BETWEEN THE VIEWFINDER AND FLOOR

There’s an expression that when it comes to having the right kit on set, the bit you can’t go cheap on is between the viewfinder and the floor.? Or as one of my university lecturers more crudely put it “It doesn’t matter if you know what every button on the Carlos Fandango 2000 does, if you’re a dick, no one will work with you”.So what does that look like in practice? Well, hopefully this brief example of a small job I’ve just done will give you an idea. Now I might have some nice kit and I know what most of the buttons do but the value I bring to a job is the removal of problems. A client of mine contacted me recently. They’d just had a whole new dinosaur trail installed at their attraction but had realised they needed a video. Specifically a palaeontologist giving a brief introduction to the trail, and they needed it ASAP.So I hopped in the van with the kit and headed on down to one of their other attractions, a farm park to meet with the owner who had volunteered himself as Professor Dino. So after a quick scout around for a suitable-looking backdrop we decided on using the animal handling room as it had a “field science” kind of vibe, and more importantly quiet animals.Or at least, so we thought, but as I got the kit set up, the night shift turned up for work in the form of escaped crickets that had made a home in the walls. But I know about crickets, and I know how to deal with them. So rather than take all the kit down, find a new location and set it back up again, I reassured Prof Dino that it would be fine and we could press on. So without getting too deep into the technical. Crickets create a fairly narrow frequency band chirp between 3-8KHz, if you view it on a spectral graph of the sound you can see it (the hot yellow bits) stand out a mile.

These guys are chirping away at 4-5KHz. Now having a background in audio, I know that human speech doesn’t really have a whole lot going on in that frequency range, so I can safely mute everything in that range and it’s no more crickets.So with that out of the way, it’s on to the recording. Prof Dino sent me a script on WhatsApp and I get it loaded onto the autocue and re formatted the text to make it easier to read.?After a quick chat on how to read from an autocue, without looking like you’re reading from an autocue, we were ready to give it a shot. Prof Dino being the pro he is nailed it on the second take.Naturally these are just a couple of the many little unexpected hitches and glitches that can trip you up if you don’t know what you’re doing. Hopefully, it helps to show that the most important bit of kit is the bit between the viewfinder and floor, that knows how to make the complex combination of kit, performers and, environment work like a symphony and not a dumpster fire.

And here is Prof Dino, doing his best Alan Grant impersonation.