Rupert
made his way round to the booths where he took up position in front of the
camera monitor with Derek The Client.
He focussed on his script, ridden with hastily scribbled notes and time
codes, making sure he knew exactly what he needed from the scene they were
about to shoot. Yes, fine. Usual kind of thing - customers
approach from left of screen, greeted by clerk from right. Shoot the whole
interview as a three shot, then again on a close up of the clerk, and a third
time on a two-shot of the customers, not forgetting the nice big close ups of
them signing the form and shaking hands as they finally succumb to being 'bigged' by the deceptively harmless
looking member of staff.
He leant back wearily against the enquiries
booth wall and watched the production machine around him grind through the
traditional rigmarole, each crew member caught up in a frenzy of professional
habit and fear. Fear of Roger, the
director, who stood at the centre of it all barking instructions like a drill
sergeant at his kid's birthday party. The director roosted comfortably at the top
of the corporate video tree.
Having a director on your average video shoot was about as necessary as
having an Admiral present in the bathroom for the launch of a new sponge.
However, as Roger's other role in the company was counting the money he felt it
best if he came along to keep and eye on the petty cash.
He also enjoyed reminiscing with the
cameraman about their time together on The Antiques Roadshow, discussing the
fate of ex-colleagues who where still unfortunate enough to be working on
interesting and worthwhile programmes in far-flung corners of the world. At least with the Brighouse Sewage
Sludge Incinerator you didn't have to have a malaria jab every time you went to point the camera at the latest
over-sized piece of steel tubing being attached to the rest on the way to
achieving staggeringly low CO2 emissions in line with EC environmental
directives.
"Okay let's do one," said Roger.
"Know what you're doing..."
"Martin," the sickly-looking
enquiries clerk reminded him.
"Sorry, know what you're doing
Martin?"
"Yeh," he said feeling relatively
confident, the director not yet having said the 'mind-numbing word'.
"And roll camera," said Roger
adding a hint of Hollywood for the benefit of Derek The Client who looked on in
awe.
There was a meaningful pause as the camera
whirred into life, gathering itself to record the take. The cameraman was quite
a guy. Being responsible for the most expensive piece of kit on the shoot he
generally wore a genuine Levi denim shirt and stood with his light tan suede shoes
- expensive squash pumps at a pinch - set a good distance apart. His upper body swiveled like a
pneumatic dream as he practiced the move, the camera perched like a
containerized parrot on his shoulder.
And then it was time to do the shot.
"Speed," said the cameraman
signifying that the camera was sufficiently gathered. Rupert suspected that he
got to choose that word himself.
It suited him so well.
"Okay Martin...and ACTION."
There was that word. Clouds of
unconsciousness immediately begin to envelop Martin's brain. Suddenly he was up
to his neck in treacle. His arms
felt heavy and incapable of carrying out even the simplest instruction from his
brain. He lurched across the
banking hall like a robotic orangutan.
His leaden fingers fumbled ineffectually with the edges of the required
leaflet, unable to extract it from the firm hold of the leaflet stand and
deliver it to the hand-holding newly weds in the booth.
"Sorry Roger. I'm picking something
up," said the sound recordist, emerging for a moment from the private hi
fidelity world of his headphones. “Clanking coming from outside."
That'll be the cages, Rupert thought.
"We'll have to go again."
The Sound Recordist was fortunate enough to
be indivisibly linked with the sweet scented cameraman on a more or less
constant basis. A respectfully
long cable linked the camera to his humble sound recording equipment (which
looked strangely like an early Bush transistor radio with a number of round
knobs that he continually adjusted for God knows what reason). The camera on the other hand had a
panel of minute controls secreted under a hidden flap and, like all the best
car radios, was most easily operated with the aid of a microscope and a darning
needle.
In the next take Martin successfully
retrieved the pamphlet and stationed himself back in the booth to put across
the benefits of the product in an attractive and easily understandable way.
“Basically, what this does right is let you
vary your payments over time in accordance with your disposable income levels,
giving you the opportunity to pay it off early and save thousands of pounds in
interest.”
Perfect, thought the producer. They could use that. Unfortunately Roger had other ideas
having suddenly become acutely aware of a cable running across the floor in the
background of the shot.
“Cut!”
The ‘spark’ – or electrician - was duly
admonished. Donning his gardening
gloves he eagerly – almost gratefully it seemed – repositioned the ‘blondes’
(big yellow lights) and ‘red heads’ (small red ones) so that the cable was no
longer in view.
Great for the shot – but a further drawback
for the ‘talent’ therein. Although
the leaflet stand showed no visible signs of discomfort, Martin now had several
lights aimed directly at his rear cranial portion, inducing a heavy and obtuse
pain in the fore part of his head, accompanied by dimness of site, vertigo and
coldness of the extremities. But
like a true professional - and like someone who had absolutely no choice - he
didn’t complain.
“Basically, what this is all about is about
letting you pay less so that in the end you pay less…does that make sense?”
“Don’t look at the camera Martin,” said
Roger. “And leave a pause when
you’ve finished speaking.”
Rupert approached with his script and tried
his best to explain what was required without adding further to the pressure
that the spot lit clerk was gradually wilting beneath.
“Have you got that then?” he asked
hopefully before retreating back into the shadows.
“Yeh, no problem. Sorry. I don’t
know what’s wrong with me.”
They tried again.
“This means that you can actually change
your payments to pay less if you want so that you pay less but over time pay
more…sorry…over time pay less in interest which means you don’t pay as much as
you would if…sorry. I’ve lost it.”
“S’alright,” said Roger. “Keep rolling. Martin, just start again from where you
left off.”
