Team Work

Every member of the film crew is extremely important.  Just ask anyone on the film crew.

If not for the director, the talent would be impassionate and disorganized, their motivation, lost.  There would be no… no direction.  Without the DP and camera operator, all that great acting would never make it to the screen and what good is a collection of great acting and visuals, if you can’t hear it. 

And so it goes down the line.  The grips and gaffers, wardrobe and special effects, editors, the lists go on.   Each, without whom the film could never have been made.

And what about the Fedex guy?  Even with an army of talent, if it doesn’t get delivered, ya got nothing!

The truth is, everyone on the crew is extremely important and it requires a serious amount of teamwork to successfully pull off a large production or feature film, but for some, (er, uh, like myself) teamwork was an acquired taste.

My interest in film and video production had its roots in photography and began in Ireland.  I was in Dublin taking photographs of an Irish rock group called Bagatelle when Jack McNiece, the president of the record label asked if I would produce and direct a music video for the band. 

I said “Sure.  I’d love to”, without having a clue what that involved.  

Now, I had been a photographer for a dozen years or so.  I knew a bit about lighting and I was having moderate success shooting fashion and portraits, but moving subjects.  Nothing!  I didn’t know where begin or who to enlist for help.

Still, I was young and cocky, so, I decided to pull it off by myself.  As a photographer, I did it all on my own.  I operated my cameras, set up the lighting.  Sure, I hired assistants to help out and clothing and hair stylists, but basically, I was a one-man show. 

Now I’m about to make a film.  OMG!  How do I do that?

The filming was to take place two weeks later at the Rose of Tralee festival in Co. Kerry.  I flew back home, ran to Fishkin’s, my local camera shop, where my camera guru Paul set me up with a Nizo super 8 camera, a Bogen fluid head and a bunch of Kodak black and white film. 

Back in Ireland a few weeks later, I set up a few lights that I had hired, and began filming each member of the band performing their part of the song, several times over, with the thought that I would film all the story footage back home in the states.  Which is exactly what I did.

I had a relatively clear vision of the mood I wanted to instill in the video, but I had little idea how to make my images come together to make a film.  So, I began to experiment, with everything and everyone around me.  I shot and wasted a lot of film, but I was really enjoying myself.  I was hooked! 

Not surprisingly, my images looked like a series of still photographs with a minimal amount of movement in each frame.  It’s all that I knew how to do.  Later it would be suggested that this was ground breaking technique, but for now, I was heading back to Dublin with a few reels of processed film and little clue to how they become a music video.

Enter Liam, my first team member.  Liam Walsh ran an edit house called Silhouette and was sympathetic to new filmmakers.  Without a proper tele-cine available to transfer the film to video, Liam arranged for a small projector and we figured out the best way to project the images on a wall and capture them with a video camera.

He put me in a room with two Sony U-Matic machines and a young editor named Maurice Linnane.   Maurice was young and cocky, as well, but here, on staff at a small editing facility, he had worked on dozens of projects and he was used to working with producers as a team member. 

Even better, he seemed anxious to help me with my video. 

I’m not sure how much Maurice knew, that I knew very little about the editing process.  Perhaps he thought my silence was due to deep creative thought, when in fact I was probably praying for a miracle.

Nonetheless, after a very short while, I began to see what was possible and as I saw my vision coming alive on the screen, I felt the interaction between us creating a product that was bigger than both of us.  Very cool!

The video was successful, but only because I was lucky enough to fall into the hands of other creative and kind individuals.

In the years to follow, I would work on much larger projects and with much larger crews.  Although i was still a bit of a maverick, I did learn to count on each of them for their particular skills and frankly, it’s those individual skills, coming together in concert that often enhance my work to levels I certainly would have difficulty reaching on my own. 

Today, I enjoy collaborating with my wife and partner, Sarah.  She and I prepare the groundwork for a production and then hire a team of talented freelancers to join our projects.   We still like keeping the production team small, but I am no longer trying to do it all myself.

Every member of team is important to us, but it still comes down to the Fedex guy if we want the job delivered on time.

Correction: After posting this page I received a fiery note from my writer saying that none of us, including the Fedex guy would have a job without a script.

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