What's the dumbest thing you ever did on a shoot?!

This is more bad luck than stupidity. I went to Fry's to pick up some Sony HDV tape for a shoot. I picked a pack and was just about to go to the checkout line when I thought, "Hey, this wrapping looks a little worn out, better pick a nicer looking one." And so I did.

Well, later on after six hours of shooting, I rewound the tape on the camera to get ready for capturing, and what did I found? DROPOUTS!! Tons and tons of drop out basically every other seconds. I practically had a heart attack. Can't believe I actually exchange the good tape for a crappy one.
 
well...on the bright side, maybe the tapes in the package you put back, were *also* crappy.

do you run your tapes to the end, and rewind, before shooting on them? I hear that can be a way to minimize dropouts (knocking off loose flaky bits of mag before they cause trouble, I guess) with consumer-grade tapes.
 
Hmm, dropped a light. Luckly only the bulb broke, but had to go out and a buy a new one. Found out afterwards I had gotten a blue temp lightbulb instead of orange (like the other light I had). It was only my second film with school equip, so I didn't understand it. Now I laugh about it.

Forgot to press record or take off the lense cap or turn on the mic on several occasions. Luckily I noticed soon afterwards everytime.


Aside from that nothing big. Oh, I forgot to bring the sweater for the main actor one day. We had to improvise. This was recently. But I had a lot on my plate as my Producer left me in the dry to do everything on my own.
 
I was doing a shoot for a Christian athletes program. After we setup a shot, the president wanted to pray before the shoot started. I saw a light that needed adjusting and thought I could get to it with out being noticed. I tripped on another light and made a big noise. There were only 4 of us there, but after I did that the director of the shoot reminded me it was probably better to wait.


They were great to work with, but that was a mistake I wish I wouldn't have made.
 
dumbest thing i ever did on a shoot was to leave the gun but take the cannoli.
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That reminds me, another one of the dumbest things I've ever done was making a third movie(over 15 years later) to one of the biggest series in American cinema history thus ruining it as a whole.
 
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I don't know, Robert. "My Little Pony 3 (Return of the saddle)" was pretty good. Don't be too hard on yourself.
 
I don't know, Robert. "My Little Pony 3 (Return of the saddle)" was pretty good. Don't be too hard on yourself.
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If you got the reference to uagafan's last post, which is quoted in my post, you'd get it(my post).

17---RATHMINES_th.jpg


...right over...
 
Not on a shoot, exactly, but media related...was working for an internet portal/independent production/telecomm/ripoff-and-deception-and-fraud company, in 2000...one of their media 'products' was a streaming science-fiction/comedy show (generally pretty unfunny and, well, mostly just plain bad). The hired-from-bagging-groceries-at-Ralph's cute blonde Vice President of the company, was supposed to have two hundred VHS copies of the flashy cool whiz-bang company promotional reel run off and sent to prospective investors. Somehow or other, she managed to send out the out-takes reel - of all the stuff too lame and unfunny to merit inclusion - from that science-fiction/comedy sketch show, and have two hundred dupes made of that, and send them out to prospective investors...and not catch the error, until two or three days later, when another VP borrowed a copy of the tape, to look at it.
 
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lets see, I was filming some of the top Nicaraguan pro surfers and in order to get to the location we had to take a boat, and from there i would swim my camera (dry bagged) in on a body board from the boat to the beach where i would set up to film. It was time consuming enough making everything water proof, then swimming to shore, by the time i got to the beach to set up to shoot I realized that I didnt have a single tape with me, it was all on the boat.

I then had to leave all of my camera gear on this beach in sketchy 3rd world Nicaragua and swim back out to the boat to get a tape while this surfer Oliver told me he would watch my gear.....apparently from the lineup in the ocean! Thankfully nobody jacked my **** while it sat out catching a tan.

My camera didnt suffer any damage over the course of production, my tripod on the other hand, which wasn't properly water sealed, is a differente story.
 
dumbest thing:
got called at 4am, breaking news story, got dressed, grabbed camera, ran out the door,
drove for about an hour to get to location, then realizes all the batteries (apart from one on the camera) were sat on charge in my hallway.
 
Some years ago, the "comedy of errors" dummest thing by my colleages at a sister satellite earth station was to point the backup antenna to a competitors bird to watch Linda Carter's best assets in "Bobbie Jo and the Outlaw" (strike one).

Unfortunately, afterwards they forgot to move dish back to our satellite before leaving work (strike two).

The next morning a crew came out to do some experimental data testing on an unused transponder - assuming the dish was pointed to our satellite, they fired up the High Power Transmitter (strike three).

BTW, the scientists were using modulation equipment beyond the FCC-approved bandwidth for the testing, figuring it would be "okay" since it was only our bird and they could do whatever they wanted (strike four).

Of course, our HPA blasted their working transponder knocking the bird off the air. They called Intelsat who begin madly calling all satellite companies to see who-dun-it. My colleagues, actually at the leading control office for our cluster of seven earth stations got ready to call us, only to realize it was THEM who had their azimuth/elevation erroneously pointed incorrectly! So the turned of the HPA transmitter, and notified Intelsat and their local management they fixed the problem (strike five).

The local management notified the third-level manager, who chewed out the local folks and figured he'd let it go at that (strike six).

Of course, Intelsat notified the other company that my company erroneously illuminated several of their transponders. Their Senior VP contacted our Senior VP, wanting to know what we were going to do to make restitution for the lost service to their customer (network TV). So the S**T began quickly rolling downhill, picking up momentum en-route. The Senior VP wanted heads to roll, but it was impossible - they'd have to fire a ton of people. So everything was handled very hush-hush discretely, with the internal auditing guys (white trenchcoat-types) interviewing everyone, asking lots of questions under the proverbial bright lights.

The point is, when it's going bad, you gotta when to cover and when to open the kimono and ask for forgiveness (or at least ensure so many will go down with you that the gang will get a general pardon)!

Regards, Michael
 
A letter came down from the Senior VP with high level directives (too many screw-ups to detail the fiasco in detail). Everyone was "counselled", one on one and as you can imagine, managers the those involved had unpleasant appraisal feedback. And as to the companies, AT&T had a "private settlement" with RCA. I'm not privy to what transpired between RCA and their network TV client, but I'm sure AT&T's name wasn't mentioned in the best light (although none of them knew the comedy of errors).

Kinda makes you "appreciate" what goes on in our government's TLAs (Three Letter Acronymns) cloak and dagger programs, doesn't it?

Regards, Michael



bpotter said:
Then what happened?

;-)
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Robert86 said:
That reminds me, another one of the dumbest things I've ever done was making a third movie(over 15 years later) to one of the biggest series in American cinema history thus ruining it as a whole.
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LOL! What was that?! I must know.
 
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