The Ten Foot Circle

Any O.G.s here at BS&T might recall a terrific two-part guest post from the keyboard of Peter McClennan, a retired camera operator, DP, and occasional director from the Great White North.  Although it feels as though "A" is for Aerials, "L" is for Lunch went up on the blog just last year, it was actually in 2014.

Damn ... this blog is starting to make me feel old.

If you missed that post seven long years ago, click the link and take a look -- then you'll understand why I've been hounding Peter to come through with another guest post ever since. And now ... drumroll please ... here it is.

                                            

                                 The Ten Foot Circle

                                                     by Peter McLennan

 Photo by Michael Uslan 

On every set you’ll find the ten foot circle, an imaginary radius of ten feet centered on the camera.  It’s the center of the action, ground zero for the entire cast and crew. In the past, to gain unquestioned admission to that holy ground you needed to be a focus puller, boom operator, dolly grip, an actor, a director, or a camera operator. It was a small, hardworking, intense and vital group, deserving respect from all who participated in the obscure, arcane, expensive business known as Principal Photography.

At the center of that circle is the camera operator. It’s not the hardest job, that title goes to the actor, but operating the camera is the best job on set, and possibly best job in the entire industry. The operator has the best seat in the house, be it on a cushy studio dolly, standing onstage between ZZ Top, or sideways in the open door of a helicopter.

Focus pullers share some of this “best seat in the house” aspect. There’s usually nothing but empty space between them and the actors, so they experience actors' performances like few others. The camera operator shares this intimate experience, but with the added input of directly controlling how the audience sees. Of course, as some wise man said, “With great power comes great responsibility,” but there also comes great job satisfaction.

Many of the top-tier directors of photography refuse to give up operating, and for good reason. Roger Deakins insists on doing all his own operating, only excluding a few specialties like Steadicam. Emmanuel Lubeski (“Chivo”), the only DOP to win the Cinematography Oscar three years in a row, also operates, and for good reason. The degree of creative input is intoxicating, and the instantaneous, real time interaction with action and performers is addicting.

As an operator, I learned what I came to call “The Seven Word Rule.”  When the director calls “CUT!”, everyone on the set would turn and look at the operator to see what happens next. If the take is good, it’s the operator’s responsibility to approve it because nobody saw what the camera saw except the operator. That’s why the Society of Operating Cameramen uses the motto “We see it first”.

If it’s not a good take, the operator then has just seven words to explain where it went wrong and what needs to be done to fix it. Seven words, after which nobody’s listening.  Concision is mandatory, as is knowledge of the other crafts.  “The smoke’s too sourcy,” “The fireplace fire doesn’t match the master,”  “A stray hair was distracting,” “The boom dipped in,” “An extra looked at the camera.”  Or sometimes, “I need another one.”
 
The timing of lines or bits of business by the actors can vary from take to take. An important part of the operator’s job is to note where, when, and how things went wrong, or where a happy coincidence resulted in something special.

In addition to controlling, monitoring, and reporting on the technical issues that can affect a take’s quality, the operator is privileged to offer creative input, especially with the actors. Actors are not robots. Their performance can vary subtly from take to take. Their position in the set with regard to background, lighting and other actors changes with each performance.  and can greatly alter the character and quality of the product, rendering some takes useless and some superb. It’s part of the operator’s job to be aware of all of these factors and to offer input to all, including the director and the actors, to continuously improve what the camera sees. The English system, where the operator and the director work closely together, honours this shared responsibility and that’s why Mr. Deakins insists on operating.  It's another of the reasons why the operator has the best job on the set. Creative input.

But the job has changed, and from the operator’s perspective, not for the better. New technology has leached much of the fun from the job, but if the arrival of the digital movie camera cemented these changes, the beginnings appeared long before the death of film thanks to a long-ago intentional and unnatural act. Back in the early eighties, some bright spark decided it’d be a good idea to put a tiny television camera inside a film camera, and from that day life in the circle began to change. With the on-board television camera linked to an on-set monitor, everyone could see exactly what the film camera saw and the mantra “We see it first” was forever invalidated.  As a result, a large part of the operator’s technical and creative input was suddenly irrelevant. Now that everyone could “see it first,” everyone became an expert on actors’ performance, camera moves, lighting changes, smoke, density, random microphones in the shot and, yes, operator errors.

