Saturday, August 13, 2005

Television production: 'Hours of inactivity followed by 2 minutes of frenetic activity'

Someone once described TV production as 'hours of inactivity followed by 2 minutes of frenetic activity'. I'm not sure this has been totally true for us this week. In the last 5 days we have filmed 16 interviews, 7 plenary talks and one advert.

It's far short of the 30-40 interviews that we had wanted to film, but because almost everyone that we wanted to interview is a significant leader in the organization their schedule is VERY full and it's been difficult to make contact, arrange times for filming and then meet up for filming.

There have been times when we have been sitting waiting for an hour for someone to turn up... not quite the 'hours of inactivity' but we have waited and then the interviewee has turned up and said 'I have another meeting in 5 minutes, can we do this quickly?'

Till today the weather has been kind to us and we have had sunshine so most of the interviews have been outside. Today it rained and we were forced to be inside, which meant we were looking for suitable locations and then also having to light those locations.

The equipment today is MUCH lighter than it was - it was about 100kg as the mininum when I started nearly nearly 30 years ago, but even today camera, tripod, sound and lighting equipment comes to probably 30kg and carring that around; up and down hills between venues gets very tiring. We had about 45 minutes between interviews today and me and a colleague fell asleep waiting since we were so tired.

For all it being tiring, I must admit that location filming is still probably the most enjoyable part of my work.

I met another interesting person at dinner today, someone who is a professional graphic designer in southern California. He and his wife are over here helping with the children's work, but he hadn't known that there were opportunities for the Lord to use his gifts in His service out here.

No comments: