When I tell people I work in the film industry, the immediate connotation is glitz and glamour. No, I’m not out here sharing sarmies with celebrities, but I do spend my time with the people behind the scenes. I work at a gear rental house.
We rent out film and photography equipment. My original role was as an administrator. I was hired to do invoicing and chase people for money. I quickly got pulled into more hands-on tasks, and deep into the wonderful world of cameras.
Everything I know, someone patiently taught me or watched from the sidelines to ensure I didn’t blow anything up. I’ve semi-electrocuted myself a few times, and left a horrible fingerprint on a camera sensor. This is a mistake you only make once.
I’m an organised chaos kind of girl, when it comes to my own working area. I feel like most of the team has a blind spot when it comes to keeping tidy and organised. Our ops manager, of course, wants everything very neatly organised, in every area.
I love to have everything in its place when it comes to shelves of gear, but please don’t try to file my papers or ask me to clear my desk at the end of the day. My desk drawer is an embarrassment, but I insist on the office kitchen being immaculate. Others have a perfect desk but don’t seem to know that the sink is not a magical portal to the dishwasher.
We all know who to call when something has gone wrong in a specific department. A light won’t power up, a camera isn’t picking up sound during a gear check, a client is arriving in 10 minutes and nobody can find the right cable.
I love a good mystery. I can’t resist a treasure hunt for a piece of gear, or a billing error. I also love an opportunity to come up with solutions to make clients’ lives easier. In this industry we often improvise, adapt, or MacGyver a solution out of whatever is lying around.
The other day I watched a colleague put together something involving a ladder and tripod head. Apparently such a contraption exists in the wild, but we had to make our own. My specialty is mounting GoPros to everything from planes, jet-skis, to shopping carts.
The work we do is serious. We clean and maintin expensive and hi-tech gear. If we issue a client with less than perfect gear, leave out a cable, or heaven forbid, give them terrible advice, it could affect an entire shoot. Deadlines are tight, and tempers could fray.
However, we laugh a lot. Sometimes it’s the only way to get through days in the thick of our busy season. Inside jokes like playing “Enter The Sandman” for the guy who spent hours filling sandbags. Trying to take photos of our eyeballs with a probe lens, and calling it “product testing”. A personal favourite is climbing into the huge boxes that lights arrive in, all for the jump scare, or just to prove I am flexible enough to do it.
Our crew is made up of some alternative sport fanatics: skateboarders, surfers, climbers, rollerbladers. Our boss even swam to Robben Island. Solo parenting is exhilarating enough for me.
This works well in a field where creative clashes, last-minute jobs, and emergency gear swaps are business as usual. I can’t tell you how many times we’ve rushed off to a set to solve a problem. Once or twice, only to discover that someone put a battery in a flash upside down or forgot to flip a switch.
Most people would find last-minute changes stressful. I think many people in the industry secretly thrive on this pressure.
I wish I could say I’m the person who remains calm while everyone else is spiralling. I’ve spent too many Friday evenings hunched over a laptop or furiously pulling together a job for collection on Monday morning, sometimes even Saturday morning, when we got the brief at 4pm. I’ve learnt to just get on with it, but I’ll certainly be sweating and complaining.
Everyone in the crew is a know-it-all about something. Ask someone about lighting and they’ll disappear down a rabbit hole of colour temperatures, and a practical demonstration. Ask me to spell a word, and I’ll give you a TED Talk on etymology.
I used to think community meant belonging to one clear group, but along the way, I’ve discovered that there is more to each of us. We are all, in our own way, a neat freak, a problem solver, a class clown, an adrenaline junkie, and a know-it-all, depending on the day, the deadline, or the disaster.