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Dealing with Reality

Aug 1, 2001 12:00 PM, By Michael Goldman

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Craig Hoffman didn't want to take any chances during production of UPN's Man Hunt, a new “reality” show that debuted with six episodes this summer. That's why he took along 500 nonlubricated condoms when the Man Hunt crew went to Hawaii early this year. It's not what you think. Hoffman, the show's technical producer, was seeking protection of a different kind: shielding for the show's 400-plus RF directional camera mics from Hawaii's tropical rains.

“I learned the mics will work with the condoms on them,” Hoffman says. “We knew we would have lots of elemental issues taping in Kauai, so we made a concerted effort to bring as much protective gear as we could. Anyone shooting unscripted television in this kind of environment needs to strategically plan protective solutions for the equipment.”

Like most shows in today's ever-expanding reality TV lineup, Man Hunt places a huge technical burden on producers. The show follows a group of contestants through a variety of obstacles in wild terrain as they try to complete physical challenges and avoid being “captured” by “hunters.” Things aren't much easier for the production staff. Crew members run, walk, and climb through Kauai's rough terrain, following contestants while carrying and operating an assortment of Sony DSR-300 DV camcorders, PD-150 miniDV cams, XC-999 cigar cams for POV use on the contestants, and a variety of portable recorders. At the same time, audio teams chase the contestants carrying RF receivers, DAT recorders, boom mics, and other audio technology.

The nature of the show called for unique solutions to logistical and technical pitfalls. Producers, for instance, needed to place recording decks on contestants to capture POV shots as the players scrambled across the terrain. To lighten the load, Hoffman's team designed special lightweight backpacks for each contestant. The production team attached XC-999 cigar cams to the players' clothing and cabled those cameras to tiny Sony PC-5 consumer mini-DV cameras in the backpacks, which also contained NP battery adapters to run the cigar cams and RF audio transmitters for each player's microphone. The significance of the PC-5 in the backpack was the decision to use the tiny cameras as video recorders; to capture the cigar-cam signal rather than outfitting the players with clamshell recorder units.

“The PC-5 is really compact,” Hoffman explains. “Plus, we were already using some PC-5's as POV cameras mounted at strategic places along the trail. So we felt, rather than introducing another format or piece of equipment into the mix, we would utilize the PC-5's to function as recording decks. Having a piece of equipment serve two functions is always a good idea, when feasible. We needed a special cable to make it work, but we planned for this in advance.”

Of course, Man Hunt is hardly unique there are now dozens of unscripted shows airing on American TV screens, or currently in production. Technical producers, engineers, and consultants involved with some of these shows recently discussed with Video Systems some of the hurdles they overcame when taking gear into rugged locations in search of unique POV's.

Hot & Cold

Last year, fresh from the fan frenzy surrounding the first season of CBS' Survivor and in the middle of preparations for this year's second season, the show's camera engineer, Brett Wilmot told me that his experience on the show taught him that extreme humidity was “a big enemy” in tropical climates. Wilmot strongly advised crews to “always keep camera equipment in the same environment, and not move it back and forth from air conditioned environments into humid air.

“To a degree, cameras can adjust if maintained properly and kept in the same environment,” he added. “But heating and then cooling cameras is a bad idea and can lead to all sorts of problems.”

This year, while preparing for Man Hunt, Hoffman's team faced the same problem, and he strongly supports Wilmot's advice. Hoffman's solution was to set up a permanent base camp in the field. “The reason for that is we were working in a very humid environment, one of the wettest places on Earth,” says Hoffman, explaining why the team chose not to set up in the nearby hotel. “We wanted to avoid exposing cameras to air conditioning once they got acclimated to humidity. Going from moist and humid air to a dry, air conditioned environment can create major condensation problems.”

Power & Light

USA Network's Combat Missions follows teams of combat-hardened veterans using real military equipment (with nonlethal ammunition) to fight battles on a one-mile-square chunk of the Mojave Desert in California. The show's technical director, Mark Mardoyan, says power supply was one of the show's many technical challenges. Figuring out how to power two DA-78 digital audio recorders and a 16-channel digital mixing board at audio mixing stations in the field with no access to DC power “was a real bitch,” he says candidly.

