1 The Director of Photography – an overview

26 Practical Cinematography
Figure 3.2 The tape stick
Figure 3.3 The set box
may need during the shooting day. The focus puller must never leave
the camera, so the loader could be thought of as the legs of the focus
puller. A good loader will have the camera car, or truck (in the UK
even a seven-ton truck will usually be referred to as the camera car)
very neatly organized with everything in its place and always in the
same place so that it can be found quickly, even in the dark.
A good loader will learn to anticipate which pieces of equipment
will be needed and when they will be needed; they will then be able to
be standing by with all the parts needed before they are asked.
Magazines will be adjacent as and when the camera is close to needing
reloading and will be loaded with an appropriate film stock. All this
must be done without cluttering the set; it is not an acceptable solution
to have everything that might be needed very close to the camera.Too
many people will get cross at continually tripping over the camera
boxes and if you are working outdoors then the slightest amount of
rain will cause dreadful panic as equipment is put away. Good anticipation
is essential to being a successful loader.
These days, it is the loader’s job to put marks on the floor, usually
with different coloured camera tape, for both the artists’ sake and the
focus puller’s, these marks not necessarily being for the same purpose.
It is a good idea to dedicate a colour to each artist. A very useful
gadget is a ‘tape stick’, as shown in Figure 3.2, this being a hexagonal
piece of wood with a round handle on the end. Each face of the hexagon
will have pre-prepared strips of camera tape stuck on top of each
other, one face for each colour. If you fold back about one inch of each
piece of tape, they will be easy to pull off in a hurry.
It is a good idea for the loader to have a single bag or box close to
camera with just the small bits they will need together with the report
sheets, so that any spare moment can be used to keep up to date without
leaving the set. This box or bag can also be used to hold the clapperboard,
the cup bat, the mark stick, etc. For interiors and guaranteed
dry days, most loaders seem to have prevailed on a unit carpenter to
make them a divided set box, as illustrated in Figure 3.3.This can be of
any size, but I recently saw one made to fit exactly on a Magliner trolley
the crew were using to bring essential kit closer to the set – very
impressive.
If cleanliness is next to godliness, then all good loaders would
deserve to go to Heaven. The inside of the changing bag or, on a big
picture, the darkroom, which may be in the camera truck, should be
immaculately clean and should be cleaned several times a day.
We have all seen a hair in the gate, shown on a lab report as an HIG.
That little image, actually the shadow of a hair-like object, waving at us
from the edge of the screen makes the shot unusable. Some hairs come
with the film and are the product of the slitting, or sciving, process.
Film is made in wide rolls and, after coating with the photographic
emulsion, is slit into the required width – for motion picture negative
16 mm, 35 mm or 65 mm.
Any cutting process produces swarf – this is fine strands of the
material being cut. In the case of film the base plastic cuts very cleanly,
the emulsion itself not so well.Therefore, our hairs are sometimes fine
pieces of emulsion swarf. In the manufacturing process great care is
taken to reduce this problem to a minimum and vacuum removal
processes are employed at every stage but, such is the nature of things,
occasionally some hairs get through.