Video killed the radio star

Video killed the radio star

Well, that may be true, but I’m still wedded to the BBC audio output… And yesterday, I discovered why. Again.

Now, back in the Sixties, I played with Standard 8mm ciné film, in a succession of cameras: a Kodak Brownie (really, there was a Brownie ciné camera), my Dad’s Bell and Howell Sportster, finished in a crackle grey paint and hewn from solid metal, and finally a Bolex C8 that my uncle gave me.

From them, I learned to hold the camera as steady as possible, not ‘hosepipe’ around the scene, and to shoot a series of shorter clips, moving position between them. And that it is VERY hard work. And I had no serious clashes with video from then until yesterday.

Someone I know writes songs and sings them: she wanted to put together a video to go with one of them. Stella likes my still image style, so she asked me if I do video. My immediate answer was ‘no – but I’m willing to try’. Hence my Sony and I were in the country along with costume and a horse. (Did I not mention the horse? Stella wanted to sing on horseback, and had persuaded another friend to lend her his horse.)

So there we were, and the horse wasn’t looking that friendly, despite Lee and Janine bringing expert calm to the situation. When Stella started singing to the horse, she received a gentle nudge – but horses are big, and one quadruped’s gentle nudge is another biped’s head-butt…

And I was having fun stepping back – you can’t turn the camera on its side for video!

We decided that this might not be the way to go, and Janine offered to take us to her horse, Lady Luscious, who has a more sedate temperament. 30 minutes and ten miles later, Lush (as she’s known) was saddled up, and had a singer in the saddle. Which is where the fun really began for me.

I have never used a gimbal (a £400+ device that stabilises the camera in three axes, so that the image doesn’t wobble, even when the cameraman does), and I’m certainly not going to buy one – but I definitely acknowledge the need for one. SteadyShotInside deals with camera shake, but comes nowhere near giving the steadiness that you need walking across a rough field.

But we did what we could with minimal camera movement, and after three takes of the whole song (one of which involved me standing on top of a water trough (Janine – ‘Don’t fall in that water!’) we were pretty happy, and the subject was confident enough to take one hand off the reins for gestural purposes.

An attempt at a tracking shot as we went back to the stable has left me with (vastly!) increased respect for the BBC’s outdoor cameramen, who can walk sideways without falling over. And for separate microphones with woolly covers that pick up more sound, but without the laboured breathing of the operator and wind noise.

Will I do it again? Yes, definitely, if asked. I shall beg, borrow or hire a gimbal, though we can do without the fluffy microphone: the sound will be added in the edit (which, thankfully, I am not involved in).

But – like Ronnie Corbett – I Know My Place. I have no aspirations to shoot a lot of video, and no illusions that I’m any good at it. And my advice to others is that video is an absolutely different thing from stills photography, demanding a separate set of skills, and that you shouldn’t expect everything to go perfectly with zero practice. Mixing in stills may be a problem: shooting portraits at 1/13 second is not a clever thing to do.

Your first 10,000 minutes will be your worst.