On The Road - 23/Nov/2015

Haven't Done This In A While

It's been like 8 years since I went on the road for any shoot so this is all a bit of a mind warp this week. The moment I was freed from the clutches of the little tyrant, I rang my friends and said I was free. It took 3 days before somebody called - and by somebody I mean somebody who had seen me work as an interpretter, and had spoken to one of my friends that I told, and one thing led to another and it's been this really busy month. If I combine how well I've done in the markets and doing these jobs, I'm actually way ahead of where I would have been had I stayed at the Events Lighting Company. I don't have a business plan, but I seem to have a personal business! At least just for this month.

The good news is, it's a shoot, it's on the road to get me out of my head if not my room where I'd likely brood or fret, and it's with a small crew so it's not that complicated. I'm a bit rusty with the airport run-throughs and sorting out extra luggage, but overall, we're getting our shots and the locations have all worked out. It's all coming back to me ever so slowly. The first day was a grind, but on day 4, it's feeling like old times but with better tech. For a start I'm blogging here from my iPad, right? When I think about the time I was lugging my iBook laptop around Japan for that Discovery Channel thing about the Aquarium and the H-IIA rockets, it's a far cry.

The bad news is that I don't really see much aesthetic or technical merit with Japanese TV crews. They're just so minmalist that working towards quality lighting and sound hardly figure into it. You can understand why Japanese TV looks the way it does, from the way they work. They don't really sweat the kinds of things I would, and shoot gobs and gobs of stuff you know is going to end up on the cutting room floor.  It seems like a colossal waste of time and money. The cameramn knows it too, so he's bitched about it in private.

The real joke is I was asked whether I thought I'd go back on the road by TDT at the Events Lighting Company. I gave him a non-committal "yeah-maybe-if-the-deal-is-right". It sure didn't take long before the deal looked right.

With The Luxury Of Experience...

I used to get down when working on other people's shoots. If I watched too closely as a crew person doing audio or gaffering or even doing post-production, eventually the director in me would start seeing faults and not the merits. Truth is, everybody's different and working to different urgencies, so it makes sense to not get wound up about it, but... I'm sort of a tough nut. I like doing things as best as you can, every shot, every move, every cut, every fade.

Anyway, being on the road with this crew as the production coordinator has been great because I bear absolutely no responsibility for the creative choices. My name won't be on this piece of crud when it's cut. This is really quite liberating; and at the same time I'm on a shoot, so it's like getting my sea legs under me again.

It doesn't matter that it's got nothing to do with my vision or my project. It's just something working in TV where at least I know what the fuck is suposed to happen. The fact that it doesn't quite happen the way I think it ought to, is just academic. And liberating.  Funnily enough, working for so long for the little tyrant made me not give a shit about working for other people's cockamamie creative pursuits. If I've worked on the lighting of the Sydney Harbour Bridge and pretended it was 'art', I can sure as heck work on a few crappy Japanese shoots and pretend it's meaningful.