Roger Long
We had Moles at TFS but we also had a mobile Fisher which was a delight compared to the antediluvian Mole and pram. I drove Nigel P Woodford( who later owned Richmond Film Services) down to Snape for Tony Palmers’ 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.
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! Just look up ITC (production company) on IMDb.
Cue…A cheerful Director I worked with, with a sense of humour, always said he wanted a scene with a character named Cumber, so he could call: "Cut, and cue-cumber!" I guess he might have his wish if directing our Benedict!
John Hays
It’s interesting to note 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.
see also:
Mic Booms
Mic Boom Experiences
