Real Horror Stories From Videographers (page 3)

Flying Video Camera

My real horror story happened during the first out-of-state shoot and one of the biggest productions I ever did for our wrestling show. This show, however, cost me more than just the gas for the trip. During the two-camera shoot, one wrestler whipped another into the turnbuckles... which happened to be the exact location that I was shooting from. The wrestler tried to flip out of the way, and I tried to move. We didn't quite make it... His foot caught my arm, which sent the camera flying through the air behind me. I heard a crack, followed by a smash... And my favorite camera was near death. What happened next, you ask? Why, I picked the camera up and continued to shoot with it, of course! The second camera caught the flying cam shot, and the broken camera footage lives on forever in this very clip: www.youtube.com/watch?v=xIWWqCnnGYY at about 1:45 in. -Tom Skowronski

School Daze

It all started innocently enough. My senior AV class project needed to involve a video with at least thirty seconds of animation. I decided to make a music video to one of my favorite songs. The animation would go in where I couldn't make live action work. It was brilliant! I got to use an old storyboard to cut back on some of the work involved (never mind that I made it during freshman year when I had no idea how to make a storyboard). Pre-production was a breeze. I scheduled use of the one camera capable of stop-motion animation (hey, this is a high school AV classroom we're talking about here), and an hour to use the Home Economics room for a shot. I finished all of my drawings for the animation and prepared my cells. After spending three hours after school making the animation, I was ready to shoot the live action. That was about when things started to go wrong.

On the day I had scheduled to use the Home Ec room, another teacher was using it and sent me to the teacher's lounge. Okay, I can make this work. Just as we began to film, the same teacher entered the teacher's lounge with her class to use the television. She told me to leave. I protested, saying that I had scheduled the Home Ec room and that she had sent me to the teacher's lounge in the first place. It didn't work. Okay, still not a problem, I'll just shoot the other live action parts.

I shot the scenes I needed. They were not quite what I was hoping for, but beggars can't be choosers. I was still missing the kitchen scene I needed, but I could get that later, right?

Then I played back my video. Something was wrong. Very wrong. There were weird black spaces where my animation was supposed to be! I let out a moan. This was worth one-third of my grade! It was due in two days! One of those two days would be taken up with graduation rehearsal! I spent my lunch period and the time after school fixing it. It was beautiful! Well, it was as beautiful as a high school production that went wrong can be. I was called away to look at something while it exported, but I had never had a problem exporting before. I turned it in.

The next day, my teacher came up to me. He would have to look at my video on the computer and needed my password. The broken camera we used to export video had finally bitten the dust. It had done so while it was exporting my video and had ruined the tape. This could have been a real horror story, but luckily, he gave me an 'A' anyway. Thank goodness. -Kimberly Lewis

Silence is Golden... Maybe

I was directing a live newscast one night and I was watching the clock because we had to be out at 7:00 to hit the national news on time. We had two minutes left to the show after the last commercial break. I was looking at the story the anchors had just begun to read, and I could see they weren't going to finish in time. I had never seen the story, but I let everybody know we were going to find a point to cut the story off and go into the outro. I found a spot and had the floor director cue them to say good night. They did, we played music, and faded to black. Smooth... or so I thought. I looked up at the clock and realized we had one minute left. There was dead air for about 20 seconds. Everybody was silent until I had the crew run some random commercial. That went for another 20 seconds. And then there was a bit more dead air. Adding to the drama, my supervisor was in the room showing some new people what went on in a live broadcast. Luckily he was understanding and even jokingly said that if I was going to do that again, I should let him know, so we could sell the air-time. -Evan Edstrom

Final Curtain

From student productions to the pros in the trenches, we all make mistakes some time down the road. The true magic is when we can deliver the product anyway, despite the odds... and sometimes they are pretty crazy odds. Thanks for sharing your stories with us; we all can learn a lot from them (especially about checking your gear bag for snakes... yikes!). You can find more horror stories from our readers at these links:
www.videomaker.com/article/13761
www.videomaker.com/article/13011
www.videomaker.com/article/12659

'Til next year...

Videomaker Managing Editor Jennifer O'Rourke is an Emmy award-winning videographer and video editor.