Camera operators with no experience - interesting experiment.

paulears

paulears

Veteran
I tried an interesting experiment with my band. We'd arranged a local subsidised gig - basically we needed a new set of production photographs - we've had some lineup changes and the old photos didn't match with the addition of new stuff to 8 year old material - so we've redone the posters, flyers, and needed a new gallery section for the website - on top of this, we're off to Germany soon, and they want up to date images. So we schedule a show local to us, do a Facebook trawl of our friends and fans and just explain that they need to ignore the photographer. The pictures were absolutely great - just what we needed.

I suddenly remembered that I'd actually got 4 of my cameras in my van, that I'd forgotten to unload into the store - so hit on the idea of handing them out to 'random' people (I got the idea from the crazy UK video business that do this for weddings - and gets mixed results, apparently).

I handed each person a camera - they have manual lenses - so no autofocus, so I put them all onto wide angle and just told them to move closer if they wanted to 'squeeze more in'. I wasn't worried about sound, so left it on auto, even though I knew the volume would be firmly in the red! I just needed to see the waveform for sync. No plan. No suggestions. Just told them to do what they felt was right, and not to worry if they messed up.

The results were interesting. No proper multicam edit, I simply synced up the start and then cut out every 100% duff shot - there were rather a lot. One person discovered the zoom rocker and instead of moving zoomed - leading to terminal wobble and blurred pics. I had unloaded all the tripods, so wobble affected everyone. One girl who volunteered seemed to cut everyones heads off, and another obviously one of the drummers facebook friends spent nearly all the time on the drummer, but still missed his head and seemed to have terminal wobbles.

So it was an interesting experiment. Can totally inexperienced people use video camera - yes. Can they hold them steady and frame pictures - not really.

I'd imagine that giving wedding guests a camera would produce exactly these results. I didn't spend any real time on the edit, of course, because it's not really needed for anything, some stabilisation would help, and perhaps a bit more wide angle - but that camera had serious wobbles too, and again, unwanted zooms. Pretty well everything in the video is the 'best' bits - and every time you see the wide angle shot it was because at that point in the song none of the close cameras had anything that could have been used. I could have taken some non-sync material, reverse views I had plenty of, but they were all far too wobbly.

As many readers are Americans, they might even find our band a bit amusing - with the UK swing to it. I did suggest they shoot three songs, but this one was the only one we had multiple takes of, the 'operators' deciding that despite my request, they would use the record button - and I didn't have the time to try to re-sync these, as the camera audio was just a full scale blast - syncing the start was a piece of cake - but doing ti during the number to cater for a start and stop, very difficult.

https://vimeo.com/70662454

The only real snag will be that my own production people are also involved with the band - the drummer is the only one who wouldn't normally be working on video productions - the other three - me and the guitar and keys, plus the sound man. Very difficult to shoot yourself! I know the people who we'll use to shoot our video, when we need it, but having to get others in is very strange!
 
Hey Paul, Is there any chance that you could make the video public? Right now it's set to private and is requiring me to input a password.

Thanks!
 
Great!

Aside from the unsteady shots, the framing was actually pretty good! You can tell how each of the operators had their favorites as there wasn't much coverage on the bassist (that's you, right?) either that or there wasn't enough useable shots to put in the edit.

But I can see how this can work if the band started touring and start collecting an amount of shots, kind of like the 30 seconds to mars video closer to the edge. By then you can hand out flip cams to other operators and take crowd shots as well!

Reminds me of Project X and The Chronicle, captured footage I think they called it?
 
One of my clients has been handing out cameras to totally inexperienced people lately, or producers as they preferred to be called.
 
This is a really neat idea! I thought the video came out great and the framing or stability didn't bother me one bit. I really like this idea for a wedding video - hand out four cameras to four different guest volunteers who film their wedding experience, and then we take care of the audio and equipment, then put together a short video later. Neat!
 
Yep - that's me, but the actual problem I found was that most of the shots of me were moving kind of around me, and frankly I felt I was kind of boring to watch. This was because most of the shots of me, were during the bits I don't sing, so ironically, the only nearly wobble free bits of me were actually the bits where I'm doing nothing, so I selected the others.

The surprising bit was that despite watching pop videos of concerts, the people weren't very good at observation. Some of the stuff I had to dump were where they totally ignored mic stands or other obstacles - so a great picture of the drummer, but a mic stand right through his face, from the front. One of the camera positions available was from a followspot box, about 5m in front of the stage, hanging down from the roof, but none of them fancied climbing the ladders to get there!

Probably a useful clip too for sound people, as it demonstrates the snags of taking a feed from the output to the PA - certain things in the mix were too high, and some too low, because the stage sound levels were quite high, but mismatched. The drummer and I have in-ear monitors, but the guitar and keys have floor monitors, which of course tend to feature themselves loudly - so the drums which are quite loud in real life, don't need much amplification in the PA at all. In this case, the mix was recorded to a USB stick which the mixer can record to. Cat 5 links the mixer with the stage mic sockets, and the two in ear systems have their own sub mixer - mines on a little stand, so I can have exactly what I want in the mic. Our stage box with the mic preamps in has 6 Sennheiser IEM transmitters in it - but we're just using two. As we also use the kit for other bands, we're able to do multitrack recordings direct to a laptop if people wish to have the individual sources to do their own mix.

I suppose it just reinforces the need for skilled camera people, but maybe with a bit of training before the gig, the obvious slips could have been worked on. I didn't really explain anything at all. What was clear, though was that some of them really did not like coming on stage. One did and was very obvious, but one tried to be very discrete and tried to zoom instead of being in the lights.

As one said, any pictures are better than no pictures!
 
Interesting experiment, perhaps more so in concept than in results.
I'd call it more of a psychology/behavioral experiment- such as your points on assertiveness, favoritism, observational skills, or lack thereof, etc...

More to the point- shouldn't the song be Surfin' U-K? :happy:
The British Invasion did borrow the blues, but strangely, not so much of surf music...
I wish they all could be Channel Girls.... :grin:

But thanks for sharing- I would find it much more difficult to post me playing guitar than my video work...
 
The hand out camera idea was the product of British TV show that offered money and assistance to people with good ideas. The people would punt an idea and hope to interest a millionaire business person to invest in them, and the idea was to do this for weddings - and despite the industry people slagging off the idea, it does seem to have worked. I just wondered if it would work for music products.
 
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