Womad 1987
UK Factual TV in the 80s and 90s
My Super 8 filmmaking has mirrored the technological changes of moving image production in the last two decades of the 20th century and the start of this century. Towards the end of the 1980s, television companies in the UK led the shift away from film. Broadcasters such as Television South West (TSW) and the BBC had their own film processing facilities. News stories were shot on 16mm colour reversal film, which was developed in-house, then quickly edited on a Steenbeck edit table and telecined onto videotape to play out during the news bulletin. Kodak produced reversal film stock specifically for this purpose – VNF (Video News Film). Towards the end of the 1980s, as video equipment became more portable and effective, the cost-saving and immediacy of video recordings with sync sound outweighed the advantages of film-based acquisition.
Not all television production had moved away from film, and a company I freelance with needed a 16mm camera-assistant. I put myself forward, mentioning my experience with stills photography and Super 8. Despite scoffing at 8mm, the cameraman gave me basic training in how to load their Eclair ACL 16mm film camera, how to use a clapper board, and the protocols for keeping camera reports to send with the film to the lab. Almost immediately, I was thrown in at the deep end, assisting on a BBC documentary shoot in south Devon. The company upgraded to the ‘industry standard’ ARRI SR camera which I learned how to load and maintain, so my assisting skills became useful to other companies.
I spent a year camera-assisting on a Yorkshire Television (YTV) documentary Johnny Kingdom and the Secret of Happiness (1993) travelling from Plymouth to Exmoor and staying for a week at a time in a hotel. This hour-long programme was the last episode of the First Tuesday factual series that ran from 1983 to 1993. YTV in Leeds produced the series which screened across most of the UK’s regional commercial television franchises on the first Tuesday of each month. ITV companies generated large profits from television advertising before the disruption of the Internet era, and this allowed the director, James Cutler to use his preferred cameraman – Mustapha Hamouri – who travelled down from Yorkshire to shoot on film at a cost that would be almost unthinkable a few years later. I recall an afternoon of sit-down interviews in Kingdom’s house when I had to reload the camera magazines repeatedly with fresh film as each ten-minute 400ft roll was exposed. The amount of film stock used was extraordinary and in complete contrast to my Super 8 practice. The programme was the swansong for the high-profile network series.
The ‘Johnny Kingdom Obituary’ by Stephen Moss in The Guardian (18 September 2018) provides an interesting background to this ‘poacher turned filmmaker’. Available: https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2018/sep/17/johnny-kingdom-obituary Accessed: 10/02/2022
Around the same time, I assisted on a BBC series, The Skipper (1993). This depicted the life of a Cornish trawler-man, Roger Nowell, based in the large fishing port of Newlyn. The director-producer Jeremy Mills shot this series on film partly to use an experienced film-oriented crew, but also for another reason, which he explained when he took my employer and I to a BBC building in London. It was not a happy visit since there was a problem with the audio recordings on a shoot – the fragile Digital Audio Tape (DAT) tapes seemed to be blank. When we arrived at the cutting room, Mills explained that shooting on film allowed him to cut his multi-episode documentary on the now under-used Steenbeck film editing machines, rather than compete with other producers for time on the BBC’s expensive Betacam video editing suites. The unfortunate sound recordist had to cover all the costs that the BBC incurred on the days shooting the unintentionally mute scenes. This was the reality for freelance workers, where it was a given that being ‘in-the-frame’ for any problem could jeopardise future employment. This stressful working environment was a complete contrast to my carefree Super 8 filmmaking. The film editing suites had a feel of a heritage experience centre, a stroll, but also a world away from the BBC’s bustling headquarters in Broadcasting House.
