Day 1:
I was hired by ‘The Valiant East Productions’
as a ‘Production runner’ to help in anyway on the production side, or assist
the camera department. I did this job in
early December last term. I arrived on
location in West London at Black Island Studios to shoot a few creative shots
of a female model and re-enactment, with the model in the back of a black cab
driving around Piccadilly curve with reflections of the curve on the window. We
were shooting using the ‘Sony F5’.
I met with the DOP and had to immediately
set up early in the morning around 8.30am. The different areas of shooting included
setting up a chair shot with some lovely, glistening gems hanging on pole just
in front of the camera to help make the model stand out in a creative shot that
was used. In another shot, we set up
half of the space in the studio for numerous amounts of taxi shots. The problems which I encountered that day was
when we setting up the jib and started to shoot with it, the tripod plate attached
to the base of the jib was a bit loose and this meant that the camera could
fall off. We started to shoot and carefully the three of us held both ends of
the jib to make sure nothing happened.
We always had one person standing by the camera to prevent it from
falling on the floor. However, after 30 minutes it very nearly fell off, but
luckily the camera assistant caught it in mid-air. At that point, the Director
of Photography was a bit shaken up, as £45,000 of his equipment nearly got
smashed!
Unfortunely, we had to resolve this problem,
so the shoot was delayed by 20 minutes. We solved this problem by taking the
jib apart and looking for any loose screws, or any damage to the jib. We
discovered that underneath the base plate four screws were really loose and
these hold the plate in and, also, one of the holes at the other end where the
weights are, had been worn out. This is
used to balance the jib and this caused the weight pole to slip out of the hole,
causing the screws by the tripod head to get looser and looser. For the rest of the shoot, everything was
fairly relaxed because we all worked efficiently together. By the end of the
shoot, we finished around 8pm and then it took us over an hour to pack all the
equipment up. One of my main jobs was to pack away all the hired equipment into
a separate area, ready for the hire company to come and pick them up. On the shoot I learnt a bit more about the
electrical side of things, as I was asked to pack up big cables, about 10cm
wide in diameter, which connected to the generator. I learnt which ones to take
out, to make sure I didn’t affect anything else. Also, I got a general overview
of the generator.
Day 2:
The second day of this shoot was a bit more
adventurous, as I turned up in Hackney
an hour early having rushed there in a expensive taxi, as my phone somehow went
forward an hour, making me panic early in the morning at 5am. After I
discovered this, I ended up waiting outside near the location for a while cold,
tired and very frustrated with my phone!
As soon as all the crew arrived, we went inside the location and started
to set up in this really smart location where we were filming various bits in
the house - but mainly upstairs in the sitting room. My duties that morning
consisted of making a huge amount of tea and coffee, as there were more experienced
crew available on this day. Also, I had
to go and buy some general items for the shoot and had to be on standby
downstairs in kitchen, in case the director needed any assistance. There was a lot of waiting around in the
morning, so I used my networking skills to get to know everyone and this worked
really well, as I received a lot of good compliments at the end of the day. The
director only needed me near the end when they were leaving, to give him advice
on the layout of the set and helping him to find the right shot he wanted for
the promotional video. I learnt that
advising, or helping the director to achieve different angle of shot was a really
good way of standing out and also opening up new opportunities for myself in
the future on other projects.
Around about three in the afternoon, the
production assistant and I carried all the ‘shoot’ equipment and relocated to
the centre of Piccadilly, at the ‘Jewels Bar’.
We arrived on good time, but the Producer and the Director were not to
be seen, so the whole the shoot was on hold because we had to wait for them.
The producer was stuck in a big traffic jam on the M1 coming back from Stansted
Airport and the Director was somewhere in the underground with the ‘Male Model
‘. This was really bad and
unprofessional, because they kept the rest of the crew waiting and it all felt
very disorganised. Also, this nearly
caused the shoot to run on to an extra day, because rain was expected and we
wouldn’t have been able to shoot in the rain. Luckily it didn’t rain and we
managed to get all the production team and crew to the second location for a
few hours before the day had ended. My
main tasks at the end of the shoot was to look after the equipment on the
street and keep my eyes glued to the kits, because there are a lot of
Pick-pockets and thieves in central London.
My other other tasks included shining a Lite Panel at two models walking
down the street and starring the back of my head in one of the main shots as an
extra walking past the models!
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