6 years of college, for this?

One of the biggest mistakes that young people make is that they think they’ve already paid their dues. Older people do this too, BTW. I know this because I did this (and you may have too).

The truth is that we never stop paying our dues. Ever. And when we think we’re above making the payments, we shut ourselves off to some great learning opportunities.

Rewind to 1993. I’d been out of school for less than a year. Scratching for gigs in music and video production, I was able to get my foot in the door on a few corporate video shoots. Those were pretty cool.

Though I was doing mostly production assistant-level work, it was a start. And if I got a call to work, I was on it. Wrap cables, set up lights, move gear, you know, the grunt stuff. That’s pretty much what I was doing. Nobody cared if I could operate the camera, light a set (sort of), and record audio. It didn’t matter.

They didn’t know me and I needed to prove myself long before I’d ever get the better slots. That’s the way life works.

Then, Spring of ’93, I got a call from a small video house. It was my first shooting gig! Was it a commercial? Corporate interview? TV news story? Something even better? Not even close. They wanted me to cover high school reunions. Um, what?

Humiliating was the only word I could use to describe it. But back then, I had no idea of what I was in for.

These gigs were terrible, especially for a 25 year old single guy.  Every Saturday for the hot, exciting Summer months, I’d go to some far away hotel usually at the beach and video the event. It was a ‘most of the day to past midnight’ ordeal. 

The gear provided was way too old and way too overused. I was shooting Super-VHS tape, the red-headed stepchild of video production. The only people using S-VHS were wedding shooters and very local (mostly tiny) markets with those horrible, shitty commercials that you probably made fun of at one time or another (I may or may not have shot a few of those crappy commercials, but that’s another story).

My camera should have said “Fisher Price” or “Mattel” on it because it looked like a plastic toy. That, and all the gear smelled like a giant smoldering ashtray. Covered by years of soot and ash from its prior operators, it was pretty disgusting to me - especially being a non-smoker.

If that weren’t bad enough, the batteries were used way beyond their operational lifespans. These were the old, old rechargeable ones. Nickel cadmium. If they said the battery would last an hour, you’d be lucky to get 35 minutes on one of these at full charge. And a couple of those were total duds. They were unlabeled and mixed in with the ‘good’ ones. You’d only get 5 minutes running with one of those on the best of days.

Cables were well worn and some had exposed wires. Tape residue, cigarette ash, tar, grease and some unknown substances decorated the support equipment. Running with all of this, in front of crowds of people, I thought I looked like a joke.

But, hey, it did pay $10 an hour and I was guaranteed about $80 for each Saturday shoot.

So I shot my first reunion. I got through it, hoping that I wouldn’t run into anyone I knew. This was just like a wedding minus the bride and groom. It sucked. I was chasing the things happening, just covering the event. Presentations, eating, drinking, dancing, hugs, kisses, laughs, yearbooks, all that stuff.

And all I could think of was “6 years of college for this”? You can get someone with the skillset of any high school Junior. Hell even a trained monkey could video a reunion.

Finished the gig, then turned in the gear and tapes the next day. After that, and I can’t remember if it was a face to face or a phone call, but I got my first professional ass chewing.

The editor (who was also the only employee of the video house) ripped into me for my work. He was pissed that he had to edit all that footage! Well what did he expect? I mean it was something like 4 hours of stuff happening and I had to cover it all.

He wasn’t mad at the quality of my work, just that he had to edit so much footage. Now this guy was a kind soul, Vietnam veteran, chain smoking, coffee guzzler who had the occasional acid flashback. Nice guy actually. I liked him. He was very experienced, especially in the low-budget end of this business.

He was tasked with putting together all the reunion tapes (along with weddings and similar) and mine wasn’t the only one. They would shoot something like 4 or 5 separate reunions in different places on the same night. Then he would edit, duplicate and package each one, all before the next weekend of reunions. And he was always running behind.

“You edit in camera, damnit!” That’s what he told me. And like a flash of inspiration, it immediately made sense. I just had to shoot these things and “edit” as I went. I was not only covering the story, I was creating the story in and with my video camera.

Since he had a huge workload, all he wanted from the shooters was footage that was pretty much already edited. That way he’d just add some graphics and maybe a still frame or something and it was done.

This wasn’t high budget stuff. And, yes, it was still embarrassing. But, I had a whole new perspective. Edit in-camera. Got me thinking about what I was shooting. The angles, the distance, the perspective, the audio, the happenings, the flow of the event. Then hit pause and set up the next scene in an instant and hit record. Rinse, repeat.

Do all of this with beat up gear, zombie batteries, lights that only worked sometimes and a camera that should have been set out on a table for discount sale at your local flea market. Sure I love the abuse, I can do this.

And I did it. For 3 Summers, I did those shoots, running the reunion circuit. It was embarrassing and something that I never wanted to admit that I did, but am now grateful for.

Because even though I had crewed some pretty impressive shoots, I’m talking network TV news, sports, commercials, infomercials, and large corporate gigs, I also did these reunions. And, unfortunately, I occasionally ran into people that I knew. Inside, it felt kind of devastating as all I could think of was “wow, I’ve really gotten far in life”.

But that was 30 years ago and the statute of limitations has long passed. Even though I tried my best to forget those gigs completely, they really have come in handy. Because when you’re thrown into hell with grimy gear and Murphy’s Law is having the time of its’ life, you survive and you get good. Hopefully.

And once I started photographing real estate (in 2015), all that experience really came in handy.