Crew Etiquette

While shooting, the crew keeps movement to a minimum and stays out of participants’ eyelines to avoid distracting them. Even when something funny happens, the crew tries to remain silent and expressionless. If you allow yourselves to behave like an audience, participants turn into entertainers. Every crew member has something vital to monitor:

• Camera operator watches for focus, compositions, framing, movements, and whether the mike is edging into the shot.
• Sound recordist listens for unwanted reverb or echo, ambient noise, mike handling sounds, and sound consistency from shot to shot. The last takes the most skill.
• Director monitors the scene for content, subtext, and emotional intensity. What does this add up to? What meanings are taking shape under the surface (subtext)? Where is the scene going? Is it what I expected? Does it deliver what I hoped, or is this something new?

The scene proceeds until the director calls “Cut!”

Who Else Can Call “Cut!”

Nobody but the director can call “Cut!” unless you’ve agreed to the right to do so beforehand. The camera operator, for instance, might abort the scene if some condition that only he or she can see makes it useless to go on. An arbitrary halt, however, may damage a participant’s confidence, so it’s nearly always best to keep filming. Sometimes a participant, unhappy with something said or done, may call “Cut!” and you may have no option but to comply. Do not encourage participants to take over your role.

FIGURE 12-1 Short personal release form suitable for student productions. A full-length release appears in Chapter 24, Figure 24-2, but its all-encompassing legalese may intimidate those contributing to modest productions.

Sound Presence

Make sure that you have a minute or two of silence for each location. This, variously called presence, buzz track, room tone, or ambience, is background atmosphere inherent to the location. All locations, even those indoors, have their own characteristic ambient sound, and you shoot a presence track at the same recording level as the rest of the scene. Recording some at every location ensures that the editor can always fill in spaces or make other track adjustments.

Warn participants that you have to shoot a presence track. When the time comes, everyone stands in eerie silence for a couple of minutes. You are uncomfortably aware of your own breathing and all the little sounds in the room until the recordist calls “Cut!” For more information, see Chapter 11, Location Sound, and Chapter 27, Advanced Location Sound.

Getting the Personal Release form Signed

Once you finish shooting with someone, you ask him or her to sign a legal release document. This gives you the right to make public use of the material in return for a symbolic sum of money, such as $1. It does not, however, immunize you against legal action should you misuse the material or libel the signatory. Some documentarians get a verbal release by asking participants to say on camera that they are willing to be filmed and that their name and address is such and such. This certainly guards against subsequent claims that they didn’t know they were being filmed but does not fulfill what a lawyer would want. It does not, for instance, guard against people deciding not to participate later and rendering void months of work. The brief release version in Figure 12-1 will suffice for your first productions, but any work for broadcasting requires a release form whose pages of legalese make ordinary people go pale with alarm. Normally you won’t have legal problems unless you allow people to nurture the (not unknown) fantasy that you are going to make a lot of money selling their footage. For full-length location and personal release forms, see the end of Chapter 30, Conducting and Shooting Interviews.

It’s a Wrap

Once you have shot the scene and the editor has all necessary materials, it’s time to strike (dismantle) the set. Check that you shot a presence track and then announce “It’s a wrap!” Everyone moves to begin their own winding-up responsibilities:

• Lower the lights and roll up cables while hot lighting fixtures cool down.
• Strike the set; collect clamps, stands, and boxes.
• Replace furniture and household goods exactly as you found them.
• Take the camcorder off its support, dismantle it, stow all gear in protective travel boxes.
• Stow sound equipment in its own travel boxes.
• Whoever is supervising the schedule confirms the next day’s shooting with those affected.
• Director makes sure that the location is undamaged and everything is left clean and tidy, and thanks participants and each person in the unit for a good day’s work.

Creating Trust

You create trust by explaining why you want to shoot a particular scene or topic and by convincing participants that something about their lives is valuable for other people to know. You can film an old man feeding his dog and talking to it because he senses you feel it’s a special part of a special life. A taxi driver will happily chat to the camera while cruising for a fare because that is his central reality and he enjoys sharing it. You may discreetly film a woman relaxing in her morning bath because it was in this very bath that she made the momentous decision to visit Egypt.

You and your camera can plumb the depths of other people’s lives whenever they sense that you and your crew personally accept, like, and value them. A documentary is a record of relationships, so success depends on what took place before the camera is ever switched on. For this reason I have always avoided topics or participants for which I feel little interest or empathy. Not always, though. I once embarked with very mixed feelings on a BBC film about Sir Oswald Mosley and his 1930s British Union of Fascists in The Battle of Cable Street (1969, United Kingdom). We set about tracing people from across the sociopolitical spectrum who had taken part in the decisive anti-Semitic street confrontation, particularly those who admitted to being his followers. As it happened, they were shockingly ordinary; no horns or cloven feet anywhere. They were anxious to present their case and even made a distorted kind of sense. All researcher Jane Oliver and I needed to do was play the part of younger people learning history from its protagonists. In the end, I interviewed Mosley himself. I knew him to be urbane, an upper crust swaggerer with a penchant for distorting everything connected with him self. I felt apprehensive—less over his followers’ reputation for violence or my revulsion with their values than with his reputation for squashing interviewers. So, instead of trying to trick him, I encouraged him to explain the events for which his published views were most specious.

