Film snobbery on location with Ivanhoe

many years ago I got a telephone call from someone at the BBC he needed a focus puller and he needed one now could I do the job they were filming another version of Ivanhoe this time at aiden castle in Northumbria which wasn't very far from me and could I be there by two o'clock or whenever it was I very nearly talked myself out of the job you see I had listed focus pulling as amongst my skills in the Northern register of film crews but as I said to him rather foolishly honestly I'm not really a focus puller I have focused pulled on a couple of small productions so I know I can do it but you know principally my skills lie elsewhere but yeah okay I can do it he took me on so I turned up and I encountered the most appalling film snobbery now I knew that it existed but it was still quite a shock to to encounter it in the raw so to speak there was another focus puller already there he was the guy who was this a permanent crew on the number one camera but because they were shooting a lot of action and they wanted wide shots shot at the same time and so forth they would have they had a second camera unit and they needed the focus puller for that all these they felt they needed a focus puller for that why do film cameras have focus pullers it's not really necessary but it's it's the way film at least then was done and video camera man meanwhile are their own focused pullers now that's actually quite sensible in some ways because when you're pulling focus on the video camera and you're also the camera man you can see the effect you're having so if something is coming into focus you can see when you're just about there and when it's there you can stop whereas when you're a focus puller and you're just holding the camera looking at the thing and trying to judge the distance you can't actually see what the cameras see and so you think about there now maybe you've pre measured it and the actors hit is Mark in which case you should be spot-on but maybe the actor doesn't hit his mark or maybe you're shooting as I was that day a dog that's won't walk walking around so you've just got to estimate it's very difficult the cameraman I'm most in or of our sports cameraman and when you're for instance covering a football match and you're on the the the big camera that can cover the whole pitch and sweep from one end to the other you've got a massive zoom lens on it and when you zoom right in your depth of field is tiny tiny tiny that guy who can follow the ball he's no idea where the balls going it's not choreographed it's not scripted the ball something goes that way and he zooms in following the ball keeping a beautifully friend goes right in on the goalie and that goal and he's got him in focus he's found that guy his tiny in the pitch he's found him and he's in focus most of the time how often do you see the cameraman zoom in and just lose the where is he oh there is which is extremely easy to do and then you have to focus afterwards no he's as he's zooming in he's finding that guy and focusing all in one smooth movement and you don't even think about it that is extremely difficult to do and here's his own he is his own camera crew now when I worked in a television studio as a cameraman for a while I had this sometimes we called them Daleks as a pedestal that's on wheels it can it can track in and out it can crab left and right and crane up and down you can point the whole thing this way that way and you've got your your zoom in one hand and your focus in the other with your thumbs and you are everything a film camera man has got dolly grips and so forth for moving him around he's got his focus puller and he talks about oh well why is that necessary they actually said this to me I was told that people said this but I think sort of believe it because could anyone really be this pretentious and stupid but do you know they can he said oh yeah well I see filmmaking is a craft that's the word they use and so I'm framing the shot he was actually saying that video camera man don't have to frame the shot how stupid is that of course they're framing the shot they're framing the shot all the time and they're doing it perfectly well and competently whether it's a documentary nature thing they're all framing the shot the idea that you're not playing the shot because you're using a video camera is just patent lunacy and it wasn't just the film crew as well that was incredibly film snobby when I was there I was playing the game of guessing the role which is you know one way of trying to start a conversation and I talked to this lady who was in a room getting on with something and I said you're your PA you're the PA production assistant because she seemed to be don't you know filling that sort of role and she said well sort of only I don't do television so I am continuity but she made it quite clear that she was above television what she did she didn't do television she only did film because film was better and if she were on the video production she'll just be a PA but then oh she's continuity which is which is better somehow it's actually virtually the same job but what the heck um and I encountered a number of people there who had not been told stuff because the film camera crew was actually - technically naive and/or arrogant to tell them for instance I was talking to a matte artist and the matte artist couldn't understand why one of his matte paintings which he thought was perfectly good hadn't been used the reason it not being used is that the the characters were walking towards the camera away from a wall the wall which was a real wall he had painted an artificial top two in his matte painting so the artificial top to the wall was here in front of the camera the real wall was there and the actors were walking towards the camera which meant that as you pulled focus and the cameras came the characters came towards you because of course you'd focus on the characters then the real wall would be going out to focus but the fake wall on the bit of glass in front of the camera would be coming into focus and would then draw attention to itself and you'd see that it was a painting I explained that to him you all right nobody had told him he was really he was really annoyed he felt a lot of trouble to do this matte painting nobody had told him and some of the naivety that the camera crew expressed this idea that oh you don't have to worry with depth of field for videos because just this good everything's in focus that's absolute rubbish a photon of light doesn't know as it's as it's hitting the lens what it's going to be hitting having gone through the lens doesn't know whether there was a film or a CC T CCD here it's going to just bend through that lens as photons do and then maybe hits a bit of film or maybe it hits a CCD which is that the sensor in a video camera what effects depth of field is the size of the piece of film or the CCD and they were using cameras that were actually had a sensitive region about the same size as the video cameras I used to use in the studio so they were just wrong in fact in many ways video camera work is a lot more difficult lighting for video is a lot more difficult I worked on several productions where we would perhaps just have one light on and we just look at the way it looked and go only we were working in film that will be lit fulfilled you get these wonderful shadows and film having button video it would look really terrible in video lighting is a lot more difficult you've got to you've got to do ass of a general raising of the level and fill in the shadows and so forth otherwise the picture looks terrible um video is getting better all the time but it's still not in every way as good as film and back then the snobbery the snobbery and coupled with the technical naivety of those film crews was just terribly most those people had not been trained from fundamentals and how to be a cameraman they'd they'd come up through doing they'd they'd worked as as the the the the guy just lug stuff about and then they got you know maybe they were became a grip and then they became a focus pull and then they became a cameraman or then they became a DOP and it's possible to go through all that without actually having any fundamental understanding of what you're doing I was taught how to light by a guy who was in his 50s he'd been a cameraman all his working life very respected in the industry and it became obvious to me he had absolutely no understanding of the technical stuff behind what he was doing he didn't actually understand why bouncing a light of a big piece of white polystyrene made it softer and because he didn't understand it there were things that he couldn't do that I could do we had a big argument once about the nature of polarization and he had this idea that if you use a Polaroid filter it cuts down exposure by a certain amount it's fixed and I said no no it's variable depending on various things and he didn't actually understand what he was doing but because he was able to do it had been getting away with it for so long you know he was able to do his job despite being technically naive anyway those people were appalling snobs lindy marriage you

Channel: Lindybeige

Views: 294,027

Rating: 4.9495773 out of 5

Keywords: ivanhoe, bbc, film, video, snobs, snobbery, haughty, competence, understanding, knowledge, skill, social, status, castle, television, cameraman, camera, focus, puller, crew, set, location, aydon

Id: FceUD_TvxJo

Length: 8min 46sec (526 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 28 2015