howie’s halfpipe

Today for work I had to go into the city and film the Easter march from town Hall to Hyde Park, and then a bit of the festival afterwards.

I got there early and did some establishing shots, got a few landmarks in so you can tell its in Sydney.
Then just before the march began I got some shots of the crowd gathering and some long shots of the crowd from a distance.
Then the media rocked up!
Now normally this would excite me cause it would mean you can hang out with them and get similar shots to them and just latch on to the group of TV channels. In the past this has been a great experience for me, like at the No War march’s and even last years Easter march. But this year it didn’t excite me, and its not because of my recent divorce from the world of making videos. Its all about Pride, Self Esteem and Aesthetics.
You see in my head I think of myself as a bit of a professional standard cameraman, Now I’m probably not but in my head I am.
And us professionals only like to work with the best of equipment, because we are striving for the best quality picture we can possibly muster. In past marchs I have at least had a pro-sumer camera (prosumer is a cross between a professional and just your average consumer). Like my Panasonic 3CCD camera. It’s a decent camera and sure its no TV station camera but its at bare minimum community television , and with my camera the media guys would not look down on you too much because obviously you know what you are doing a bit. Last years easter march I had Steve Bevis’s camera which again is a nice 3CCD camera the canon XM1. So I fitted in with the media.
But now we get to this year, where I had one of works cameras which was no bigger than my clenched fist. Its lens is about the same size as a 20 cent coin and the tripod may as well have been made out of paddle pop sticks.

It was embarrising standing in the middle of park street filming the march approaching and knowing that either side of me where media guys with massive DVCAM over the shoulder cameras on their chunky miller tripods. I felt like a piece of road kill with eagles swarming around me. Me and my little hanycam just didn’t cut it. Sure my shots might have been all right but the media guys wont have seen that, all they will have picked up on is that there is some punk with a handycam making a home movie on their turf.

It was like I was at a set of traffic lights in my little blue barina and then up beside me pulls a big HSV Commodore with its V8 engine rumbling. It was like that, I could hear the TV dudes revving the engines of their big cameras and there I was siting in the lane beside them in my little beep beep barina.

In fact at one stage I was taking this good shot from the middle of the march with the crowds filing past me, recoding away, and then BOOM. This big miller tripod lands in front of my lens and a giant DVCAM camera locks onto the top of it. There he was a media man stealing my shot as if I didn’t exist.

Never again shall I take a handycam to anything where I will be seen and will harm my self image.