What's been your biggest screw-up?

[Heath McKnight]

Yeah, we're beyond # 1, we beat 12 and 25 combined. 25 lost to Everybody Loves Raymond repeats at 11 on 29!

I started Nov. 1997 and loved it, then Jordan came in. He's infamous across America! He cleaned house, but gave me a ton of raises, go figure. I left. Oct. 1999 for Orlando, but returned Dec. 2000. Jordan fired many people, some that actually NEEDED to be fired! I don't know if you had heard about the Chief Engineer brought in in 1999, but fired and arrested for sex harrassment (fired) and bad checks/impersonating a doctor/lawyer (arrested). WILD! Anyway, a female reporter sued and it got messy (sex harr.) and she left, the Video Tape, Audio and Master Control unit unionized and Jordan was canned late Sept. 2001. 9/11 was the only time he bonded with us.

Now we have your old boss, Bill Peterson (who was canned from WPEC four years ago) as our new GM. Nice guy!

Tell Anthony Pittman (pitt-dog), if you talk to him, H-Dog (heath) said hi.

I look forward to leaving news forever and NEVER looking back!

heath

<<<-- Originally posted by Gary Chavez : hey Micheal,

if you partied w/Brian and didnt get arrested or dead....kudos!
i was always scared to hang with him outside of work, but a very likeable guy.

heath,
im back home here in san antonio. wpec was my grand experiment in moving around in the biz. i also miss the long straight flats on my motorcycle.

wasnt WPTV just sarting all thouse changes around the end of 98? are you guys still the dominat #1?

my wife was the EP/Proudcer of the 10 the July that wpec finally beat you guys at 10:00pm. 1st time in like 8 years or something?we left the day before the ratings came out! bob jordan fired the sports guy, Anthony Pitman, blaming him for the slip to #2.
he came home to S.A. and got a job at the station, FOX 29 , i left to go to wpec. when i met him here...didnt know him there, i told him my wife was the reason he got canned!!! -->>>

[Robert Mann Z.]

i very much enjoyed this thread, ...untill that is

[Dan Uneken]

To get back on track:

I worked on a documentary about European Cowboys once, when we were on our way from Jerez to this bull farm with my car up front and a Landrover with the crew and gear behind me. First part of the trip was on the highway and we were doing 100 kph. The Landrover had a crane and a steadycam kit on the roof rack. The assistent thought that stuff was heavy enough that it would stay there without tying it down. Arriving at the farm we noticed that the roof rack was empty. We had lost the crane and the steadycam. Nobody had noticed anything and we hadn't stopped on the way. We drove back, expecting to see a terrible accident but nobody has gotten that gear through his windshield, fortunately. In fact we never found a trace of it.

Dan.

[Steven Digges]

I was shooting a corporate gig where all of these executives were horse back riding. When they were mounting up I ran around and got what I thought was a great shot. I would put the camera low and inches from the horse’s mouth with the rider looking down at me. This one horse started flapping his lips, funny stuff, looked great. I was so proud of myself I jumped on my horse and spent the rest of the day shooting with horse spit on my lens! I was devastated when I saw the spots later on a monitor. What an idiot, I shoot in all kinds of conditions and know better than to ignore something so obvious!

Steve

[Heath McKnight]

I did this the other night: I was at work (TV station) wrapping up (note how I mention I was almost done) a small inhouse evacuation instructional video. The drives haven't been optimized lately, so it was running slow. I'm kind of in charge, so I made a mental note to bring in Disk Warrior, but I still was having problems editing.

So...........long story short, I decided to trash some old video and projects. I had forgotten I was saving EVERYTHING on our SAN drives instead of the computer. I had an alias of the project on my desktop. So, you can already guess, I TRASHED the nearly complete video. My boss laughed, but I can tell she's not happy; this project kept getting pushed back for months, and I screwed up BIG time...

Sigh...