Of course the live video (and audio) feed has obviously improved the overall results of the shoot. The ubiquity of video village proves that, despite its complexity and significant expense. Now that everyone sees it first, problems are more readily apparent and easy to communicate. Many eyes are better than one.  And, like “We See it First,” the seven word rule has become irrelevant.
 
Freed from the necessity of peering over the operator’s shoulder, directors and DPs can relax in a comfy chair while seeing and hearing precisely what’s been recorded. In fact, anyone with access to the village can now experience the rare and special privilege once reserved for those behind the viewfinder.   

The biggest loser from the advent of video village is the camera operator, whose job has transitioned from one of a high status position requiring significant and continuous creative input to being a much smaller cog in the same machine. In fact, the operator is sometimes banished from the ten foot circle altogether and can be found in video village, operating the camera far from the action.

Gone is the electrifying close presence of the actors and gone is the commanding view from the best seat in the house right behind the lens. Gone is the delightful “ride at the fair” aspect of a seat on the camera crane.  And gone too is the cozy, private intimacy with the focus puller.  A tiny team of two, separate from the rest of the crew, working just inches apart, they experienced a unique shared viewpoint on the proceedings. Now they often work far apart.

For the camera operator, first the live “video assist” feed and now the digital cinema camera have removed much of the fun stuff and left all the hard stuff. Their on-set presence is still demanding and unrelenting, they still carry significant responsibility and they still have all the stress of the demands of unerring accuracy and repeatability, but with much less direct creative input.

It's a shame, really, but inevitable, and it all began when that guy put a TV camera inside a film camera.

It’s just an unnatural act, that’s what it is.

The Hardest Job on Set

One day last spring, I headed on over to the weekly farmer’s market to pick up a bag of oranges, a tub of strawberries, and whatever fresh produce looked good. There, I ran into an actor friend I’ve known for a while – not a star, but a working actor who has managed to make a living supporting his wife and kids in this business for the past twenty-odd years. You name it, he’s done it -- commercials, episodic television, sit-coms, infomercials, theater. I've seen him on stage and on screen, and the man knows his craft.  He’s good. After the usual hand-shaking and grinning, I asked what he’d been up to.

“I had a really rough gig the other day,” he said, trying to contain a smile. “I had to lie on a table for an hour an a half getting a massage from Jennifer Love Hewitt.”

I raised one eyebrow.

“Your wife know about this?”

She did.  It turned out he’d been cast as a client of Ms. Hewitt’s character in a Lifetime show called The Client List, and was well-paid for his trouble.

As the saying goes, that’s nice work if you can get it.

Working in the film/television industry offers a unique perspective on actors, watching them struggle to carve a solid career out of nothing. Unlike those of us who work below-the-line, an actor brings no tools to the workplace -- no gloves, voltage testers, crescent wrenches, hammers, or screw guns. Instead, an actor steps into the lights and in front of the cameras armed with nothing but his-or-her own figuratively naked self.

That takes guts.

Every now and then I’ll run into a fellow juicer or grip who harbors a dark, festering bitterness towards actors. Guys like that labor under the assumption that actors have it easy -- after all, an actor doesn’t have to carry crushingly heavy rolls of cable, wrangle big hot lamps or deal with lethal charges of electricity, nor do they wrestle with twenty foot steel pipes, sixty foot trans-light backings, or walk six-inch beams up in the perms while working forty feet above the stage floor. Encased in a protective cocoon of wardrobe, perfectly-coiffed hair, and carefully applied makeup, an actor very rarely faces anything resembling physical danger on set, nor has to work up an honest, physical sweat on the job.  All an actor has to do is hit the marks, say the lines, and kiss another beautiful girl, right?

And seriously, how hard can that be?*

Adding salt to this perceived wound of relative inequity, actors get paid a ton of money compared to the rest of us, making more in a single day on a television show than most juicers or grips can bring home after a full week of bruising labor. And those are just the bit players and guest stars -- the core cast of even a low-budget cable show typically make more in a week or two than I'll make over an entire year. As for a hit show on one of the major broadcast networks, the sky’s the limit. During the final seasons of “Everybody Loves Raymond,” Ray Romano grossed one million, four hundred thousand dollars for every weekly episode.

