Background
Dramas including “Jamaica Inn” and “Quirke” transmitted in 2014 attracted a great deal of attention – for all the wrong reasons. The dialogue in “Jamaica Inn” was very difficult to hear – a combination of the actors and actresses “mumbling”, radio mics buried beneath layers of clothing and an incorrect mix down from Dolby 5.1 (for DVD) to stereo (for TV transmission). “Quirke” again suffered from problems with the dynamic range, and suffered visually, too, with strange framing (no “looking room” and reverse cuts (“crossing the line”)).
Peter Cook
The sound could be adjusted with a remote control, but pictorially “Quirke” had me cursing at the screen again. Repeated and deliberate misframing was indeed awful: lack of looking room, and crossing the line were the most obvious examples. Soft focus can be dramatic, but there should be something in focus at some stage through a shot unless there is a dramatic reason (eg. POV concussed person). CUs seemed at times to be shot from random angles and what geography of characters remained after crossing the line so often was as a result at times totally lost. Another example of an opportunity of making quality drama wasted, unforgettable for all the wrong reasons. Like “Jamaica Inn”, one episode was enough.
Pat Heigham
The last episode of the recent series of “Death in Paradise” had a two hander across a cafe table – crossed the line every other shot.
If the Director set it up like that, I’m surprised that the cameraman didn’t pull him up about it. Maybe neither of them know how to shoot films these days!
Roger Bunce
The Skills are not being handed down! – Somewhere and somehow, some pretty fundamental techniques are being forgotten.
‘Skills’ is not to be interpreted as “Which button do I press on this bit of kit”. In my experience, if it’s a new bit of kit, it’ll be the young whippersnapper who tells the old fart which button to press. Anyway, read the bloody manual!
As a Cameraman, the ‘Skills’ I had in mind were the ways of telling a story in joined-up pictures – the ways that camera position, lens angle, framing, movement and intercutting are used to convey a sense of emotion or relationship, to enhance the performance, or to trigger a response from the viewer. This was the problem I had with ‘Jamaica Inn’, before I gave up on it, the basic visual storytelling was lacking. And, yes, I remember that scene from the otherwise enjoyable ‘Death in Paradise’. I haven’t tried ‘Quirke’ – and probably won’t. When the obvious bits like Looking-Room and Eye-Lines are going wrong, there’s not much hope for the more subtle stuff. There are Rules, and there are perfectly good reasons for breaking the Rules, and I have nothing against experimentation. But these programmes seem to be going wrong because people don’t know the Rules or, more importantly can’t FEEL the Rules. Somehow some pretty fundamental televisual skills are getting lost.
Jeff Booth
I fear there is more to it than that. Last week I was in Cornwall with SWMBO and we visited a very well known (and very good) fish restaurant in Padstow.
There was a ‘kid’ (a media student type) with a video camera, waving it around the dining area. Oblivious to the ‘rules’ – signing of release forms, posting notices that the restaurant guests were going to be ‘filmed’ (sorry, videoed) etc. etc. He even shot a Piece To Camera (PTC) by the head waiter.
Now maybe it was just for internal use by the college or whatever but he clearly had no idea of any of the legal ramifications.
Nowadays, the kit is so cheap that anyone can call themselves a cameraman/editor/DoP and know nothing at all about TV or film making.
Patrick Heigham
Concerning today’s film style shooting, presumably for speed and avoidance of continuity errors, my sound colleagues in film and high-end TV drama are forced to cope with cameras shooting both wide and close on the same shot, thus obviating the use of boom mikes, as the perspective would be wrong on the close shot. Thus resorting to radio mikes, in themselves prone to possible muffling/clothes noise, particularly for period drama, however helpful the costume dept. are.
I worked on “Alien” (the classic first one). The combat fatigue style uniform had small pen loops at breast height, so easy to fix Sony ECM’s and feed the wire through holes in the fabric. Yaphet Kotto, who played the black crewman, would note which side I’d fitted the mic, (me having seen a rehearsal), and would deliberately switch his weapon strap over to the other shoulder, so that it lay right across the mic. If I then changed it to the other side, he would switch back. I call that ‘unprofessional’, as one might say about Sean Harris’ mumbling performance. Maybe Kotto wanted to be called back for ADR – more money, but in Harris’ case, I learned that he point-blank refused to do any re-voicing.
