Tonight, I was involved in a major league baseball telecast.
During the telecast, a camera operator displayed unprofessional behavior. This operator talked incessantly.
Let me explain. A typical local telecast in major league baseball includes a producer, a director, anywhere from 6 to 10 camera ops., 4 to 8 tape ops, audio, audio assist, technical director, video op, graphics operator, 3 to 6 tape operators, stage manager, stats, eic (engineer in charge of the truck), utility.
On any given telecast there are 20 to 35 people who are involved in bringing the final product to the viewer. There are hundreds if not thousands of split second decisions made by each member of the crew to provide the most succinct, the most memorable moments of each telecast. When one ingredient of this equation does not fulfill it's part of the telecast, it affects the final product.
Now, as a director, it is my responsibility to ensure that this does not happen. This can be accomplished in different ways. Each producer and each director handles adverse situations differently. Some yell and scream. This method has become against the norm. This profession was filled with screamers 20, 15, and even 10 years ago but they are not as common now. In fact, it is now common knowlege among current producers and directors that the screamers are the ones with the biggest egos and the least talent.
Sometimes a reminder to "keep it down" or "stay focused" or "that's enough" is all it takes to get everyone back to the job at hand. (I hate it when a TV Producer or Director say "on the same page" but that is another blog)
Now back to tonight's telecast.
A director has the ability to both talk and listen to the crew. In fact, there is a talk switch and a listen switch. I urged the camera person to tone it down a few times. When I realized that this operator was not listening to me, I turned off my listen switch for the game. The problem with this decision is that while there was one unprofessional operator, the other operators are true professionals and I was not able to hear them when they had insightful comments to make. I did tell the TD (technical director) to let me know if any of the other camera ops wanted to talk to me - which he did occasionally. I only turned on the listen switch occasionally during the telecast and the talk was incessant.
If a crew person in any of the capacities of the telecast is detremental to the final outcome of the telecast, then each and every member of the crew should view this as a personal insult to their professionalism and confront the crew member responsible. This industry is full of excellent, hard working in dividuals who are proud that their work on the telecast provides the viewer with an enjoyable and memorable telecast.
The telecast turned out to be one of the most compelling of the season. We covered it as well as can be expected being that there was a disrupting force on the crew itself and we were the hind end of a dual feed.
I will blog about the dual feed in the near future. For those of you who are unaware, the dual feed is a combination of the home feed and the visiting feed where the home feed has the full complement of equipment and the visiting feed has a lesser complement and piggybacks the home feed.