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What do we know and how do we get to know it? Some knowledge comes from
books, some from a school, and some from just plain figuring it out.
When I ask a difficult question, one engineer I know just says,
"Because." Lately I've been thinking of the people who taught me
through example, love, and willingness to give or just slapping me
around. Gifts of knowledge don't stop arriving when you go pro, and
sometimes you don't even know you've been given the gift until later,
when the scars have healed enough that you can pick at them without
feeling ill.
Tom was my high school drama teacher. We called him "Coach" to show the
snooty football players that they weren't the only team on campus. He
directed plays and musicals that had a hundred kids in them where we
built the scenery, stitched the costumes, hung the lights and made the
props. There were no faculty lighting, set or costume designers, just
this one guy with a wooly beard and no apparent need for sleep. Tom
taught me to use a jigsaw, stay up all night, and forge a hall pass
and, not incidentally, to work a tape deck. Because he had high
standards, little time and a massive force of free labor, we students
were ever being pressed into performing tasks for which we were utterly
unqualified. Tom was an amazing stage director whose raw material was
people -- he was not so much a technician but he was always game to try
something if he thought it would make the show better. His approach to
technical training was often to point me at a power tool or lighting
instrument and say, "See if you can figure it out, but try not to kill
yourself." If you didn't act hard enough, he yelled. If you didn't tech
diligently, he also yelled. When things went well, he'd get you out of
class to hang out and work in the theater and talk about life.
I remember him showing me how to make a tape for a show. First, I had
to set up the stereo system that he brought from home in his beat up
Ford Pinto. I recorded selections from a vinyl record album -- a very
fine John Renbourn collection which I still have -- onto 1/4" open reel
tape. He showed me how to find the beginning of the sound on the tape
by listening and stopping. Then I cut the tape with a razor blade and
spliced a piece of white leader in front of the song to mark the
beginning of it so that the tape could be cued up precisely before
hitting play. I spent a few hours putting all of the cues together for
the master show tape. I didn't even have a splicing block; I just laid
the tape on a table and made my best effort with the blade while a
chaotic dress rehearsal swirled around me. During a performance one of
my splices broke loose and the reel started spinning wildly around with
a terrifying flapping sound. Without hesitation Tom grabbed the slack
end of the tape and wrapped it around the spinning reel; the tape
caught and the cue rolled just in time for the scene change. Within a
year I had bought a tape deck and started recording my own fake radio
shows at home.
The thing about Tom was, if I hung around and asked enough questions
he'd eventually let me -- make me? -- do the thing I was most
interested in. I got to wire my first light bulb socket, hang heavy
stuff from the ceiling, paint sets, use a table saw and run a lighting
board with about a hundred faders and switches on it. I even got to
perform a bit of Shakespeare in “As You Like It,” which gave me a
useful perspective on the side of the show we point the lights at.
Once when I was working in the grid over the stage hanging lights I saw
the top of the ladder ratchet up in front of me and Tom's head rose up
from below.
"Carm, take all of the illegal wiring and busted lights down from the
grid, toss 'em."
"What for?"
"We're going to burn the theater down."
"Won't we get in trouble?"
"No. They'll give us a brand new building, better than this one. Better
stage, lighting board, the works"
"Really?"
"Yeah." He went back down the ladder. I dutifully started dropping all
of the mis-wired and frayed cables onto the deck below. About a half
hour later Tom called up to me from the middle of the stage:
"What are you doing up there?"
"Cleaning out the grid so we can burn the theater down."
"Oh. (Pause) Let's not do that right now."
"Are you sure?"
"I've changed my mind."
Lessons from Tom:
1. Bring your passion to the show. Always.
2. Don't be afraid of a tape deck, although you may be called upon to
scream at it occasionally.
3. The show is everything; stay up all night to get it right.
4. Carefully consider any decision to burn the theater down.
Jim was my English teacher who saw literature everywhere. Once in class
we did a structural and textual analysis of the Janis Joplin version of
“Me & Bobby McGee,” which was not at the time on the school's
recommended reading list. For my favorite exam he said that students
could write an essay, fiction, a song or make a movie. A movie? This
was before camcorders, consumer video and even VHS tapes.
"I want to make a movie, but it sounds hard."
"It's not. First you shoot it, then you edit it."
"But I don't have a camera."