Dave Plowman
I seem to recall being told that a cut which you notice is a bad cut.
It’s rather like wobble cam. I like a small amount of movement but just hate it when overdone.
Pat Heigham
If one notices the cut, it’s got to be bad.
I’ve often been with a Director, and heard camera people pointing out something not quite right, whereupon the response is “If they spot that, then we’ve lost them with the story” which is quite a good summation.I hate, hate, hate the current predominance of handheld shots. OK if it’s reproducing an artiste’s POV, but it’s being used for speed. Takes much more time to set up a dolly or legs shot, especially if the actor doesn’t hit his mark. In the past, film cameras were sound-blimped and bulky, so were solidly mounted on geared heads. Lighter weight 35mm Arri’s could be hand held, provided the operator was tough enough. In cinemas, the magnification of a small movement within the frame is obviously far more noticeable on a 30 foot screen. Home TVs, not being so large, one could perhaps get away with handheld shots – after all, the guys with the ‘tin parrot’ on their shoulder did pretty well. Today’s cameras, with all the add-on paraphernalia, time code locking boxes, mini-monitors, R/M receivers for guide track sound, lens hoods and flags, and maybe a light as well, cannot be satisfactorily handheld, and TV screens are getting bigger, so ‘wobble’ is much more noticeable.There was one brilliant cut in “The Graduate” where Benjamin (Dustin Hoffman) heaves himself from the swimming pool onto a floating lilo, but actually lands on Mrs. Robinson (Anne Bancroft) on the bed. The speed and angle were perfectly matched.I was taught camera operation by the great Jim Atkinson (Crew 2) in 30 mins flat! Maybe that’s when I moved into Sound. However, I did remember a lot of Evesham drilled info, and on a shoot at the original Grecian Olympia for NBC – doing a day of cut-aways and ‘beauty shots’ amongst the ruins, my cameraman gave up after a while. I asked if I could have a go, and when we reviewed the tape, he said, very sincerely: “Pat, you’ve got a better eye than me!” Lovely man!
Derek Martin
I vaguely remember a 1970s experimental session in Pres B with a “Late Night Line-up” producer and director trying to find a ‘new’ way of shooting a 2-way interview. We cameramen were told to ignore all of the rules of framing and shot size so they could evaluate the results. We were asked to frame up with no looking room – nose pressed up against the edge of frame; full face interviewee/profile interviewer in various corners of the frame; shooting across the line/down the line/up the line; slow panning across the frame etc.,etc.
Despite various self-congratulatory comments from the production team during the session it was no surprise to find that none of these ‘new’ techniques caught on and nothing more was seen of them – until much more recently, of course.
I suppose with multi-camera studio productions and small-ish sets back in those days it was quite difficult to manoeuvre the cameras to be both wrong and right side of the line and also increased the chances of cameras being in shot but with film style shooting techniques these constraints have been easier to ignore.
There used to be something called ‘the grammar of television’, maybe what we get nowadays is ‘the text-speak of television’.
Hugh Sheppard
This might be the original ‘Open Door’ programmes under the aegis of the late great Rowan Ayers. My recall is that he provided a skeleton gallery team in Pres B, who were told not to direct the camera and sound crew other than with instructions at the behest of the folk in the gallery who had volunteered to ‘produce’ an Open Door programme. By and large they had no TV experience whatsoever, so that most results were disastrous – by our standards. But somehow, the long pauses and inappropriate shots had a rawness that let what they were trying to say to come through. Had it been done ‘professionally’ the outcome would have had a certain typical TV gloss; this way a different integrity was sometimes on display.Wikipedia says: “Open Door” was a programme produced by the BBC‘s Community Programme Unit. It was first broadcast on 2 April 1973. The programme gave people control of the airwaves and was a platform for the public to talk about its own issues and give their own views without editorial input.
Peter Neill
My memory of “Open Door” is somewhat different. I worked on a couple of Pres B sessions and also a couple of days on location as part of an informal week’s attachment to TFS. The programmes were certainly properly directed and a real producer guided the amateurs in deciding content. Ultimately content was the participants’ choice, but the rest was fully professional.