“Traditional generators were too noisy to run audio equipment,” he says. “We worked with the rental house (Plus 8; Burbank, Calif.) to come up with a solution, and it is one I would recommend when access to DC is limited and generator noise is an issue. We tried different kinds of batteries over two weeks of rehearsals, trying to produce enough AC power to run the equipment. Eventually, power inverters solved the problem.”

At Mardoyan's request, Plus 8 purchased a couple of Stratpower 1000 sine-wave power inverter units from Mole Richardson. The units were capable of producing DC power from jell cell, AC marine batteries. “That gave us the power we needed to run our equipment without the generator noise,” he explains.

Shooting outside after dark presents special problems on many reality shows, since the use of lighting rigs can be invasive and often defeats the goal of showing subjects acting naturally. On Survivor I, which was shot on a small island off the coast of Malaysia, crew members eventually abandoned their use of tiny, infrared cameras to record cast members during pitch-black nights because they couldn't get the cameras close enough to the contestants to make the effort worthwhile. Instead, they switched to Sony XC-999 cigar cams, and created non-invasive lighting by pointing infrared flashlights at their subjects.

“We used infrared flashlights with the lenses removed,” Wilmot recalls. “When you take off the lens, the flashlight floods the area, but hardly makes a spotlight since it's infrared. That gave us accessible, but subtle, light on our subjects.”

On the recurring Fox Family special The Scariest Places on Earth, the premise calls for adult family members to spend a night “alone” in an old, scary building. Therefore, producers insist on limiting crew interaction with contestants as much as possible. To that end, contestants wear specially designed vest cams (Toshiba IK-TU40A ice-cube cameras sewn into motorcycle vests and attached to tiny microflow lights, a battery belt, and a clamshell recorder) for close POV shots.

For long POVs, the crew modified 15 extreme-low-light Pelco Spectra Dome surveillance cameras for use in each of the show's haunts. Pelcos the same cameras commonly used for casino surveillance are designed to be permanently attached to ceilings, but that configuration didn't match the show's needs, so the crew altered them to make them reality TV-friendly and ran them via remote control. Rather than being permanently hard-mounted, the Pelcos were reconfigured to fit into special rigging that could be moved and mounted on walls, ceilings, and even trees.

“We can rig them in all sorts of different configurations as we move from location to location,” says Mark Trembath, the show's technical producer. “We set them up in grids, with each remote control capable of running five Pelcos, one at a time, as contestants move from room to room. We designed the remotes to allow the cameras to pan, tilt, and zoom, and they have become an efficient production tool for us.”

Support Procedures

Some shows require the creation of onsite base camps to coordinate crews and equipment. Others rely on mobile control rooms as they travel to different indoor locations. In either case, the task of keeping track of and maintaining reams of video equipment is a daunting one. Besides the obvious need to bring seasoned engineers, spare parts, and backup equipment into the field, Combat Missions' Mardoyan insists that sophisticated, location tracking procedures are crucial.

“I tell people to always bring a laptop computer and printer on location,” he says. “With a computer, you can easily match operators to specific pieces of equipment, keeping track of things like serial numbers, and so on. It's almost like treating the base camp like a rental house. You can print out the inventory sheet for every operator both sound guys and video guys and you can have them sign it. That way, every member of the crew is responsible for whatever they take batteries, antennas, tripods, whatever.”

A show like The Scariest Places on Earth, on the other hand, travels the world, temporarily setting up a mobile control room in exotic buildings. The transient nature of the production caused producers to turn to rental house Bexel Burbank to design the mobile control room. This allows the crew to replicate the configuration and functionality of their control center dubbed “Video Village” no matter the location.

“We call them fly packs, and they were designed by (Bexel engineer) Jim Lucas,” Trembath says. “All the DV recording decks, monitors, timecode generators, sync generators, scopes, cables, all that stuff is packed into special cases for travel. When we arrive onsite, we open the cases, plug everything in, and we can start using the equipment immediately.”

