My First Paid Job in the Industry!

Today marked the day I worked on my first properly paid job in the industry!

As such, I was working as a camera assistant for DoP Daniel Patrick Vaughan and his company Digitalfire, filming a couple of interviews of adolescents for a council-driven project at a school in North Shields, Newcastle.

Whilst I am not able to delve deeper into the nature and particularities of these interviews due to reasons of confidentiality, I will nevertheless attempt to render my experience to the best of my abilities in order to portray my learning.

So for these particular interviews (a total of four) – together with a couple of introductions and cutaways – we had set an ambitious schedule of three hours (including time for rig and de-rig), using a simple two-camera-two-lights setup.

My Tasks

Within this, my job was to supervise the B-camera (a Sony FS7 with 85mm) for MCUs and CUs and to monitor the sound levels, which proved to be quite a feat with an active school surrounding us. Furthermore, I was naturally also tasked to help with the setup and de-rig of the equipment as well as liaising with the students in question.

My Own Research

Since it’s been a while since my last interview, and because of the time constraints, I thus decided to take a refresher into filming and conducting interviews for my personal preparation, watching Parker Walbeck’s Youtube tutorial online:

What I found decidedly interesting in this particular setup was Walbeck’s preference to put the B-camera on the shadow side for his setup, thus going for a slightly different look, rendering his footage more nuanced depending on the content of his interviews. Because of that, I thus asked my DoP whether he would rather want the B-camera on the shadowy or rather on the bright side.

After a quick discussion of options, rethinking the style in context of the purpose of this video, he thus decided to keep the B-camera on the bright side, which henceforth informed my setting up the B-camera for every single shot and interview, saving us a lot of time in the following.

My Challenges and Learning

Apart from the fact that the tight schedule required me to be alert and to keep a high pace, as well as train my efficiency and workflow on set, it also helped me deepen my learning of a classic interview setup with two cameras and to improve my learning of the more practical and social aspects of the trade.

As such, and after we had set up for our first interview, we proceeded onto filming our adolescents, which proved to be a small challenge as all of these students were (understandably) very shy in front of a camera (let alone two!) and needed a bit of reassurance here and there.

Because of this, and since I was monitoring the sound levels anyway, I attempted to make them feel comfortable by actively engaging with them, addressing them by their names – which is a real feat for me as my brain is rather rubbish when it comes to remembering names – and asking them for their favourite hobbies, food, etc. whenever I had to conduct a sound check and/or adjust the levels.

As it turned out, this treatment worked like a charm in three of four cases and made the three students in question more comfortable. This was especially visible when comparing their postures before and after the sound check, which usually resulted in us either reframing or refocusing the shots slightly.

They even grew more relaxed whenever they happened to trip on words or make another mistake as they realised that this is just part of our daily job and can be easily mitigated. Which was a very vivid example of how important it can be to portrait approachability on set and how that can make or break a production.

Film production is teamwork after all: The better your skills in that regard, the better the final outcome.

I’m already looking forward to the next opportunity!

References:

Companies House (2019) Digitalfire Ltd. [online] Available at: https://beta.companieshouse.gov.uk/company/09436747/officers [Accessed on 12 November 2019]

Digitalfire (2019) Homepage Digitalfire [online] Image taken from: https://digitalfire.co.uk [Accessed on 12 November 2019]

Parker Walbeck (2018) How to Shoot an Interview | Job Shadow [online] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7ENEuqXDwY&t=632s [Accessed on 12 November 2019]