Hugh Sheppard
I wonder how early in the piece Peter had participated. There was such an outcry over the first few ‘Open Doors’ that the unit had to change its ways and help to produce them properly.
Dave Buckley
Before many of the Open Door groups got to the studio, they did a dummy run in the B/W studio of TV Training at Woodstock Grove, to start with on Thursday evenings for two hours. This changed to a Sunday morning and I put myself down to run the first of the series. I had a surprise when the team appeared as the producer was someone I had been at grammar school with during the 50’s! I remember Roger Brunskill was one of the producers in the early days.
Jeff Booth
Studio technology nowadays is that with IP connectivity of cameras (no more triax, just a RJ45/radio link) the studio output is now just a ‘rough cut’ as ALL cameras can be recorded to a server concurrently. This means everything is available at the ‘edit’ so anything goes.
With cameras no longer ‘tethered’ to a wall box, the ‘line’ no longer seems to exist. Case in point being the Steadicam that runs behind the presenters on “Good Morning Britain”.
Roger Bunce
The Steadicam (or more often a “Wobblicam”) running between presenters may make you feel seasick, but it doesn’t break the rules. The Eye-Line rule only applies at the precise moment of a cut. If you don’t cut, but keep everything in one developing shot, then the Eye-Line rule doesn’t apply. Being old-fashioned, of course, I still prefer my camera movements to be motivated by the performance, rather than wandering about at random.
But these days, if you ask, “What’s my motivation for this?”
They reply, “We’re paying you!”
Check out “I Clavdivs”: there’s plenty of running about camerawork, but it doesn’t wobble, it’s appropriate to the performance, and the camera always arrives on the correct side of the Eye-Line, with the correct Looking Room, at the moment of the cut.
Likewise, recording all cameras, and sorting it out in the edit, can be fine, provided some of those cameras are in the right place, looking in the right direction, at the right time. If they’re not, the edit still won’t work.
Pat Heigham
I recall a programme composed of interviews with the interviewer off camera. Unfortunately, material was shot simultaneously by a researcher with a hand held digicam, but as she was on the wrong side of the main camera, the eyeline to the interviewer was totally wrong!!
Working as a freelancer, I recorded a wine tasting programme with Malcolm Gluck (“NICE!”) but it was staged in a boardroom in the White City building. (Why not in a studio? – ‘cos it’s cheaper!) What annoyed me was an advertisement I saw on the internal notice boards offering training for researchers to play with digicams, thus doing a professional cameraman out of a job. In view of the above, this ‘training’ must have been crap.
Whoever set out to destroy BBC Television has finally succeeded. First Riverside was sold off, then Lime Grove, followed by the Theatre and lastly TVC itself. All places where we learned and honed our craft – I weep.
Much thanks to the BBC, though, for the in-depth training that was available to me in the 1960s. Through that, I went on to experience a varied and highly enjoyable (and remunerative) career in the Film Industry, whether it was on major cinema features or documentaries, plus working for nearly all the ITV companies. I’m happy to say that I encountered the same degree of professionalism
amongst fellow technicians in getting the best possible result onto the screen!
Bernie Newnham
Patrick Heigham wrote:”…What annoyed me was an advertisement I saw on the internal notice boards offering training for researchers to play with digicams, thus doing a professional cameraman out of a job…”
As someone who has been training all kinds of people to operate cameras for 15 years now, I’d just like to say that it just isn’t that simple an issue, and I wrote some stuff about it in the GTC newsletter back in 2004. I think it may have been too controversial for Zerb……These days I train university students to do the job which involves basic camerawork, sound, editing and lighting, as well as being the director, producer and all the other production jobs down to runner. I don’t expect them to be highly skilled at any of them but it’s surprising just how good some of them are, even at Kingston University, which isn’t top of the Sunday Times list by a very long way. When they leave, the best of them have a good grounding in anything they might want to do, if they can find the work.Anyway, here’s what I wrote, a decade ago……..
