Archive Page 2
travels with greg – day 0
This is the first of a series of day-by-day entries on my six-week documentary shoot through Western Europe in 2004. Warning: there was no sex on this trip, unless you’re counting the highly audible Dutch couple in the adjacent room. Up until then I never realized that inarticulate grunts and cries were delivered in accents. That was day 6 of 41.
From 2003 to 2005 I worked as a field producer/unit director for a small but plucky, but ruthlessly cheap, television production company. My job was to go on the road with a cameraman (unless we were crossing international borders, in which case he was the Director of Photography) and shoot interviews for one-off documentaries and low-low budget series on crimes and historical disasters, the kind that typically end up on cable specialty channels. We also did kid’s shows, which usually meant that I would end up running a shoot involving a pack of sad clowns or a giant lobster. Those were not the highlights of my career.
In some ways it was an ideal job: I only visited the office twice in the course of an assignment (once to load the equipment up, once to unload); I usually had two to three weeks to spend at home between assignments; and I was usually, although certainly not always, sent to interesting places, locales that I had barely even dreamed of visiting. I took helicopter rides over the Alps, climbed a volcano in the Philippines, picked wild blackberries at the foot of Roman ruins. On the less positive side, the shows I shot for were budgeted as tightly as possible, which meant eight- to twelve-hour days, six days a week, invading strangers’ houses three times a day to set up lights and interrogate them. Some of the motels were so cheap that sometimes I feared to lean against the wall lest the sheet of chipboard collapse and send me flying into the neighbour’s bathroom. After three weeks of driving around foreign cities and grilling strangers about old crimes and disasters, I would be longing to get back home to see my wife.
Filed under: travels with greg | 8 Comments
