Pat Heigham

It’s time for me to ‘fess up to some horrid mistakes!

I’ve posted a story about causing the wiping of part of Katarina Witt addressing the East German Parliament – not altogether all my fault, as I’d forgotten that the camera could initiate record on the separate BVU recorder.

Blunder #1. The full-track TR90s had the record interlock button close to the main output fader, on the panel below the deck. Reaching down for the fader, I pushed the record button while pressing ‘play’. Some nifty work involved dubbing from the 7 ½ ips safety copy up to 15 ips, and magic-ing with razor blade and splicing tape to mend the erased bit.

Blunder #2. This in the Film Industry, on my second feature. The Nagra III had two buttons on the front, one was the A/B (input/off-tape) one, the other injected tone. Halfway through a take, I pushed a button to check the off-tape mode. Arrrggghh! Wrong one! Burst of tone for a second. This, of course turned out to be the chosen print take, and on two cameras, so I cringed twice while seeing rushes.

Blunder #3. Following Muhammad Ali, who was attending a school to present a birthday cake – lots of noise from excited kids as we entered the hall. Later, the editor rang me at home, asking:” Where’s slate 7, Pat?” I thought – between 6 and 8? He sent me the tape, and indeed it was missing. What had happened, was…. the Nagra 4 has a multiposition function rotary switch.

Record mode:	1
Off	2
Standby, inputs live but tape stationary	3
Tape rolling, machine recording	4

There was so much noise that the leakage round my cans led me to think that it was already in Standby, so I went one click, not looking at the machine to see if the spools were actually going round – we were closely following Ali, so had to look where we were going.

I’m sure I’ve got others but those above are ones I would like to forget!