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“… I was at the Production Show the other day. I turned up at the GTC stand to say hello and grab a free copy of Zerb – always a good read for us ex-cameramen. The spring issue was very big on DV issues, which was a bit of a surprise to me because I didn’t realise how much controversy is still raging, after all this time. I am moved to chuck in my two-penny-worth.
First, a few modest words about me – in the hope of making you read this article to the end. I stopped being a BBC studio cameraman and GTC member 24 years ago, back when men were men etc, etc. For the next good long time I minded my own business sitting in edit suites and studio galleries, standing on grotty locations, and trying to learn how to type up my scripts back in the office.
In late 1995 1 was asked to work on a show called “Morning Surgery – Hospital Watch” for a daily morning audience. The production had put in a budget of a million and a quarter pounds but had been told they could only have the quarter, and they were looking for ways to get round this. I am the guilty person who specified the brand new DV as the answer to their prayers. I created the first BBC DV kit, now seen in their hundreds coming out of White City every day. I cut the foam innards with an electric carving knife in my kitchen, and when nobody in the resource departments would help, soldered up the first sound adaptors at my office desk. “Morning Surgery” was hailed as a major technical triumph, and I’ve been lecturing on the fallout from it around the country and the world, ever since.
So – why DV?
I understand and sympathise with the criticisms from camera people in Zerb and elsewhere – mostly, they are absolutely right. But to get a proper sense of why, you have to take a much broader view. Let’s work from the top down….
We live in a market economy – most of us don’t rear chickens in our gardens on the best corn feed, though I do – we go down to Tescos and buy what’s cheap today. In turn, Tesco buy the cheapest they can get away with selling us – if they go too down market and we don’t buy, they adjust accordingly. Television is exactly the same.
If you are a satellite or cable company, you need product. You aren’t going to get subscribers if you offer a couple of extra channels; you need to offer a bountiful cornucopia of joys to suit all. You aren’t too bothered about what it consists of, so long as it sells and makes a profit. You bundle channels together, so that your punters have to buy as many bundles as possible to get what they want. To get Cartoon Network for my son, I have to buy about four other channels that I may dip into for about five seconds a week or less. It’s cheap, so I don’t worry. If it got expensive, I’d dump Cartoon Network.
If you are a programme providing company, you sell what you can, to whom you can, for whatever profit you can make. As a very senior accountant at a major ITV company said to me, “carriage is all”. If they can sell their product to a cable or satellite company, and you and I buy it in our bundles, they are home free. It doesn’t matter whether we tune in or not – we’ve paid for the product. Cynical, isn’t it? But the difference between profit and disaster in this area is very narrow – see Mr Micawber – so the programming needs to be cheap.
You can see where we’re headed here…
You are a producer and are offered a long series of docs at £8,000 per half-hour, instead of £80,000. Do you take it? Well, it depends – do you want to pay the mortgage or not? Of course you take it, and then you work out how to make it. The first thing you look at is what you can lose and still keep the customer happy – just like Tescos. You have heard about this DV stuff and seen some good results, so you pitch right in and dump your crews. They cost £800 a day, so that’s a decent start. A bit later on, you dump your editors too. If the results you provide please the customer, end of story. If not, you argue a lot and they either take their money elsewhere, or give you a bit more and see if things get better – Tescos again.
Sadly for crafts people, they don’t set the standards, the market does – he who pays the piper etc. – and that’s it.
In the UK, the BBC is in a slightly different, but similar situation to the commercial people. They cannot afford, if they are to survive, to be two channels amongst, say, 160. They have to make more product, but they have a fixed income. Yes, they can hack back on the bureaucrats, but programme costs still have to come down. Yes, presenters cost, but presenters sell shows and crews don’t. Yes, sometimes it looks pretty average to the professional eye but, if the customer – in this case a channel controller – is happy, then that’s that. The BBC and all TV companies are just like Tesco; they do the best they can for the money.
