Real Horror Stories From Videographers (page 2)

Pomp and Circumstance

I was shooting a high school commencement several years back. I had a guy on a second camera, so that I could change tapes without missing anything. We even started the cameras 15 minutes apart, so that there would be plenty of overlap between tape changes to ensure we both didn't need to change tapes at the same time. While I was changing tapes, the second cameraman started zooming in. Unfortunately, as he pressed the zoom button, his hand also hit the record button, stopping his recording... while I was changing tapes. He eventually noticed he had stopped recording, but by that time I was already done changing tapes and back to recording. I ended up having to "invent" the missing footage.

Fortunately, the headmistress was talking during that downtime of recording, so, for the audio, I recorded her later in a sound studio repeating that same segment of her speech. I then had to do major sound degradation on it to make it match the rest of the footage's audio. For the video, I had to take some generic B-roll footage of a couple of graduates sitting up on stage and put it in place of the missing footage. Not a real horror story, but it was a LOT of work and NOT fun. And it totally defeated the purpose of having two cameras! -Dylan Bennett

Run 'n' Gun

While I was in my second year of school, two of the psychology professors were giving a presentation for a group of peers, and my name was suggested to tape it for posterity. They gave me three hours' notice. Not having time to scout the location and plan what I would need, I grabbed the usual assortment of camera, field recorder, cables and microphones (not to mention batteries and all the other expendables).

Little did I realize that the venue was a large room inside a restaurant, with no doors to isolate the clanking silverware sounds of the other patrons not associated with this event. Little thought had been put into the seating arrangements, and fitting the whole room in frame was a nightmarish scramble of rearranging tables, playing with window shades and moving all the presentation equipment into a better location. Luckily, with a few hours in Adobe's Soundbooth, I was able to cut out a majority of the clanks and clinks, and some tweaking of the lighting in post was enough to save the production. That horror story certainly earned me a paycheck. -Tony Spano

Backup Plan for the Backup Plan

I was commissioned by a well-known record producer to videotape a live concert of a gospel choir that was recording its first album. The video was to be used as promotion for the album, and it would have been a great opportunity for me.

The first thing that went wrong was my best crew member went missing on the eve of the shoot. I had to scrounge around for someone (anyone) to fill in at the literal last moment. The one person that was able to show was inexperienced and practically incapable of getting a decent image. She shot the floor, the walls and people's feet, and the footage bounced in and out of focus. Scratch Camera One.

The second thing that went wrong was due to the location where I had to set up my switcher and the cables from the three cameras. Due to the location of the remote truck that was recording the audio, I had to set up right next to one of the P.A. stacks in order to get a live feed for the audio portion of the video. It wasn't until I was in post that I discovered that the magnetic field generated by the massive speakers interfered with the switching transitions. Scratch the live switched version of the taping.

Luckily I had set up a fixed location camera and had another ENG camera and had the presence of mind to supply them with tape, so I was able to use the captures from those two cameras to cobble together fairly decent scenes totaling two of the ten songs the choir performed. (An excellent argument for redundancy.) -Michael Parrish