What went wrong on your first serious shoot?

from various shoots:

- cargo van got towed (for being parked in secured parking lot without the ticket). lost half-day of shooting (to save $50...)
- working in new location new soundman turned out to be a bust - his audio recorded to external recorder was totally unusable - thankfully he was also sending ref sound to the camera (despite his original objections)
- early on in my carrier we blew the fuses on the location on over night shoot. Without access to the basement we were forced to use the power from socket-into-outlet adapter after unscrewing the bulb from hallway light (imaging lighting a set with 1000w of lights max before LEDs and Kinos got popular...)
- (this one comes from my friends and is tragic one) using unskilled labor to operate heavy machinery he had gaffer backup boom lift without knowing it's backing up into electrical power (middle of nowhere - bright light, sparks, all lights go out, one person dies - incidentally not the guy in the lift but some PA G&E who was adjusting barndoors of a light.
- producer flips out over attitude of a mother in charge of one of the acting kids and threatens to shut down the production for a week (with serious $ loss for herself) - me and line producer had to talk her out of it.
 
I'll go way back to my first shoot on film. Bought a camera (16mm) and of course we couldn't afford to shoot extra film so we didn't even shoot test shots...come the first day of production the guy who was going to handle camera didn't know anything about this camera...we didn't even know which way to thread it...we looked at each other and laughed so hard we almost wet our pants. We had 20 people showing up in an hour and we had no idea what the heck we were doing. Chaos is fun, exciting and great for keeping you up at night when you are supposed to be sleeping. No film day will ever be that exciting again. I miss the days of changing film rolls in a changing bag, running film to the lab, etc...but digital makes life so much easier. Keep shooting!

www.filmschoolnow.com
 
Perfect casting decision for "The Guy". Incredibly and utterly moronic casting decision for "The Gal". Both decisions by me.
 
- Endless edit revisions, with me finally just showing up to the client's offices with the laptop. None of which was provisioned in the contract of course. Mmm...committee editing. Lesson learned.
- Canon XHA1 set on super video-y colour matrix. I didn't do any testing to dial it in at all.
- a two-shot standing interview where one guy just stands there and mad-doggs into the lens. In the hallway of a primary school.
- rewind the tape to check the last interview while walking to the next one, camera on shoulder. Then don't FF to the end, taping over the last 10 minutes.

Needless to say I dropped this piece off my reel and website as soon as I could.
 
imdjay - really interesting post. Thanks!
Grug - you just broke my heart with that story haha!

Seems like there's often a case of biting off more than you can chew for your first shoot. Interesting.
 
I worked on an animated farm animal film, where the animals were similar the Muppets. The lead was a rooster driven by a computer program, which controlled all its movements.

The intention was to produce a TV series but on the first day, we had trouble with the program. The programmer spent hours with his toy while we all hung around.

The producer gradually worked himself into a lather trying to fill in with other stuff. Eventually around 3pm with everything ready we rolled, but at the critical moment the roosters head jumped off.

The programmer blamed those poo flinging code monkeys at Microsoft and we all went across to the pub. The series never eventuated.

Cheers.
 
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