There are other aspects to DV, at the programme making level…
A good crew, or editor, is a joy – and a bad one is a nightmare, but sometimes there’s just no substitute, no matter what. But, at the end of a shoot, the crew is off to the next one, whilst the director takes his rushes to the edit suite, in hope and trepidation, and carries that project through till it’s on the air. If he didn’t like what the crew provided, he can go elsewhere next time but, right now, it’s too late. Even the best of crews have to be looked after. They are human beings who are working for you and they need to be managed, one way or another. Take them away and, if you can do DV well enough to please the customer, it’s one less thing to worry about – you’re on your own, but you look down your own viewfinder, and hear what you are putting onto the tape – there are no surprises, good or bad. You work for as many hours as you want, and as many days as you want. Sometimes you have to work in delicate situations, and two people from the TV company are far less intimidating than four or five – or fourteen (in the old ITV days).
The whole DV thing can be very liberating, if you can do it.
Which brings me to training, or the lack of it. It’s true that quite often a researcher, who has done a two-day course and then turns out wince-making results, is replacing a cameraman with many years of experience. This seems stupid and, if it were a fair world, it wouldn’t happen. But it’s not, it’s market driven and all the professional standards in the world aren’t going to make a difference. The customers choose – first the channel controller, then the viewer – not the camera crew. But the days of rubbish results are hopefully numbered. More and more often, when shows take their staff on, they want them DV experienced, and want to see proof. So colleges are beginning to turn out people who can do what’s needed – a different kind of person is beginning to make television, multi-skilled and pretty comfortable with it.
Where does all this leave the traditional camera crew?
Well, if it’s holding a very expensive Beta kit, I’m sorry. Change isn’t going away – so if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em. There’s a huge shortage of cameramen who don’t insist on bringing macho sized kit and attitudes to the party. A DV camera at £2,000 is almost identical to a Digibeta at £40,000 – it’s not as good, but it’s not a twentieth of the quality, and it has its own very clear advantages – for example, have you ever done a two-camera shoot in a London taxi? Why not dry hire yourself without your kit, and don’t whinge on about prostituting your art, just because you are holding a VX1000 – it’s the story that matters, and you can help to tell it. Do you want to pay the mortgage or not?
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Me – controversial? But I’ve just read all that again for the first time in a very long time, and I still agree with me. And it isn’t till you stand on the other side of the fence that you really grasp the fact that not all professionals – of any kind – are created equal.
No-one who isn’t an idiot is going to replace a quality crew with many year experience with some junior researcher, but it is likely that the person you take on these days as a camera assistant will have done training for all the other jobs too, which we certainly didn’t get do in Tech-Ops . They could of course be useless, so how do we know how good they are when we interview them? Well, that’s another story. Think ITTP and LICAS exams…..and if you don’t know the acronyms, ask Graham Reed.
Alec Bray
Pat Heigham said:
“…Much thanks to the BBC, though, for the in-depth training that was available to me in the 1960s…”
I would sincerely echo that, although my subsequent career was not in TV or associated industries (I went to university, then secondary school teaching, then moved inot IT (and Quality Management)).
It is to my lasting regret that I cleared out a lot of my BBC memorabilia before I came across Bernie’s Tech Ops website – we could have shared the complete TO 16 course notes!
I was clearing out more stuff and I came across some negatives taken during my training on TO 16. The negatives were taken on Kodak glass plates, 3.25 by 4.25 inches, panchro-royal P.1600 (yup, still in their box) – did we have to load up the plate camera in a darkroom?
Anyway the task was to light a couple of objects in an interesting way and then light a person – and the homework was to write a critique of the lighting setup.
Unfortunately, the negatives have not survived well in my loft, but one of them scanned on the HP scanner: the other (that has a lot of degradation) I put on a light box – er, rather, I blue-tacked it to the window and took a photo of it using 2+ and 4+ closeup filters on a handheld DSLR ( a Canon EOS 550 D): I know I should have used a tripod, but I was quite pleased that my hands are getting steadier again after open heart surgery (prosthetic mitral valve).
There is another photo of me, but surely one is enough! There were other photos of the guy I was working with – and his interesting setup – but I have not got those negatives, I wrote my critique of the photos, including the photos of the models (er, us): I went to town criticising the nose shadow that the pair of us had got on at least one of the portraits, only to have the write-up returned with the comment “Typical Television nose shadow”!
Our end-of-course exam – aside from the practical production exercise – was to approach a Marconi image orthicon camera which was sick, diagnose what was wrong with it and tweak the knobs on the camera and CCU until we got a recognisable picture. Just about managed it in time!