Some back-of-the-envelope arithmetic revealed that it’s taken me nearly thirty-five years of working in Hollywood – essentially, an entire career -- to earn what Ray made in one week of his show. That a single person on a television show can take home more than a million dollars per week while working alongside crew members whose paycheck for the same week will reflect roughly one-thousandth of that amount is typical of the extremes endemic to Hollywood. It’s understandable that a guy on the short end of that stick might feel some resentment. I’ve felt it myself from time to time... but deep down, I know full well this is really just an ugly blend of ignorance and envy.

Yes, the actors make truckloads of money and their every whim is catered to on set... but look at what they do.  The actors performance can save a production that might otherwise spiral into the toilet.  A movie or television show can survive bad lighting, cheap sets, shaky dolly moves and clumsy direction, but no production -- no matter how perfect -- can overcome bad acting.  Everything hinges on those actors, and they know it -- and if you think they don't feel that pressure, think again.  The rest of us can muddle through a bad day on set, but not the actors.  They have to be really good every single day of production.

A skilled actor makes it look easy out there in front of the lights and cameras, but from where I sit, actors have the hardest job on set. Image this: You show up for work, where a wardrobe person dresses you, a makeup girl applies the war paint, then a hair stylist adds the finishing touches and voila, it’s showtime – at which point, blinded by the lights, you walk out in front of anywhere from thirty to three hundred complete strangers and are expected to deliver the goods, becoming a character who is probably nothing at all like your own true self. Given the realities of scheduling single-camera productions, scenes are often shot way out of sequence (two of the movies I worked on shot the final scene in the script on the very first day of filming), which means there is no flow of continuity for a screen actor to inhabit. He or she is expected to deliver a perfectly modulated blend of emotions custom-tailored to each particular scene, and do a great job every time. Word travels fast in this business, and if an actor doesn’t (or can’t) deliver the goods on camera, every casting agent in town will hear about it.  In a very real way, an actor's career rests in the balance with every new job.

That’s pressure.

Sometimes an actor – for whatever reason – has trouble making it look easy, struggling with the process. On my show last year, we had a guest star one week who just wasn’t getting it done during rehearsals. A well-known industry veteran, she couldn’t get in synch with the script, the other actors, the producers, or the director. As show night approached, they were all shaking their heads and mentally writing that episode off as a disaster, a big bump in the road of an otherwise smooth season. It was too late to replace her, so they’d just have to grit their teeth and get through shoot night -- then forget about it and move on to the next episode, and another guest star.

Given that actors are acutely sensitive to what’s going on around them, there's no doubt she picked up on that suffocating cloud of negativity. She knew it wasn’t going well, and that the producers, director, and fellow cast members were not happy, but she came to the set every day and fought her way through each rehearsal -- and on shoot night, in front of a live audience of three hundred people, she absolutely nailed it. Her performance knocked the ball out of the park.  It was a great thing to see.

From the looks on their faces, it was clear just how amazed and relieved every one of those above-the-liners was -- really, they were happily stunned -- and although that actress must have felt a giddy rush of vindication, her demeanor betrayed nothing. She smiled and took her curtain call like it was just another day at the office.

So don’t ever make the mistake of thinking actors have it easy just because they don’t sling cable or lug sandbags all over the set. They’ve got their own cross to bear every day at work, and that sucker is heavy.  


* I can't speak to reading scripted lines or kissing beautiful actresses, but -- as I found out a long time ago -- hitting those marks and not making a complete fool of oneself on camera is very hard indeed...

The Christmas Show

No Respect

                                                Snow Rollers in action
                                                Photo by Sketch Pasinski

The nature of television production dictates that we shoot episodes linked to specific holidays or other cultural touchstones far in advance.  That's why the Halloween episode (which airs this coming week) was the very first show we cranked out at the start of our final season well over a month ago.  Last week's episode was the Christmas show, and thus the pair of snow rollers hung above the front porch set (with another pair over the living room set windows), each loaded with fluffy white plastic flakes that look very much like real falling snow once those rollers start moving.

And let's face it -- nothing says "Hollywood" quite like plastic snow drifting down upon plastic trees and plastic grass in an air-conditioned sound stage, while the fierce SoCal sun pounds the world outside like a thermonuclear sledgehammer.

