segments that we have, a TV camera woman and a TV news editor. And until next time, please visit our website at how much can I make that info? And on your way out, don't forget to subscribe and share this episode with anyone who is curious about their next job. See you next time.
