The Lazy Crew

It seems like a lot of people have a, "Do the least amount of work to get by," attitude. You don't survive long in a film and video production environment with that kind of attitude. In fact, you won't make it through a single shoot. Pretty much everyone I worked with had the exact opposite attitude; we came in early and worked late and did whatever we needed to do to make sure the production exceeded our clients' expectations.

That being said, there was one particular instance that we totally and completely violated that code. John was our boss. He was part owner of the business and we ultimately answered to him. He rarely came back into the soundstage or out on location other than to do a bit of schmoozing with the clients. Every once in a great while, though, he would decide to direct a shoot for a particular client. It wasn't normally a big deal because we were all used to dealing with directors and producers and their little idiosyncrasies.

John was a little different, though. He had a purely film production background and always wanted very complex lighting set ups. He was often rather difficult to please - to put it mildly. We learned our lesson on one particular shoot and pretty much carried our education forward on any shoots John directed.

I do not even remember the original client, but each evening John would tell us what he wanted for the first shot in the morning and it was our job to have it ready when he walked in the door. I was salaried so John didn't really care how many hours he worked me and I didn't really care how many hours I worked. Hey, I was single, without a girlfriend at the time and would only go home to my cat at the end of the day anyway.

The entire crew would arrive a couple of hours before we planned to roll tape. We carefully set up the lighting, ran the power and prepared the set according to his direction. John would roll in shortly before the client was set to arrive and take control of the set. We quickly learned that, no matter how much time and attention to detail we had put in on the set; John would come in and change virtually everything.

It didn't take us long to figure out that this was John's normal pattern. While none of us were afraid of working long, hard hours; we weren't naive, either, and didn't want to work long, hard hours only to have our hard work trashed.

So we came up with a plan. Each evening, John would lay out his plan for the first shot of the next morning. We all listened carefully and finished wrapping up the work for the day. The next morning, the entire crew would show up on set shortly before we expected John and randomly throw lights up in a pattern roughly resembling what he had spelled out the night before. He was going to come in and change it, anyway, so why should we go to great lengths to do it any other way?

Without fail, John would come in and complain about the lighting and pretty much change everything. We dutifully made all of his requested adjustments and often ended up with a setup much closer to what we would have set up if we had taken the time than what it would have been changed to if we had done it ahead of time.

That plan worked fine for us!

I don't think John ever caught on to us.