TWOFOUR - Day 4

Today I was in the camera store with Ben Whitehouse. To be honest when they first told me I would be spending the day there I wasn’t particularly looking forward to going because I’m not really interested in all the cameras; I prefer the pre-production stages.

When I first got there, there wasn’t very much to do because equipment was not due to be hired out until later in the day. So Ben explained what his job involved and how the camera store operated. I was really surprised to discover that the camera store was managed under the ‘DIGITAL’ sector of the company and the ‘BROADCAST’ sector needs to pay to hire out any of the equipment. To be honest I didn’t fully understand this at first because to me it seemed pointless TwoFour paying to hire their own equipment. But Ben explained that the equipment hire costs are always in every production budget and if they didn’t have their own camera store the sectors would have to hire the equipment from another hire company so this was a way for TwoFour to put money back into their own company rather than into someone else’s. It was set up for TwoFour to save money in the long-term. However if lots of projects are taken place at the same time, in some situations the camera store do need to hire in extra equipment in for the production teams to use.


My first task in the camera store was to carry out a few camera tests, to test the quality of two different brands of DV tapes. This required me to film twenty four-minutes of the camera storeroom, twelve-minutes of footage on each DV tape using a Sony Z1 to film. I had to ensure I filmed exactly the same on each tape so the editors and directors could analyze the difference in quality and decide which DV tapes would be better to use for future projects.
After lunch I helped Ben gather up all the kit ordered by one of the production team. This meant looking down their order form and loading everything on it onto the trolley ready for them to take out. While doing this Ben was explaining the different types of equipment and why it’s relevant to the type of shoot.




The other thing Ben and Elaine showed me was the Camera and Sound contacts. This was a spreadsheet in Excel filled with names and telephone numbers of hundreds of different camera and sound operators. The spreadsheet is used when production teams need someone to shoot their production or to manage the production’s sound. The sheet is updated regularly with production teams leaving comments about the contact’s abilities and whether they worked well or not and whether they should be recommended for future projects. This is a good way for TwoFour to build a strong team that can work well together.






Overall my day in the camera store went well and wasn’t as bad as I had imagined. The day went really fast and I learnt some more about TwoFour Group and how the company operates.

Pictures Source

http://worldserviceyourstory.files.wordpress.com/2008/11/z1.jpg

http://homepage.cs.uri.edu/tutorials/csc101/pc/excel97/images/excel1.jpg

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/cwdZbSJ6OVk/s320/excel_logo.jpg