I got yelled at at work last week. This happens from time to time, so while I don’t enjoy it, it also doesn’t bother me too much, mainly because I’m experienced enough at my job that I know what I’m doing and so I know when someone yelling at me is bullshit, and I’m experienced enough in life to know that when someone in power yells, it’s always bullshit.
What happened was that, on one take, there was a boom shadow in the shot, and despite the fact that this is a thing that happens sometimes on a film set, it pissed off the DP. Now, everyone who doesn’t fully understand it assumes that the job of boom operator consists of trying to keep the boom and any associated shadows out of the camera’s frame. (As a reminder for those who don’t understand it at all, the boom is the long pole with a microphone at the end that is used to record the actors’ dialogue, and the boom operator is the person who holds that pole.) But no. My job when I work as a boom operator is really the opposite: it’s to get the mic as close to the actors as possible without having it be seen on camera, so that the people photographing the scene can do their job at the same time. We, as a crew, are all working on the same thing — recording the scene — but we must work together to make sure that the particular aspect of that scene that is our focus — the sound or the picture — gets done right, without screwing up the other part.
Of course, people on the camera side tend not to see it this way. As I’ve talked about in more detail in another post/rant, they will always think that the visual aspect of filmmaking is more important to get on location — and for many years, that was true, because sound was the easiest thing to fix in post, through ADR, otherwise known as looping. Plus, when wireless microphones came along, the hierarchy of importance shifted even more away from the boom, specifically, because everyone thought actors could just be wired all the time and the boom could just go away. This was always untrue, since wireless mics have their own significant problems and will never sound as good as a boom, but now, with where we’re at with digital photography and editing, it’s often just as easy for the editor to go in and paint out a boom or boom shadow from a frame as it is to ADR a scene, and maybe easier, given that most actors tend think that the performance they’re going to give alone in a tiny sound studio is not going to be as good as the one they gave when they were doing the scene in the room with the other actors — you know, acting. Still, camerapeople often don’t get this. After I got yelled at by the DP, the sound mixer I was working with told me he’d had a conversation with the guy recently where, when the sound mixer said he was capturing the actors’ performance, the DP said, “No, that’s my job.” That tells you everything you need to know about a certain kind of cinematographer, and how they look at the process of making films: they have a job to do, and our job is to just stay out of their way. To be fair, the first camera assistant came up to me afterwards and said that the DP was out of line, and the camera operator had been working with me the entire time, as colleagues do, so this doesn’t apply across the board. But first ADs and directors on TV shows often also like to over-criminalize the boom creeping into the in frame because they are always under time pressure, and god forbid they should have to do another take, even though they are perfectly happy to do additional takes for all sorts of other reasons: line flubs, necktie continuity, an ice cream truck pulling into the shot, stray nose hairs, sirens (which they also somehow blame on the sound department), etc etc etc.
The truth, however, is that just staying out of the way is the antithesis of what I’m supposed to do. That’s why, when the grips on set were joking that the person I was replacing for the day liked to be in the shot, I said, “If I’m never in the shot, I’m not doing my job,” and then proceeded to feel bad thinking that maybe I wasn’t getting in the shot enough. Basically, being a boom operator is to constantly live between the rock of being too far away from the actors to make them sound as good as they possibly can — in which case you’re making your boss unhappy — and the hard place of being in the shot — in which case you’re probably making everyone else on set unhappy. So being on the edge of trouble all the time is basically how I spend my workdays.
This is ironic since I have never exactly been the type to court danger in my daily life. I was pretty much a tattletale goody-two-shoes until the second half of my senior year of high school, when I felt fairly secure in the knowledge that I was going off to college, and then started drinking and smoking weed — which, at the time, in the suburbs, if you were white, were fairly consequence-free activities. In college, I drank but never got out of control, and didn’t really hook up with guys because I was afraid of getting involved with people who I wasn’t madly in love with, and the people I was madly in love with made me nervous. I stayed with my college boyfriend through most of film school, went into every one of my student films with a detailed shot list, and never spent more than I knew that I could comfortably pay off on my credit cards.
But I think the subsequent 25+ years of booming has made me bolder. When you do it every day, you get pretty good at weighing the risks and the consequences of a situation against the benefits, and realizing when taking chances makes sense. Without that experience, I don’t think I would have moved in with so many random roommates who later became friends, or had any one-night stands (all of which sucked, but I had to do it to learn that they sucked), or gone traveling around Latin America for long stretches by myself, or done any of the few actually unsafe but worthwhile things I did on those trips, like jumping off a cliff into a cenote (when my guide said it was deep enough), or hitchhiking (but always with a partner when it was the only mode of transportation, Mom, if you’re reading this). I wouldn’t say that booming has made me more reckless, that’s not it. What it’s done is make me trust my own judgment, because I generally have seen that that works out okay.
Which is why fuck that guy (no, not the one-night-stand or the tour guide, the DP from the top of the page). What he didn’t get — aside from basically everything about my job — was that I’d already successfully done four takes of that shot while keeping the shadow out of frame, because I’d worked out how to do it with very little risk. Not zero risk, obviously. But almost nothing in life has zero risk, certainly not booming on a job where the DP is an asshole who doesn’t know how to light in a way that works for everyone (because, yeah, the top guys do know how to do that) and doesn’t realize that he’s not the boss of me. But a risk that I know I can calculate, and that makes it worth it if it’s going to get me the result I want, which, in this case, was the actress’ voice sounding just right.