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MillimeterThe Real Survivors
Oct 1, 2000 12:00 PM, Michael Goldman
With the second season of Survivor currently in production somewhere on the Australian Outback, the frenzy surrounding the smash CBS reality series continues. Aside from raising various social, creative, and business issues, Survivor's first 39-day shoot on a remote island off the coast of Malaysia offers interesting technical lessons, as well.
The first season's premise, in which a cast of "ordinary people" compete to survive grueling conditions on the island of Pulau Tiga, created a host of challenges for the approximately 85-member crew. Grappling with humidity, rain, sand, wind, power issues, and a lack of access to fresh supplies and equipment, the crew nonetheless provided round-the-clock coverage of the cast, primarily with video cameras, audio packages, and Avid editing technology rented from Wexler Video, Burbank.
Shortly before leaving for Australia to begin shooting Survivor II, two central players in the first shoot discussed with Millimeter how the show's first season helped them improve their plan for season two. Brett Wilmot, the show's on-location camera engineer, and Bill Ball, the on-location Avid technician, describe the Pulau Tiga gig as a job that was "full of issues."
Cameras and Audio For the first Survivor, Wilmot says 10 two-man crews (each with an audio engineer and a cameraman) relied on eight Sony BVW-D600 video cameras as their "workhorses," with DXC-30 cameras for back-up. Initially, the show also used tiny infrared cameras to capture late-night coverage, but eventually, the crew abandoned those devices.
"The idea was to set [the infrared cameras] up as robots, so that cameramen wouldn't have to get too close to the cast members late at night," explains Wilmot. "We discovered that there was no way to set them up close enough to the cast to be useful at night, and they also reacted poorly in the humidity. So we switched to Sony XC-99, mini-DV consumer cameras for night scenes."
Wilmot says that switch also educated the crew on how to create light for night shooting without disturbing subjects in reality situations. "Only the Tribal Councils [in which cast members vote peers off the island] had set lighting on a stage, which we built in the middle of the jungle and powered with portable generators and car batteries," he notes. "Everything else was natural light. Since we weren't using infrared cameras, we needed some kind of light for the shot itself. So we used infrared flashlights with the lenses removed. When you take off the lens, it floods the area but hardly makes any kind of a spotlight. That gave us accessible, but subtle, light."
Audio coverage was also difficult. Wilmot says the first plan called for cast members to wear wireless mics in keeping with current reality-television techniques. Upon arriving on the island, however, the crew quickly realized that ocean and wind noise, along with the heat and humidity which often compelled cast members to strip off most of their clothing, made wireless mics impractical. Instead, Wilmot says, the crew used boom mics and Shure FP-33 field mixers. "We also set up Lectrosonic Lavaliere mics in various locations, and our audio people got very creative with that - burying mics in sand, placing them on logs, anywhere where the cast members were likely to be sitting," he says. "We got ambient sound of the island and the ocean, obviously, but the quality was good enough to use throughout the series."
Still, providing constant video coverage of the large group of castaways was the greatest challenge, according to Wilmot. Wear-and-tear on the cameras was a major problem and led to logistical changes for Survivor II. "I was the only [camera] engineer on the island," says Wilmot, adding that Ball often assisted him in camera set-ups for the "controlled" parts of the show, such as the Tribal Councils. "That made routine maintenance the toughest part of my job, since we had crews coming and going all the time and switching cameras, often losing track of which cameras had problems. Wexler Video gave us equipment that was in superb condition, but it was understood that wear-and-tear and the humidity would impact some of the cameras, and we would sometimes have to cannibalize parts. But it would have been more efficient if we had assigned cameras to crews and made them responsible for the routine maintenance of specific cameras." Wilmot says that based on this experience, each cameraman on Survivor II will clean his own camera and track problems as they arise.
Humidity had the greatest impact on the cameras. There was early talk of storing cameras in the island's only air-conditioned environment: the Avid editing building. But Wilmot vetoed that plan and advises engineers or cameramen in similar environments to do the same. "In real humid locations, whatever you do, always keep the camera equipment in the same environment," he says. "Taking cameras in and out from air conditioning into the humid air would cause a lot more problems. To a degree, the cameras and the tape can adjust if maintained properly and kept in the same environment. Heating or cooling the cameras suddenly is a bad idea."
But the constant humidity did cause maintenance problems, such as corrosion, that grew increasingly complicated as the shoot went on. "[Corrosion] started happening fairly consistently after about the tenth day," Wilmot recalls. "We started seeing hits or blips in the video signal on most of the cameras, and you could even see it through the viewfinder and when we were watching the day's footage. I eventually discovered that I could fix it by opening the cameras and pulling out the CCD block. The corrosion was always around the contacts in the CCD block, due to the salty and humid air. When the camera runs and the block gets warm, it absorbs moisture as it cools down. That moisture has to attach somewhere, and frequently, it grabbed those copper contacts. I used a couple of different deoxidizing sprays to clean them off, and that took care of most corrosion problems."
Moisture also caused fuses to pop occasionally, and sand created occasional problems with the Sony Betacam SP tape that the crew was using. But Wilmot hails Betacam's overall heartiness in the grueling conditions. "The tapes rarely performed poorly, no matter how much sand got in," he remarks. "I'd blow it out of the gears with compressed air, and a few times, I had to take tapes apart to clean them up, but all that is to be expected."
