Trevor Roach wrote:... Lots of curveballs came our way too... from our lead actress sleeping in and having to replace her last minute, to only having 6 hours at our main location to shoot everything (antique store), to my co-editor walking out on the project with 5 hours left -- lots of stress.
Wish I could have put all my focus on lighting and shooting and not towards rallying the troops, but oh well.
I've made that mistake of assuming everyone will do their job and you can concentrate on the technicalities, but I've learned, hopefully, that it is all about the people and how you will work with them including lots of pre-production time discussing whatever and listening carefully to them. Some can take the ball running and shine for you when you point them in the right direction. Others, let's face it, require more personal attention, especially the talent in front of the lens, even to the point of stroking a fragile ego or getting them up in the early morning. That 'slept in' behaviour may have been masking her fear! I've never been in a competition that must be a pressure-cooker, but managed to make lots of mistakes with people as I concentrate on the technical and logistical necessities.
I think in an ideal world, you have people do everything technical and logistical and have a fallback position as needed, while you concentrate on the people behind and especially in front of the camera. In a larger production, you even have people that help the people, the "assistant to Mr. Harrison" approach but those assistants need to be very good at what they do. I can't imagine what it would be like to be the assistant to Marilyn Monroe. I can see these competitions are very valuable for learning these lessons in a quick and relatively painless way compared to running into these experiences on the bigger projects you do.
Rick Lang
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