In previous years, Comcast has offered the use of a production truck for the Video Club at Caruso Middle School in Deerfield. I was the one who was required to drive the truck to the school for several training sessions, leading up to the two big nights of basketball games.

This year, however, things have changed. Our production truck was decommissioned and the guy who normally leads the video club kids didn't end up doing anything this year. 

Of course, the school still wanted the games taped, but I told him that I could not offer any equipment for the kids to use since they had not gone through any training this year. I then offered to tape the game myself, as a freelance gig.

In previous years, we used the production truck to tape the games. The truck required getting there 2 or 3 hours before game time, running hundreds of feet of camera cable through the snow into the building throuh multiple doors, down multiple hallways. Running long lengths of mic cables over doors and under bleachers. Setting up crappy, outdated tripods and camera set ups. And then once everything was set up, of course, nothing ever worked right. It may have been that a camera's picture would look green, or we wouldn't be getting signal from the annoucers mics, or a plethora of other problems. Combine that with a crew of low attention spanned middle schoolers and you get a chaotic situation.

Once set up, the taping of the games was all done by the kids.  I usually just sat in the truck and made sure the kids weren't eating or drinking in there. I'd try to read a magazine or something despite them constantly yelling at each other over the headsets.  Staying warm was usually difficult, since the door to the truck was constantly being opened by kids coming and going. After the game required an hour breakdown of all the equipment, and then I had to drive the crappy 1983 Ford production truck back to the studio, one year through a blizzard.

This year was much different. One crew member, one camera. I set up my camera on a raised platform center court next to the annoucer's table. I ran 3 feet of cable from the mics to the portable sound mixer, which was in arms reach of my camera, and then 3 more feet from the mixer to my camera. Done. Setup time: 10-15 minutes. Not only did the setup go smooth, but the games themselves when very smoothly. The picture looked great and the announcers sounded great. There was not one technical issue the whole night.

The only thing that sucked was what happened when the game was over. In efforts to get the crowd to leave the gym, the cleaning crew started turning off some of the lights. This was fine...until they turned off every light in the whole fucking gym! The only source of light was the red "Exit" signs above some of the doors. I was pissed. I still had to gather my equipment and wrap my cables. Someone eventually turned on one light and I was able to continue packing. But then when there were still people hangin around, they turned off all the lights again! I yelled "Turn on the lights!" several times, but I assumed that the cleaning crew did not speak english. I was pretty sure I had all my equipment at this point, but not positive since I couldn't see a damn thing. I was so pissed that I considered kicking over a garbage can on my way out since I knew the asshole cleaning crew would have to clean it up. But I held myself back.

Other than packing up in the dark, it may have been the smoothest shoot I've ever done. And it was nice to tape a sporting event where so many people were appriciative of you being there...even the coaches. This is in stark contrast of dealing with asshole high school football coaches who treat anyone with a camera like they are some kind of virus.