During the lengthy editing period, my editor and I grew increasingly fascinated and repelled. I wanted to relay his version of the 1936 events, yet show how delusional it was. This emerged through juxtaposing his account with those of other witnesses and participants and he hanged himself on the rope we gave him. The film pleased the left (who opposed the freedom Mosley was given to organize racial hatred) and even Mosley himself, since he had expected to have his account distorted.

In Search of Naturalness

People often ask, “How do you get people to look so natural in documentaries?” Of course, you want to shake your head and imply many years spent learning professional secrets. Actually, it’s much easier to achieve than is, say, a satisfactory dramatic structure, but it still takes some basic directorial skills. When participants are uniformly unnatural, as you sometimes see, it is mistaken directing. The key lies in the way you brief your participants, as we shall see.

Interviewing is just one way to direct a documentary, and some of the most gripping films are entirely made of people talking. In an oral history work where little but survivors provide imagery, this may be the only film you can make. Most directors, however, take pains to show people active in their own settings, doing what they normally do. This spares the audience the hypnotic intensity of being talked at for long periods. In any case, we like judging character and motivation more by what people do than by what they say. Actions do speak louder than words, and film is inherently behavioral, so we make sure participants have familiar things to do, things that set them at ease.

So you decide to shoot your subject with his family, at work collaborating with an employee, and in the neighborhood bar playing pool with cronies. These situations won’t transcend the stereotypical unless you can make them yield something satisfying—about your subject or his milieu. There is also another slight hitch. He feels most normal when nobody is watching. Once he’s under scrutiny, as you film, his sense of himself fragments. I once filmed in a glass-door factory, and a lady who had spent years passing frames through a machine completely lost control of her machine when we turned the camera on her. To her deep embarrassment, the frames began to jam or miss the jet of rubber sealer solution. It happened because she was thinking about her actions instead of just doing them.

In documentary we aim to capture people looking normal, and self-consciousness wrecks the process. The factory worker, feeling she must “act,” lost automatic harmony with her machine, and all I could do was reassure her that this sometimes happens. So we waited until she managed a few rounds in her old rhythm. It was a memorable example of the mind impeding the body’s habitual function and shows how important it is that you help people stay inside their own sense of normality.

Giving Participants Work

Make sure your participants have familiar things to do, even while they talk to the camera. For every action sequence, have some requests lined up in case you sense self-consciousness. I should have asked the lady in the factory to mentally count backward in sevens or discuss her shift with a colleague to get her mind off the idea of being filmed.

Interviewing

If you interview, here are some brief hints. Make a point of being relaxed and natural, so you don’t scare your interviewee. Prepare your questioning in advance so you know what you want to explore or find out. Make a list of questions but try not to use it, since working from a list will seem formal and even mechanical to your interviewee. Instead, keep it handy in case your mind goes blank, and simply have an interesting conversation that touches all the points you want to explore. Use your list as a checklist before you finish, so you don’t forget anything important.

You will probably want to edit out your questions, so it’s important not to overlap your voices. This means you need a clean start from the interviewee, with no overlap and no beginning that depends on your question. If, for instance, you asked “Tell me about your first job?” you might get the kind of answer that starts, “Well, it was in a school bus company, and my job was to. …”

This reply depends on the question, so you’d ask him to start over using the words, “My first job was. …” You can try asking interviewees ahead of time to incorporate your question’s information in their answer, but they often forget. As the interviewer, it’s your responsibility to ensure a clean start to each answer.

The other important thing is not to be afraid of silences. Be absolutely sure the interviewee has said all she wants to say before you come in with another question. If you think there’s more to come, wait. With digital media it costs nothing, and you’re going to edit the material heavily. A pause is not a failure—it’s being considerate. Often you get gold when you wait.

Interviewing is a very productive skill, so Chapter 30, Conducting and Shooting Interviews, is devoted to the subject.

Filming in Institutions or Organizations

Organizations, especially those operating in extreme situations, are far more likely to be paranoid than are individuals. At any time they may want you to explain in writing why you are filming this topic or that scene. Keep explanations simple and uncontroversial. Your explanations should be consistent (because participants compare notes) but not so specific that you box yourself into a corner.

Communication

Day-to-day direction while shooting should begin from a comprehensive printed schedule with timely updates in cases of change. Include travel directions and cell phone numbers in case of emergency or cars getting separated. Give everything of possible importance in writing since shooting is no time to test people’s powers of recall.

Ideally, the crew has been intimately involved in evolving ideas for the film, but when you shoot for television, you often get an assigned crew. Outline the intended filming for the day, and keep the crew abreast of developments—something I used to forget when the pressure mounted.