This visit to the BBC was a rare occurrence for me as a freelancer and only happened because I was working in London on an unconnected job, tagging along with the company owner who was ‘pouring oil on troubled waters’ with the producer over the missing audio from the Cornwall shoot. In all my years of assisting, it was the only time after a shoot that I saw again the physical film that I had been handling. The ‘professional’ way of 16mm factual filming was quite different to the ‘point and shoot’ style of the Super 8. An important part of the camera assistant’s job on a documentary was to produce detailed written camera reports listing each shot’s details such as which filter was in place, lens and aperture used, whether it was interior or exterior, slated at the start or end of a take, sync sound or mute, and other metadata. The assistant would mark every shot with a clapper board, calling out the shot number and take for the sound recordist, and write the corresponding information in the camera report sheet. This was in complete contrast to my personal Super 8 practice, where often the only metadata was the postage date on the processed film’s return envelope, with perhaps a word or two later appended to the packaging.
The Skipper, 1993, following Roger Nowell and the crew of PZ191 William Sampson Stevenson, TX BBC1 7 September 1993, 1 hour 25 minutes. Programme details available here (Accessed 25/05/23). One of the episodes Bad News covered the blockade of Plymouth in 1992.
Bad News
"The third of a six-part series following the life of Roger Nowell, Newlyn fisherman and modern-day buccaneer. An armada of fishing boats blockades Plymouth Sound in protest against proposed Government legislation threatening to keep fishermen tied up in harbour. Roger Nowell leads an attempt to stop a ferry entering port. But back home, the man from the Inland Revenue calls. Tax arrears have accumulated and Roger faces bankruptcy. For wife Nell it means sleepless nights, while Roger's solution is to return to sea and leave all his worries behind."
In the autumn of 1992 the flotilla of trawlers arrived in Plymouth Sound and were sounding their horns a cacophony that was audible from our house in Greenbank. Kayla and I hurried to The Hoe with a Sony Pro Walkman cassette recorder and a microphone. We stood on the sea front and recorded the trawler horns, and the pop of flares being let off and thankfully not too much of the small crowd who had gathered to view the spectacle. Her notes from the time record the date as 23/10/92, and that the cassette recording was set to Dolby-C and transferred to DAT. Paul in the note is Paul Roberts, ex-TSW dubbing mixer who moved to London and was working at NATS postproduction where we master the sound design.
This recording formed the basis of the sound design for Kayla’s film Night Sounding (1993), an Arts Council and BBC commission for The Late Show, where it was broadcast on BBC 2 on 10/06/93. When Night Sounding was broadcast I was staying in St Ives, Cornwall, working on a Westcountry TV programme following the building and opening of Tate St Ives. The producer/director, Carol Jones, was unimpressed when I told her about our triumph – a primetime broadcast – since there wasn’t a follow-up commission.
"Night Sounding “beautifully evokes the unquantifiable depths of the sea and the sky in the dark; the melancholy sounds of a gull and a ship’s foghorn resonate against images which rise out of the inky blue darkness in vital bolts of fluorescent colour.” Jane Giles (1995) What You See is What You Get: The Third ICA Biennial of Independent Film and Video selected by John Wyver; programme notes. p. 25"
The ‘professional’ way of 16mm factual filming was quite different to the ‘point and shoot’ style of the Super 8. An important part of the camera assistant’s job on a documentary was to produce detailed written camera reports listing each shot’s details such as which filter was in place, lens and aperture used, whether it was interior or exterior, slated at the start or end of a take, sync sound or mute, and other metadata. The assistant would mark every shot with a clapper board, calling out the shot number and take for the sound recordist, and write the corresponding information in the camera report sheet. On one occasion I visited a BBC film edit suite in London, tagging along with my boss who was meeting a series producer. In all my years of assisting, it was the only time after a shoot that I saw again the physical film that I had been loading into cameras. This was in complete contrast to my personal Super 8 practice, where often the only metadata was the postage date on the processed film’s return envelope, with perhaps a word or two later written on the packaging, and I still have ‘the rushes’ decades later.
In my professional career in television and media production, opportunities for collaboration were rare. ‘The industry’ has a hierarchical nature, within which people perform specific roles within the production process from ‘script to screen’. Based on my experience, collaborative practices existed informally within certain productions, but in general people adhered to their specified job roles. Outside ‘the industry’, many arts and participatory community-based projects I worked on were collaborative in nature and less rigidly structured, and each person contributed to shaping and realising a collective endeavour.
When I became a freelance member of the Association of Cinematograph, Television and Allied Technicians (ACTT), one had to provide evidence of three television broadcast credits in a specific job category in order to be accepted. My first union card indicated I was a Senior Technician, then I upgraded to a Cameraman – later a Cameraperson – although I also worked as a sound recordist on some programmes. The ACTT merged with the Broadcasting and Entertainment Trades Alliance in 1991 to form the Broadcasting, Entertainment, Cinematograph and Theatre Union (Bectu), which represents “work in non-performance roles in live events, broadcasting, film and cinema, digital media, independent production, leisure, theatre and the arts” (Bectu, 2023).
In my professional career in television and media production, opportunities for collaboration were rare. ‘The industry’ has a hierarchical nature, within which people perform specific roles within the production process from ‘script to screen’. Based on my experience, collaborative practices existed informally within certain productions, but in general people adhered to their specified job roles. Outside ‘the industry’, many arts and participatory community-based projects I worked on were collaborative in nature and less rigidly structured, and each person contributed to shaping and realising a collective endeavour. In some collaborative participatory projects, I undertook several technical roles, such as video editor and sound designer, in addition to camerawork and lighting, and shared these skills with other members of the production.
Deluxe telecine
The facilities house I selected for the work had a long history in UK filmmaking and broadcasting at an address on Wardour Street, previously having been Soho Images and other businesses, but it was called Deluxe when I visited in July 2011. It was a strange experience having my ‘private’ Super 8 films laced up on an expensive Ursa Diamond telecine machine by a professional more used to working for television, music videos and advertising. The films had only been seen by myself and close friends, either projected or on a small hand-cranked viewer, now they (and I) were being treated like royalty, no expense spared. The telecine operator reported he had been digitising the film collection of Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum for months prior to my booking. The realisation that my films were worthy of the same treatment as a nation’s collection perhaps affected my relationship to my Super 8 films. It is hard to recall with certainty what I felt about the film collection before this time, but the grant application to have it digitised suggests that I considered it justified the attention, even if the thinking had not been fully articulated.
In preparation for the telecine, I had joined most of the 50ft rolls using a tape splicer to make larger 400 and 800ft spools to speed up the transfer process because Deluxe was charging by the hour. This was not an entirely orderly process, as many of the rolls were unlabelled and uncatalogued. Only when the mailer envelopes had project identification could the films be collated so that the larger reels had films running in a logical order. This splicing had changed the nature of the collection. Now there were longer running films with strange and interesting subject juxtapositions and jumps in time, instead of the camera rolls that would previously been loaded into a projector one-at-a-time, then each one experienced as a discrete visual piece reflecting, in a sense, the way they had been shot. The cartridge is loaded into the camera, exposed over a certain length of time – maybe minutes, maybe weeks – and then removed, so the filming is, in a sense, compartmentalised. The running time for 50ft at 18 frames per second is around 3 minutes 20 seconds which affords a particular viewing experience compared with ‘normal’ cinema – the screening is necessarily stop-start with the lights coming up to allow the next roll to be loaded into the projector. The compiled reels had created portmanteau movies which had previously not existed, and these were transferred to standard definition DigiBeta tape and later captured to external hard disks. The transfer process was smooth once the spliced film spool was laced on to the telecine machine.
The telecine suite was soundproofed and dark, coolly air-conditioned in contrast to the sweaty heat of the Soho summer outside. The films appeared on the expensive video monitors as the technician adjusted the colour balance and exposure, smoothly rewinding if I requested any changes. This was an entirely new way for me to experience the footage, and my understanding of the material, and my relationship to it had changed. This professional, hands-off, somewhat rarefied experience of the footage underlined the shift from physical film to digital, ‘amateur’ to professional, private to public.
As the years passed, there were huge advances in video technology which had two contradictory ramifications. First, the professional use of film workflows rapidly diminished, causing Deluxe Soho, among others, to be reconfigured as dry-hire Avid edit suites, losing all its telecine facilities before being shut down entirely by its American owners.