The illusion is convincing on screen, but on set that plastic snow had half the crew -- including me -- sneezing our heads off as if in the full grip of flu season.  Meanwhile, we had to carefully shroud every lamp in the path of the "snowfall" with black-wrap to prevent them from becoming coated in melted plastic by the end of the day.

This show was something of a beast, really, with yet another swing-set-within-an-existing set for one scene (our recurring Russian Nesting Dolls nightmare), and a second much larger swing set of a "great room," complete with phony forest outside the porch and windows, and a big translight backing.  Size isn't necessarily a bad thing -- one big set can be less hassle to light than three or four smaller ones -- but the degree of difficulty rises considerably when the script calls for day AND night scenes in each swing set.  That meant we had to double up on all the exterior lights, hitting both sides of the backing (warm back-light for day, blue front-light for night) in addition to day/night lamps to illuminate all those trees and beam through the windows.

Naturally, the goddamned trees were dragged on stage very early in the week -- and with no place to store the fucking things, they ended up in our way at every turn.  The work is hard enough without having to fight through Birnam Wood every step of the way, but such is the lot of a sit-com juicer.*

The whole week was a bitch.  We worked pretty much non-stop each of the three lighting days to get ready for the block-and-shoot and audience-shoot days, but when the entire crew arrived to begin pre-shooting, it all looked great, the set and actors dolled-up in 19th Century period garb.

It looked so good, in fact, that the director interrupted the first rehearsal on our audience shoot day to announce what a great job the set construction, set dressing, wardrobe and hair departments had done, and to acknowledge the hard work by the stand-ins, who ran every scene repeatedly for the cameras the day before, all the while speaking endless pages of dialog in heavy southern accents.  The crew -- all of us -- responded with a standing ovation for those hard-working departments.

The director was absolutely right -- all those people he mentioned did a fantastic job…but so did grip and electric, working under difficult circumstances, and did our esteemed director think to mention that?

Of course not.  Grip and electric are the Rodney Dangerfields of the multi-camera world, taken for granted like wallpaper until something falls over or catches fire -- then all of a sudden the director and producers know exactly who we are.  The single hardest thing for me to get used to after I left the single-camera world -- where the grip and electric departments are respected and given a prominent place at the table -- was having to accept just how far down the pecking order of production priorities set lighting really is in multi-camera sit-coms.  In commercials and feature films, the cameras don't roll  until we've got the lighting just right. In sit-coms, it's just the opposite -- we're expected to be lit and ready for anything and everything whenever the director and producers want to shoot, even when they change their minds at the last second and radically change the shot.

And of course, we have to perform these weekly miracles while remaining within the bounds of an increasingly lean and mean budget. Our poor Best Boy gets called on the carpet every couple of weeks by one of the producers to explain in great detail exactly why she ordered so many lights.**

No respect.

Still, the pre-shoots looked great, and the audience loved the show on shoot-night.  After the curtain call, our lead actor took the microphone from the warm-up man to thank the entire crew in front of the audience, department by department, including grip and electric.

Then again, he does that after every show… but hey, sometimes you just have to take what you can get, whether they mean it or not.


* Peggy Archer discussed this eternal on-set problem in a recent post over at Totally Unauthorized.

** The answer, of course, is to properly illuminate the swing sets so they'll look great on camera -- and the more swing sets we have, the more lights we need.  For reasons I'll never understand,  producers always seem to think we order all that equipment just for the fun of it… which is one more reason I avoid Best Boy gigs like the plague.

The Enemy Within

                                                Look at all the fun I missed...
                                             (Photo by Chris Elizondo)

So much for getting back to doing the "best part" of my job -- hanging, powering, and adjusting the lamps on set. My four days in Sick Bay took me out of the heavy lift to get the second half of this show underway, as four sets went out, replaced by four more, two of which were big and meant to simulate the Outside World. One was a huge woodsy set that required a 140 foot long scenic backing, several big artificial trees, truckloads of dirt, many large bags of leaves and pine needles, and dozens of potted bushes. The greens crew got a serious workout building this set, as did the juicers and grips -- because it takes a lot of lights to create a convincing illusion of an exterior set on a sound stage. 

The trick in this case was making sure they were placed properly, because once the dirt and trees were in, adjusting the aim of many of these lamps would be a very time-consuming effort requiring a big articulating lift. During the two rig days, this wasn't a problem -- the dirt and trees weren't all in place yet, so the juicers and grips were free to do their work. But once the shoot days arrived, all bets were off. Due to the fifty-pounds-of-shit-in-a-five-pound-bag nature of this show, there was no room on stage for that lift, so it had to be kept outside. If we needed it, all five (yes -- five) cameras, cables, and two big arrays of video monitors (along with two massive sound department perambulators) would have to be moved well out of the way, the big elephant door opened, the lift driven in, and all the necessary lighting adjustments made. Then the lift would have to be driven back outside, the big door closed, and all the cameras, cables, monitors and sound gear moved back in place -- a process that could easily consume half an hour. With the extremely tight schedule of this show, there just wasn't time for this, so those lamps had to be set properly the first time around.

That, ladies and gentlemen, is where the DP and Gaffer earn their money, and fortunately, we had a very good DP and Gaffer who got it right.

The other exterior set was a beach, complete with sand dunes, palm trees and real sand that came in eight of these huge bags, each of which weighed in at well over a ton.

                                                      Three of eight...

Being laid up in Sick Bay, I missed all the fun. By the time I returned to work on Monday -- the first shoot day -- most of the heavy lifting was done. There was lots of tweaking, of course, but that never ends until the cameras roll, and sometimes not even then.  

Scheduled for six consecutive shooting days -- several of which went 14 hours -- this was the hardest week of the entire five week job. By mid-week, we worked a day that started at 8:30 A.M. and ended at 11:30 P.M., then we had to be back on set ready to start another long day at 8:30 the following morning. When you factor in drive time both ways, shower time, and wake-up/eat-something/get-dressed time, there aren't many hours left for actual sleep. At my age, and still recovering from that cold (having lost my voice for two days), this was a serious grind. Day Six would be lucrative, of course (at time-and-a-half all day), but we were zombies by then -- dead men walking -- because all that accumulated fatigue truly is the enemy within. It wears you down, makes you stupid, and dramatically increases the odds of making mistakes. At one point, a camera assistant looked up and said to no one in particular, "I was driving home last night and saw all the lights on the houses... and realized I'd forgotten it was Christmas." 

I knew exactly what she meant, because the same thing happened to me every night on the way home from this job. When I pull the plug -- very soon, kiddos -- I certainly won't miss the all-consuming nature of the film and television industry, where we do little but eat/sleep/work until the show is done. The show becomes our world, with everything outside the sound stage seeming somehow not quite real anymore.   

It's no way to live.

I arrived on set that sixth morning at half-mast, acutely aware that my brain was not functioning well.  "Stay off the ladders today" was my first thought, because ending my career with a fall and in the hospital on my last shoot day in Hollywood as a core member of a set lighting crew might make a good ending for a lousy movie, but I had no desire to bring such bad fiction to life.
 
So naturally -- the Gods of Hollywood being famously contrarian at the best of times -- my first assignment was to climb that forty-two step steel ladder up high, inside the Tube of Death, to drop down power for one of the newer swing sets. Needless to say, I made that climb very carefully, holding tight to each and every rung on the way up and down, breathing hard all the way.

And once safely back on the stage floor, I was wide awake at last, once again proving that adrenaline is a lot more effective than coffee.

With that, the tedium resumed as another long day unfolded one slow hour at a time. We'd been told the producers wouldn't go past 10:30 P.M. no matter what, and they were true to their word. We plugged in the man-lifts to recharge, then did some minor clean-up around the stage -- "making it safe" -- and that was that. There will be a few days of wrap, and hopefully a little day-playing early in the New Year, but with the end of this day, my career in Hollywood is essentially over.  

Put it this way: my name will never again appear on a call sheet as a core member of a set lighting crew. That part of my life is done.

                                                  The last call sheet...

I'll have some thoughts on that and a few other things in the weeks to come, but for now I'll leave you with a little Christmas gift -- the same one I leave under the cyber-tree here every year: the great Robert Earl Keene's rendition of Merry Christmas from the Family. If you've never heard it, you're in for a treat -- and if you have, you already know.

Merry Christmas, and as always, thanks for tuning in...