Who’s Responsible for what

Be formal about the chain of responsibility at first, then once things are running well, you can afford to relax the traditional structure. If you start informally and then find you must tighten up, you will meet with resentment. Once the crew assembles at the location, privately reiterate the immediate goals. You might, for instance, want a store to look shadowy and fusty or to emphasize a child’s view of the squalor of a trailer park. Confirm the first setup, so the crew can get the equipment ready. A clear working relationship with your director of photography (DP) will relieve you from deciding myriad details that might detract from your main responsibility, which is toward participants and the narrative coherence of the film. Now get busy preparing the participants.

Working Atmosphere

The transition into shooting should hide the excitement and tension you may feel and instead be a time of relaxed but focused attention. Shooting should take place in as calm an atmosphere as possible, and the crew should convey warnings or questions to you discreetly or through signs. The recordist or camera operator, for example, may hold up three fingers to indicate that only three minutes of tape or memory remain.

In potentially divisive situations, only the director should give out information or make decisions. The crew must preserve outward unity at all costs and make no comment that undermines the authority of the director or each other. They should be particularly scrupulous about keeping any disagreements from the participants, who need a calm and professional atmosphere. When student films break down, it is usually because crew members are apt to consider themselves more competent than the person directing. As difficulties arise, well-meaning but contradictory advice showers down on the director. This propagates alarm and despondency in participants and crew alike.

Monitoring and Instructing

• Check the shot—If the camera is on a tripod, make a habit of checking the cinematographer’s composition before you shoot. Afterwards it will be too late. At the end, look through the viewfinder again to check the ending composition. Some camera operators may suggest that you don’t trust them because of this. Insist, because you’ll be held responsible, not them. After a while you’ll find checking is seldom necessary.
• Run-up—Each time you give the command “Roll camera,” allow a few seconds of equipment run-up time before saying the magic word “Action” to your participants. Most cameras hit speed almost instantaneously, but action immediately following a camera startup is not always usable because there may be color or picture instability problems. In Chapter 28, Organization, Crew, and Procedures, under “The Countdown to Shooting” section, there is the more elaborate procedure you need when you start up a separate camera and sound recorder.
• Positioning yourself—If the camera is tripod mounted, stand next to, and to the left of, the camera so you can see as nearly as possible what it sees. If the camera is handheld, you may have to drop back a foot or two, in case the camera wheels around.
• Communication with camera operator—Relay minimal camera directions by whispering into the operator’s ear, making sure, of course, that your voice will not spoil a recording. Be brief and specific: “Go to John in medium shot,” “Pull back to a wide shot of all three,” or “If he goes into the kitchen again, walk with him and follow what he does.”
• Communication with sound recordist—Usually you have visual communication with the person holding the mike, and the two of you can communicate with hand or facial signals. If the camera is handheld, the recordist has to rapidly adapt to the action, do what the camera does, and stay out of frame. He will shoot you meaningful glances now and then. Listening for quality, he will grow agitated at the approach of a plane or the rumble of a refrigerator that has turned itself on in the next room. Wearing headphones, he won’t know what direction the interference is coming from. I recall shooting an interview in a raucous London pub, and the incredulous look stealing over the record-ist’s face as a drinker in the next bar lost his investment, followed by the clank of clean-up operations with a bucket. The interviewee noticed nothing since all this took place the other side of a partition, but the recordist was looking around apprehensively and I wanted to howl with laughter. Often in such a circumstance a recordist will draw his finger across his throat and raise his eyebrows beseechingly, mutely asking you to call “Cut!” Should you?
• Sensory overload—You have to make a decision and your head pounds from stress. You are supposed to be keenly aware of ongoing content and yet must resolve through glances and hand signals all sorts of other stuff … problems of sound, shadows, escaped pets, or people who have done the unexpected(!). At such times, the director is blinded by sensory overload.

Breaks

When participants are not present (during breaks, say), encourage the crew to discuss the production. From just listening you can learn a lot. At first you may be shocked by the crew’s lack of all-around observation. The reason is simple: A good camera operator concentrates wholly on composition, lighting, shadows, framing, and camera movements. To the diligent sound recordist words are less important than voice quality, unwanted noise or echo, and the balance of sound levels. Neither can have a balanced awareness of film content.

Because crew members monitor a restricted area of quality, you should periodically reconnect them to the project as a conceptual entity. Not everyone will appreciate your efforts. In “the industry” there is often a hostile division between “arty types” and “techies.” Your technicians may never have had their opinions sought outside their own area of expertise. Treated like factory hands, they may not have considered their work from a directing standpoint. Be ready to meet hesitant or even hostile reactions to your efforts. Persist. If you want a crew whose eyes, ears, and minds extend your reach, take pains to share your thinking with them.

Always acknowledge crew feedback even when it’s embarrassingly off target. Make mental adjustment for any skewed valuations and be diplomatic with advice you can’t use. Above all, encourage involvement, and don’t retreat from communicating.

Something else to remember: When you direct, you are fully involved all the time and tend to overlook mere bodily interruptions, like hunger, cold, fatigue, and bathroom breaks. For a keen and happy crew, stick to 8-hour days and build meals and breaks predictably into the schedule. On long shoots away from home, allow time off so people can buy presents for their loved ones at home.