I stopped by his house after school and he handed me a Super 8mm
camera, a tripod and five or six rolls of film. I shot my friend Russ
doing a mime of a guy getting up in the middle of the night and making
a sandwich that was too huge to eat. I had him perform it out on the
lawn at school and I did several big long takes until I ran out of
film. I had all the coverage you could ever want as long as it was a
wide shot of the entire performing area. I gave the film back to Jim
and he had it developed. I stopped by his house about a week later and
he handed me the film and a little Super 8 editing machine. He showed
me how to cut and splice the film -- this was getting familiar -- and
sent me away. I spent the next afternoon shut up in the dark in my
closet at home cutting my first movie. The next week he and I met in
the audiovisual room in the school library and he threaded it up for my
first ever screening. He couldn't find a take up reel, so we just let
the film spill onto the floor and watched it on the wall. Brilliant!
Then we ran it backwards, which looked even better, and it went right
back onto the reel like magic. I got an A, which didn't always happen
in those days.
Lessons from Jim:
1. It's not hard to make a film.
2. People who supply and develop your film for free are nice.
3. It feels good to get an A.
John & Nancy were a couple of theater people I met after high school.
John knew some professional sound people and owned real microphones,
the expensive ones you're not supposed to drop. Nancy was a lighting
designer who worked the local theater scene. They both had a craving
for figuring out complex and beautiful things and they had an
entrepreneurial streak as well. They were psychologists by day and may
have been the craziest adults I had ever met.
Where Tom gave me a critical introduction to the essential spirit of
creativity and Jim provided a reductive framework that gave me
permission to try anything, John and Nancy brought me up to a higher
technical level. John was obsessed with all things audio and ran a
little Hi Fi shop in town. He was always experimenting with and talking
about sound: home stereo systems, speaker placement, mic placement,
room simulation, recording techniques, system wiring and overall theory
of sound systems. He knew a lot about some things and at least
something about everything else. They kept me employed with all kinds
of odd jobs around their home and business in the year after I
graduated from high school. I learned a few electronics basics like
component identification and soldering by putting together electronic
kits of complicated devices. I did a little bit of stereo recording --
a spaced pair of mics on an orchestra -- learned how to coil up a mic
cable and bought the aforementioned reel to reel deck from them. Nancy
was crazy about lighting and could get magical results with just a few
lights and a twelve channel auto-transformer dimmer that weighed as
much as a truck and had a great big stick shift handle on each dimmer.
You had to have two or three people to execute a cue of any complexity
and it could get to be like a game of twister at times while the show
went on below. She showed me what a well-lit scene looked like and
every detail of how it was put together.
These two saw that I had a lot of on my mind and did me the great favor
of keeping me busy with things that fed me. There was always another
piece of equipment to plug something into or another speaker to ogle.
During the time I worked at their store selling stereos and records I
don't think I ever took home more than a fraction of a paycheck as I
ran up a tab buying and trading in loads of gear and records. This was
a renaissance time for me, discovering a whole universe of music that I
hadn't suspected was in the world and learning how to listen to it
well. I remember taking home my first set of excellent speakers and
listening to my favorite song at the time, “A Day In The Life" by the
Beatles. There is a moment in the song where an alarm clock rings that
I had never heard before because my ragged old speakers had only
woofers, no tweeters and therefore no high end. When I heard that bell
for the first time it set something inside of me into profound motion
that is still whirring away. An alarm clock, what an amazing thing to
stick in the middle of a song!
Lessons from John & Nancy:
1. You've got to buy stuff to try stuff.
2. If it takes three people standing on their heads to make a cue work,
then do that.
3. Don't skimp on the speakers.
Call it mentoring, coaching or training, each of these people gave me
an important piece of the puzzle I couldn't have found by myself. In
today's world of a click for every task it's tempting to think that you
need only obtain the proper device to get a desired result, but that is
only slightly true. First you must know what result to desire and for
that one needs role models and good examples, and even the best book on
earth doesn't provide the insight that can be had observing an
experienced practitioner. This whole learning thing has two sides: a
person to give and another to receive. If you can watch a pro work and
take what he or she has to offer, that's good for you, but it's also
good to pass your knowledge on. The next time you're fiddling with your
editing system in the presence of the neighbor kid or pummeling an
intern to ever-greater glories, keep in mind that you're passing
something on to them. If you're the neighbor kid or the intern, hang in
there while the tape is breaking and the lamps are blowing and keep an
eye out for the good stuff. Heck, that might even be the good stuff.
Technique, skill, style and passion; all are worth bequeathing as well
as inheriting so treat them with the respect they deserve.
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Carmen Borgia is the head of audio services for DuArt Film & Video
in New York City. He oversees a post production sound department that
provides mixing, sound design, restoration, transfer and printmastering.
His department caters to independent projects in all formats from mono
optical up to digital 5.1.
If anyone has any
questions, please submit them to
cborgia@duart.com. Carmen will do his best to answer your queries.
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Coaches
I have known: