Assignment 21 - Erin

I am the first to admit that I have an inflated ego. I don’t take criticism well, and I hate looking back on my mistakes. That being said, let’s examine a failure of mine.

Back in October of 2017, I volunteered to record a performance of the school’s autumn play: Witness for the Prosecution. This was the first time I had ever recorded an event by myself in a semi-professional manner. When I was in middle school, I worked as a camera operator during some of my church’s services because they taped their sermons. But even then, I was one of three cameras, and I had a video director telling me what to do over a headset.

My overly-ambitious director mind envisioned an elaborate set up, in order to get the best possible recording. I -much like the church- would have a three camera setup: one stationary and centered for a consecutive shot of the whole stage; one on a tripod, mobile, on the left; and one mobile tripod camera on the right. I recruited two friends from my photography class to help out, and bring the other two cameras. The plan was sound.

Until it wasn’t.

We got to the theater about half an hour before the doors opened to the public, which was about forty-five minutes before the show began. As I began setting up tripods one of my “crew” members approached me with the first piece of bad news: “This camera says low battery.” I sprung to action. Within seconds the battery was charging on a plug just off stage, but I was starting to grow nervous.

With five minutes to curtain, we were all set up. Stationary camera in the fifth row. One mobile camera with a full battery. And one mobile camera with half a battery. Not ideal.

About mid-way into the show, terrible event number two occurs: I see my friend manning the stationary camera fiddling with the buttons. He then stealthily makes his way up to where I am filming from a side angle, and utters one of the two worst phrases a videographer can hear: “The memory card is full.”

Well, nothing can be done about that. I tell him to just wait by me, and, if need be, have his phone ready to start filming when the other camera inevitably dies. That moment comes later than I had expected, but it comes nonetheless. Camera operator two joins me by my camera. Everything was falling apart. And as if to seal the deal of the terrible night my camera battery soon begins flashing red.

And that’s perhaps when the most astonishing moment came. The battery light was flashing, the climax of the play was unfolding. And right as the lights went down for the last time and the audience erupted into applause, my poor camera went kaput.

Luckily, we had recording pretty much the show in its entirety, though some brief seconds were lost. I had to stitch together what I could from the various angles and awkwardly position clips that we managed to salvage. All that is to say, I went into a project overly ambitious and unprepared, and it showed. If that had been a paying gig (not just paying in community service), I probably wouldn’t have been paid at all for the job I did. It was sloppy craftsmanship. But I suppose since the incident I have learned to be more detail oriented when it comes to planning. I was caught in every videographer’s worst nightmare, and I now I know how to better navigate those kind of situations. I don’t think any amount of people telling me “Just make sure you’re prepared” would have made me as aware was that experience did.