Back in the television world again last weekend. Got to work with an old friend of mine, Jeff Ravitz. We shot a show featuring Willie Nelson and a few other country legends at a Chicago theater.
I do my share of work on various TV productions and I must say it’s different every time. I always watch how everyone tackles their problems, and try not to give any advice unless I am asked. Kind of a good way of working at any gig. Anyway, there are a butt load of clueless people out there working these shows. These people tend to run in circles like chickens and accomplish little. So I just sit to the side behind a console and do my job. In the end, the product is as good as I can make it, or the director can cut it. If I have enough time, I can usually make it look nice…, until directors start asking for too much light and no separation of beams and colors.
That’s why it was so satisfying to do a job with Ravitz. He knows what he is doing and is a perfectionist. He also knows he can tell me something once and I will get what he’s looking for from my lighting console. I originally had a bunch of movers and all the key lites on my maxxyz console. But Jeff came in and made a clever move by putting all the key light control on the house console. This freed me up to solve any problems from the moving lights while Jeff would have another operator driving the key light levels.
Running TV shows generally means “riding faders” to me. I always spread groups of intensity levels and inhibitives across as many faders as I have available. Then I watch the monitors in front of me more than the actual stage. If I see a hot spot or a flare in the camera, I try and catch it before I get busted by the director or he has a chance to yell at Jeff to knock it down a notch. This is all split second and I need to know where every intensity level on every light is, so I can race for it.
The beautiful thing about working with Jeff is he can catch stuff on his monitors in the truck that I can not always see. And since he misses nothing, he alerts me to potential problems we will have with certain camera shots, before the director has looked at that particular camera angle. Between the two of us we maintained a safe zone of comfort. And that’s when dealing with these shows becomes fun and not a tedious job. I think that Jeff and I have been doing this so long that we maintain a certain “Grace under pressure”.
Something I wish more people could learn in this whacky industry of ours.