“Which means that…”
“Hang on Martin. Remember to pause before you start so we can edit it
in. Okay? Off you go.”
“Basically you decide when you want to have
less so that the interest gets saved and you pay no less than you need to
have…”
Rupert moved in again. “That’s good Martin. But I think you’re trying too
hard. The first take was great. Remember the key points. You can vary your payments so that, if
you wish, you can pay it off sooner and save thousands of pounds in interest –
potentially. It’s not guaranteed
though so it all needs a slightly conditional tone. Okay?”
Martin sagged and suddenly looked severely
less than okay. In fact getting
more than two words strung together – conditionally or not - looked like a long
shot.
“Shall we go for another?”
They continued. Bulbs popped and were replaced. New tapes were slotted in the parrot. Log sheets were filled and fresh ones
started. The afternoon wore on and
Martin wore out.
“Don’t worry about saying exactly what
Rupert told you to say,” Roger said as Martin lapsed into a semi-catatonic
state part way through take 27.
“He’s just being pedantic! Nobody gives a toss what you say really. Just say the first thing that comes
into your head.”
Unfortunately, the only person who gave a
toss about what the poor boy said was Rupert, who had been at work until ten
o’clock the previous night tweaking, pummeling and re-shaping the script to accommodate
the twenty-five managers who needed to sign it off before shooting could
commence. And who, incidentally,
were also required to sign-off the finished programme shortly before signing a
great big cheque for Butternut Communications.
‘But hey,’ he fumed, not daring to
contradict Roger whose superiority he had pledged always to honour at his job
interview a year earlier – ‘Martin might as well say the first thing that comes
into his head. That would be just
fine!’
The producer was the most complex and
mysterious creature in the shoot.
Having the originated the programme and organised every aspect of the
production there was nobody else to blame except himself if the video did not
fulfil its brief. Once the shoot
was underway there was really nothing else for him to do but worry. And, of course, chat reassuringly with
Derek The Client as though everything was just fine. As a trainee producer he was basically being taught to
worry. Worry professionally. Not
worry as in ‘did I leave landing light on’, but the kind of industrial strength
worry that had a habit of damaging vital bodily functions and marriages.
Roger winked at him knowingly. “Don’t worry kiddo,” he murmured before
moving on to set up the next shot.
“We’ll sort it out in the edit.”
Yes, there was always the edit. The last
resort, where all ills could be cured, wrongs righted, creases ironed out. Through the miracle of non-linear
digital editing he and Roger would spend the next week taking every word
uttered by the temporarily paralysed Martin and re-shuffling it to produce
brand new sentences – the precise ones that were in the script. And if they were short of any words,
individual phonemes would be taken and reassembled to produce those words that
were needed to create an illusion of sense and coherence. This audio micro-surgery would be
covered in the final edit by a number of
‘noddies’ – regular shots of the couple nodding gratefully, yet in a
strangely detached way as though Martin were no loner there. Which, in fact, he wasn’t, having been
stretchered to the staff room with a cup of sweet milky tea and a blanket.
The fully mature Corporate Video Producer –
like the Rupert’s boss Kenneth – was an evolutionary miracle, being able to
survive in both the world of business and television production, as happy in a
BHS matching shirt and tie pack as in jeans and a black polo neck sweater. This meant that it alone could perform
the miracle that all production companies worth their salt aspired to: the use of established broadcast techniques
to create effective communication solutions for business.
Derek The Client looked over the producer’s
shoulder at the script, not understanding what he saw but loving it all just
the same. He loved telly
generally, Top Gear and They Think’s It’s all Over being by far
the most pleasurable events of his week.
And here was his very own telly Producer converting his tired old place
of work into four by three perfection, back-lit, choreographed and cleansed. In fact his Producer was the nearest
thing to a genie he’d ever had.
(Only he tended to come out of a Volvo estate rather than a lamp.) The Bank’s wishes were his command. Proper telly had made his staff believe
that angels walked amongst them, that there is a love that never dies, that
their lives are nowhere near as good as every one else’s, that all toilet
cleaners are not the same.
So why shouldn’t it also convince them that
the Low Access Rate No String Random Payment Mortgage really was worth selling
to every lost soul that entered the branch – even if it’d just popped in for
change for the meter. That
customers should expect to have a large proportion of their family wiped out at
any moment in a tragic gardening accident, while contracting a debilitating
disease themselves form the lawn clippings. That, even if by some lucky chance they had thus far escaped
the hand of debilitation, they should at least spend a disproportionate amount
of time worrying about it. After
all, how could they hope to feed their family if their right nostril was the
only part of their body to escape paralysis? Nasal elocution lessons do not come cheap. Could their family really afford to
send them to the States to undergo the nasal extension procedure that would
allow them to drive again?
Over the years Kenneth had nurtured an
intimate relationship with the Bank’s senior management, especially with Derek
The Client. Knowing more about the
Bank’s business than the Bank itself he was able to spot an internal
communication requirement before it knew it had one. For example, it was Kenneth that pointed out that if it went
ahead and redesigned its branches without training staff to recognise them how
would they know they’d turned up to work at the right place?
His partner Roger Butterworth, on the other
hand, found it healthy not to engage in the subject matter. This was partly to keep his mind free
to conduct his finely honed programme making skills and partly (mainly) because
his wife insisted that he was home at 5 pm every day to pick up the kids from
the child minders. This hardly
gave him enough time to draw up the shot list, never mind consider why he was
shooting it. All in all it was
better if he left it to Kenneth who, fortunately, had no wives, kids or child
minders to worry about.