Background (Bernie Newnham)

Graham Reed was discussing the other day the ways in which one can tell  whether a new prospective runner/trainee/whatever is any good.
If you had to write a set of exam questions, or set exercises, for eager young tech-ops hopefuls, what one question in the exam would you set?

Graham Reed

Here’s a 13 amp 6-way socket bar. How many 800W redheads can I connect without bad things happening?

Bernie Newnham

Graham is rightly horrified at the low percentage of people who even know the way of working it out.  I do the same test with university students during lighting health and safety workshops, and get the same result. I too am endlessly horrified.

Mike Giles

For the exam, assuming these are new entrants ~ you are in a foreign location, using locally hired equipment. You come in one morning to find that an essential piece of mains powered kit has lost its plug top (an enemy hath done this) and although you have spare plug tops, the cable colours are unfamiliar to you. You have a reasonable tool kit and the broken lead is detachable from the equipment. There are also other items of mains powered equipment. How do you decide how to connect a replacement plug top? There are, of course two potential answers to this question and it would apply equally to any other cable, star quad, or whatever. (Perhaps not a camera cable!)

Alasdair Lawrance, Hugh Sheppard, Alec Bray

Explain the difference between zooming and tracking?

And where would you use the one or the other?

Where have both been used together at the same time (clue: in film : Alfred Hitchcock and Steven Spielberg) (ans: in “Vertigo” and in “Jaws”)

Ian Norman

You have 5 cameras to cover a football match, where will you place them and why?

Alec Bray

An actor walks from one set to another through a door that connects then.  When should the cut be made from one camera (on one set) to another camera (on the other set)?

Dave Buckley

For sound staff…..

You have to make up a number of sound leads, using starquad cable (BBC version from Canford) and XLR connectors.

What’s the colour coding for the cable, how are they paired and what are the pin connections on the connector?

Probably the cable part may not be known (the info is available in the catalogue or on the website), but the connections of a 3 pin XLR should be engrained into anyone involved with sound!

Dave Plowman

Studio sound staff may never see the inside of an XLR.

I certainly never did in my years at the BBC. Repairs and making new cables etc
were done by the appropriate department.I’d also think it unreasonable to
expect a prospective trainee to know this too.

Pat Heigham

I left BBC in 1968 or so, and later achieved work on the film version of “Fiddler on the Roof”.

Working in the Sound Dept. I made every single cable needed for the shoot – mic, speakers, comms, 3-phase power for the cameras!