And to add insult to injury, my Tibook and new DVD-RW firewire were having problems, so I downloaded a driver. Must've been a bad one (or the wrong one), because my Tibook wouldn't even BOOT UP anymore yesterday (2 days after the disaster at work)! ARGH! The only projects I had on there were some scripts, but I hadn't backed them up to another hard drive. After 10 attempts, including a hardware check (nothing) and an OS X utility check up, plus 5 times to get it to boot up under Disk Warrior, I was able to save the projects onto another drive. Then I wiped it. Dang, what a weekend!

heath

[Lorinda Norton]

Shooting cross country meets for a high school provided two of my most embarrassing moments. I was set up in the best place I could find to shoot kids coming up a grueling hill. Pretty soon these people came and parked right in my line of sight, though 50 feet or so away. I grumbled something about wishing they'd get their a**es out of my way, forgetting that we were right next to Pend Oreille Lake. Well, you know how sound carries near water...and they were coaches.

Weeks later I found another really cool shot near the starting line where I could shoot runners as they neared a bottle-neck turn. How could I know that some of them would cut the corner?

One good thing: in Idaho if you show up with an XL1s people think you're with the news. Because of that, I got to stand in the media box for the finish at the state meet--all by myself.

[Lorinda Norton]

In an effort to keep things light, I didn't confess to my biggest screw-up. Now I'm thinking it might possibly save some other inexperienced person nightmares if I tell the story. Caution: It's a long one, but might be worth it to newbies like me:

A while back, one of the '04 Democratic presidential hopefuls came to Boise for a banquet. They had oversold, so I got the bid to provide the video portion of a live feed to another room. (I didn't know there were enough Dem's in Idaho to overfill a ballroom! :) --just kidding; I'm not knocking any party.

When the senator's entourage got there they asked why I wasn't set up for taping. I explained that it wasn't part of the bid. They wanted it anyway, saying the state committee would pay for it, so I recorded it in low light. (nobody paid) I could have kicked myself for not bringing lights, although it would have ruined the aesthetics of the room and I'd had to fight for position as it was.

As if that wasn't bad enough, with audio gear and accommodating another videographer we had run out of places on our power strip, so I used my 3-hour battery for the two-hour event. I didn't pay much attention to my viewfinder until the speech when, to my horror, I discovered that my battery was fading right before my eyes. I'd used my other battery for setups, so I called my friend forty minutes from there and asked him to fly over with our other batteries. I made the switch, losing only a few seconds--but gained an ulcer.

You'd think that was enough for me, but no. For a very modest fee I agreed to get up early the next morning and record his wife's speech at some breakfast. She wanted to critique her speaking skills. I set up in front of everyone, leaving my gear hidden in the back. She was scheduled to speak for twenty minutes. I thought she would like to hear the nice things her good friend said about her so taped the ten minute introduction, then settled in for the cakewalk. Horror of horrors, she droned on for over an hour! I only had my 60 minute tape with me and didn't feel right running to the back of the room, so when the tape ran out I rewound it and taped over the introduction--but she even went too far for that! Talk about a nightmare.

To add insult to injury, when I explained what happened in a letter accompanying the tape, her people said that they were knocking money off their paying price, plus they let me to eat the overnight shipping. I felt so dumb I would have given it to them if it weren't for paying the audio company.

I learned MANY things, among them--take all gear for the unexpected; keep extra batteries and tapes on your body somehow; don't get involved in politics :)

Question for those who know: What caused the huge battery drain? The S-video line out?

[Dan Uneken]

Batteries to me are like politicians: unpredictable.

[Rob Lohman]

Difference in temperatures, a lot of zooming or auto focussing
etc. can drain a battery faster then "normal"...

[Charles Papert]

This listing was just pointed out to me. The "crew or equipment visible" item was something that I was certainly aware of from the first time I saw the movie, but it's embarassing that anyone else noticed it! We were doing a big remote head crane shot and the reflections in the bus door weren't visible on the video tap--still, I should have caught it (by checking out the door by eye rather than relying on the tap). I can justify this a little though, because on this movie we also had 3 weeks of shooting in a glass house and never once photographed bad reflections, which took plenty of effort.

Here's another: the "shadow of camera visible on Seth", that's me in the rig. This time we saw it when it happened, but I was told the classic line "we just won't use that part of the shot". It's not subtle by any means...!

[Rob Lohman]

The most noticeable one from American History X was the paper
at the end.... Flying out of his hand and then was back in his
hand the next shot.

On my first shoot I had myself as a reflection in the window too.
Learn everyday eh!