Geoff Fletcher

Diary entry:

	Friday 6th December 1963
	…  Play with Milo O’Shea. Quite funny. I tracked Nigel on the Pedlo Boom. ‘Orrible to work but OK to track.

Alan Machin

Geoff Fletcher mentioned his pedalo boom experience before his defection to cameras: while attached to Cameras I tracked the Mole on a live “Z Cars”. We always made it, just…, but I opted for Sound shortly afterwards! 

Pat Heigham

I  remember the Pedalo – what a complete abomination. Nice idea but the pedal operated pan system was so slack as to be unworkable.

I was brought up on the Moles in both LG and TVC, but what an improvement when the 33′ reach of the Studio Fisher was introduced. The swing stool was lovely in between set ups, but one was taught to operate standing up, and the boom at hip height with your body mass used to help swing.

I was appalled, when I transferred into the film industry and saw elderly boom operators with the platform set low, and the boom raised to operate well above shoulder level.

Nowadays, the film technique uses more handheld poles than dolly booms, so operators have to:
a)  be pretty strong, and
b)  take their eye lines for frame from a low angle.

Different if you are on a platform boom.

I’m so against handheld poles – there isn’t the facility for telescopic operation for tracking shots.

On a few pictures I boomed on, I insisted on a Fisher boom – not the studio one, but the shorter reach that was used on the side set in TV Theatre. This had the advantage of being locked off in its probable position while the Lighting Cameraman got on with setting his lights. (Hopefully to avoid shadows).  My trouble was, having been properly trained, it was difficult to refrain from telling the guy how to light for a boom!

I did work on a commercial, where the Lighting Cameraman turned out to be Freddie Young. He sought me out, and said "You won’t have a problem". I stood at the artistes position, as I was used to, and looked at the lighting rig. Perfectly textbook – Key, Back and Fill, as we had been taught at Wood Norton!  No problem.

John Hays

It’s interesting to read Pat’s remarks about film boom ops having the platform low and the boom above shoulder height. In my AP days, late 1950s, we used to do a Sunday afternoon magazine programme from the rarely used studio A, and that had a similar boom, the platform was inches off the ground on castors and you stretched up to operate it — a right sod to work. Perhaps this was a relic from prewar days.

Pat Heigham

It made sense on a platform boom to keep the arm low, compared with the operator’s body, as usually the arm was balanced slightly front heavy, so one was pushing down rather than pulling up, also the arm was swung using body mass at hip height.

Film studio booms did not have tilt for the microphone, which I found immensely irritating, since one couldn’t flatten off over an artistes head if there was a lot of head turning.

I came across a lot of antipathy, when my film crew colleagues discovered I came from ‘television’ (dirty word) as they thought that TV was doing films out of business. Possibly a little true for a time, but TV is such a hungry medium, that soon there were myriad series, shot on 35mm!

(see “The Adventures of Robin Hood”   or  look up ITC (production company) on IMDb.)

Roger Long

We had Moles at TFS but we also had a mobile Fisher which was a delight compared to the antedeluvian Mole and pram.

I drove Nigel P Woodford (who later owned Richmond Film Services) down to Snape for Tony Palmer’s “Festival of Britten”, especially “Billy Budd”, the opera, but many other great musical events.

On one occasion Ben Britten returned from the station with Sviatoslav Richter, they both sat at their Steinway Ds and prepared to play unrehearsed to Tony’s instructions and 3 film cameras.  Ben stood and closed his lid, so did Richter:  we had rigged C28s on elegant goose neck stands inside the pianos, they were now beheaded!
Nigel and I rushed the Fisher in, it saved the day, not sure Tony noticed: he could be very prickly, he was Ken Russell’s ex assistant.

Nigel started RFS from one fire damaged Nagra IV bought off a insurance loss adjuster he met on a film location: they are still the premiere Nagra hirers,  and possess a phenomenal Mic Cupboard