Island Editing With a typically tight television schedule, Survivor producers decided to produce rough cuts of each episode directly on the island before shipping tapes back to Los Angeles, where a nine-person Avid team finished the offline and performed the online work. Producers outfitted a pre-existing building on the island with the generator-powered air conditioning necessary to protect five Avid Media Composer 1000 units, one of which technician Bill Ball wisely brought along just to cannibalize for spare parts.
"The big issue we hadn't adequately prepared for was storage," says Ball. "We originally brought roughly 180 gigs per system of local drive storage, but we realized early on that wouldn't be enough. So we ordered more and probably ended up with close to 1.5TB, but it took almost two weeks for those hard drives to reach the island. That caused problems early in the production because we had to hold off digitizing some of our material as we edited each show. That created a bit of a scramble to catch up, but our editors pulled it off."
But first, producers had to figure out how to get the Avids onto the island before any editing could be done. Ball says the problem caused many anxious moments. "We ended up driving the equipment from where we were staying in Malaysia about three hours away to a dock bigger than the dock that was available near our hotel," he says. "We loaded the equipment onto several small boats, which also caused worry because we had to drop the equipment down and some of the cases weighed more than 500 pounds. Once we got to the island, there was no dock that could handle this type of equipment, only a rickety, small dock. Our only choice was to carry most of the stuff overhead, through the water. Our guys managed to unload it all and carry the equipment through the jungle to our editing facility."
In the facility, video loggers watched and manually logged all the footage as camera teams dropped off their tapes. Editors then digitized footage applicable to the particular episode they were working on, following consultations with on-location producers. "Editors, after talking to producers, would figure out particular story lines and start developing each episode," says Ball. "Some would work on special parts of broadcasts, like the Tribal Councils, while others were piecing together nuts and bolts of particular shows. One editor and a producer would then be assigned to work together to finish each rough cut. At that point, the tapes were sent off to CBS, and changes and color correction were done in Los Angeles."
Since the Avid technology proved so robust on the island, the main upgrade planned for Survivor II involves a more aggressive storage solution. "We're going with six Avid systems, instead of four, and instead of local drive storage, we're deciding [as of press-time] about using Avid's Unity system," he explains. "We hope to have somewhere close to 3TB of storage in one network. That will allow us to have editing systems running 24 hours a day."
Ball expects that a main challenge in the outback will be replacing equipment when parts are potentially weeks away. "I don't know if the conditions will be easier or harder than they were in Malaysia, but that's our only area of concern," Ball remarks. "We'll probably bring some sort of back-up technology. Like the first season, I'm sure we'll learn lots more in Australia."
A large crew used Sony video cameras, boom mics, and Avid technology on a remote Malaysian island during production of Survivor's first season.
Wexler Video, Burbank, conducted an inventory of every piece of equipment it provided for Survivor's first season by displaying all the equipment in a warehouse just before shipping it to Malaysia.
Sidebar
Slice of Life
Piecing Together The Real World
Having completed nine seasons, MTV's The Real World provides a textbook example of NLE's importance in the reality television genre.
Over the years, Bunim-Murray Productions, Van Nuys, California, has fine-tuned the procedures used to sort through each season's coverage. Mark Raudonis, an editor who has been with the The Real World for six seasons, says the show is a logistical minefield. "They shoot from early January through the end of May, and that generates, literally, miles of videotape," he says. "We begin editing as soon as the first day of shooting is completed, and we have lengthy meetings and discussions to make sure we are not distorting events. Our main function is to make sure each episode has the clarity of the main story line, and we spend about a month on each half-hour episode, including the online finish."
Up to eight Avid editors work on the show simultaneously, creating rough cuts on Avid Media Composers and finishing on Avid Symphonies (they previously used traditional online rooms). Raudonis says the amount of material is so vast, that no editor can work on more than three episodes each season. To accommodate the process, the Bunim-Murray team developed a communication system that permits editors to begin crafting story lines out of rough footage as soon as it appears.
"Directors in the field send notes along with the tapes about what was the highlight of that day's shoot," Raudonis explains. "Their comments first go to a story department that manufactures a story outline, like a script, that goes to each editor as a starting point for each episode. An army of loggers views every frame of videotape and manually inputs everything into a proprietary logging system that was developed for Bunim-Murray by Midtown Video [Los Angeles] years ago. An editor is assigned to each batch of material, and based on notes and the story outline, we can locate material with ease and build a rough cut."
An initial rough cut usually ends up close to an hour long and is then "winnowed down" on the Avid into 21:30 format. "When I'm close to 22 minutes, that is what we call the first cut," says Raudonis. "That's when we screen the episode for various producers and other people at [Bunim-Murray]. Based on their comments, we go back to work and generate a second cut, which is more refined, more specific. Eventually, the material goes to MTV executives, who give their opinions, and then we create yet another version. That's one reason why a typical episode usually takes a month or so."
Editors spend much time compensating for poor audio or video, since crews often shoot in clubs, bars, and restaurants, where they have no control over light or noise levels. Editors also spend a lot of time removing or blurring logos, products, signs, and faces that, legally, have not received clearance to appear on MTV. "A lot of that we can now do in Symphony," Raudonis notes. "That's a big time and money saver for us, over having to take the material to Henry or Flame, like we used to do."
The Real World does not currently use digital-asset management tools beyond its proprietary logging system. But Raudonis says that such technology could be useful in the future. "Obviously, we don't have the resources of some major news or broadcast networks," he remarks. "If such technology was cost-effective, producers might consider it, but that's their call. They started out cutting this show on linear systems, and now we use Avids, since the price of that technology came down. So I'm sure the future will see us add other kinds of technology, like asset management, as needed."
MG
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