In the summer I am working as a steady-cam assistant/focus puller on the Commonwealth Games, in Glasgow. This entails me having a wireless follow focus, and following the steady-cam operator around, pulling focus for him. Over the weekend I went to Edinburgh to shadow his current assistant and learn how to do it in preparation for the summer. The event we covered was Scotland Vs France for the 6 Nations Cup.
Saturday was a long day, I had to be up at 5 to get the train for 6am at piccadilly, I would arrive in Edinburgh at 9.30. The rest of the crew had been there from the day before rigging the stadium and sorting all the equipment out. When I got their, Howard, the steady-cam operator, took me around the site and showed me where all the individual camera's are and the directors station etc. There were about 20 camera operators at the event, all of which have specific roles, including the high-speed camera's and close-ups etc. He then showed me the steady-cam and follow focus and showed me how to use it and what would be expected of me. At around 12, the director sent everyone to their stations and had a test of everything to make sure he was happy with the positioning of everything and if he wanted to make any tweaks to the setup. After this we had dinner and waited around until we were live on air. As I was on steady-cam, we had to be at the front entrance to capture the team coaches coming into the stadium, it got rather heated when a camera op from an independent French company was getting in the way of us, he was told to stay well out of the way in future.
After the teams had entered the stadium we then headed in to our positions so the start of the game. I was observing Howard and his assistant to see where they stand in correlation to one another and what other roles the assistant picks up. At half time we swapped over and I had control of the follow focus for the first time. The pressure was on as it was my first time using the device and the game was being aired on BBC in front of millions of viewers. I picked it up quickly and was fine with it.
As the operator moves around quickly, I am not able to see the monitor very often to see whether its in focus or not, so instead I am forced to focus from distance. The follow focus has markings or yards on the device to I have to estimate how far away the subject is and focus using this method. On a sunny day like it was on saturday, this job is not too difficult because the aperture is quite high, but I could imagine in a dark location is would be more difficult as we would be forced into shooting on a low aperture such as f1.4 or f1.8.
I can't wait to be a part of the BBC team in the summer for the commonwealth games, and the pay will help me buy more film equipment or a car and driving lessons.
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