Man Hunt's Hoffman adds that transportation is crucial when organizing a base camp on location. It's a job he likens to moving an army around everyday. “During scouting, we did a lot of research and decided to use a fleet of ATVs that we rented, along with some of those John Deere Mules little four-wheel drives with beds in the back, the kind of vehicles you see on golf courses,” he says.

Helmet Cams

NBC's Fear Factor concentrates on putting contestants through dangerous stunts while recording their reactions. For certain stunts, the show's producers rely heavily on helmet cams, which are becoming increasingly popular in the reality genre. Fear Factor producers hired reality veteran Matt Pataglia of Wexler Video, Burbank, to design special helmets that could withstand the rigors of the show's stunts and also capture the contestants' faces and their POV. The cameras on the helmets record to Sony DSR-V10 clamshell recorders, which are worn by the contestants in special backpacks.

Pataglia says the best way to configure “flexible” helmet cams is to build them from scratch. “We took OEM-type stuff off the shelf and built the minicams ourselves,” he says. “We repackaged them into our own housings that could fit our design for attaching them to Bauer hockey helmets. We designed a mounting system to slide the little, bullet cameras into brackets on the side of the helmets to capture the ‘eyeball’ shot of the contestant's face, as we called it. Then we attached a second camera to the helmet, which we designed as a ‘Unicorn’ look-back camera to catch the POV behind them. We connected the cameras to flexible tubing arms so they could break away in the event they got in a contestant's way during a stunt.”

The cameras were wired to send a composite signal to two Sony recorders placed snugly in the backpacks. Rupert Thompson, producer of Fear Factor, emphasizes that for this type of production, onboard recorders were crucial since the show couldn't risk microwave- or radio-signal loss.

“That decision (to place recorders on contestants) was well thought out, because you aren't guaranteed a signal with microwave,” Thompson says. “We didn't want to take a chance on missing something, since you can't just do another take with these stunts.”

Michael Goldman is senior editor of Millimeter magazine.

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SIDEBARS

Survival Tips

Mark Mardoyan runs Burbank's M&M Television, which offers remote production services to a wide range of TV production companies. Earlier this year, he served as technical director on Combat Missions, airing on the USA Network. Based on his experience, Mardoyan offers the following tips for hauling video and audio gear into rugged environments.

Gear Protection

• Take at least three or four clear protective filters or UV filters per lens for each camera.

• Take rain covers for everything. To be on the safe side, take several boxes of ziplock bags in different sizes.

• If you are shooting in a wet area, take several Spintec Rain Deflectors (from ZGC Inc., New Jersey). They spin super-fast and deflect water drops without impacting the shot.

• Take dozens of extra lens caps. Also take dozens of extra booklets of lens cleaner tissue. One booklet per camera is not enough.

Doodads

• Take lots of pig-tail clamps for the RF receivers on cameras to connect them to the Anton Bauer battery mount the battery brick. That way you can power the receivers off the camera and save on batteries.

• Take spare fuses for every piece of electronic gear.

• Don't forget to take lots of extra specialty batteries: those tiny lithium batteries that back up memory, date, time, color, and operator settings on video cameras if the main battery goes down.

• Take lots of spare connector parts, like bear wire, four-pin and three-pin XLR connectors, crimping tools, 6in. and 12in. tie wraps, and every audio adapter known to man.

• If you are shooting underwater, take plenty of extra rubber rings and sealing oil or grease for camera housings.

Handy Helpers

• Take several rolls of 1in. and 2in. Velcro. Velcro is useful for many things on a remote shoot: it helps with RF mics on cameras, monitor hoods, mounting timecode generators next to cameras, and so on.

• Take a label-making device, like the Casio P-Touch, with plenty of 1in. ¾in., and ½in. label tape. That way you can instantly label equipment with the operator's name or number. It's an easy way to keep track of things.

• Take a full-size air compressor on location. The compressor will save your production tons of money on air cans for cleaning delicate equipment. However, make sure that you have a condensation filter on the compressor.

• Take service manuals for all major electronic equipment.

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