Jun 19 24
Worked on set today for an ad shoot. The only production I’ve been doing for a little bit has been for my friend’s girlfriend, whose a girl-boss producer at a hip ad agency. I really like her and shes a fuckin pro, so it feels good that she trusts me. It’s also funny to see people I meet outside of work contexts in their work flow. Everyone I’ve seen at their job has demonstrated phenomenal competence, and the striking thing is how much more self assured they usually are than in social settings. Not to quibble with Marx, but its clearly good for people’s self actualization to be good at something they are asked to do.
My role recently has been DIT, which is sort of a fake job. It stands for Digital Imaging Technician. DIT stuff can go pretty deep, but thats particularly on feature shoots, or at least something that is multiday. In my case, when I’m just doing one day ad shoots, my job is to set up video monitors and ensure they get a good feed, ensure that there is a streaming feed to the clients off site1, and to wrangle all the data from the camera team and the sound recordist, as well as back it up. In more advanced cases the DIT would also have more to do with pre-staging color grading by starting to create LUTs2 and other stuff to start getting post production ready. The basic idea is that the DIT sits between production (behind the camera) and post-production (behind the various computers that edit and finalize the asset). A big part of that is often creating dailies so that the director or producers or whoever can review footage. I know also that DITs are also often tasked with being able to instantly playback things as they are being shot. I’ve done some of that, where I load up a special media player for various raw footage I’ve already loaded onto a drive, but I know in a feature film or other higher level environment theres special equipment and software which is really expensive and that they call Qtake.
Basically my day was that I got there and set up monitors and wireless links to the cameras and then waited around for 12 hours until I could download and backup all of the footage, and now I’m in the process of finishing transcoding all of it so I can send it to the editor tomorrow. In the 12 hours between that I helped out the camera and art departments as much as I could, but we were a pretty big shoot and there was already some redundancy, so I wasn’t that helpful. I started to feel a bit insecure and stupid. I noticed other people were doing a better job networking, which I’ve come to learn is an essential skill I don’t have. I kept thinking I needed to be more outgoing.
At one point someone was talking about how bad zyn is for your. She was making fun of someone for their zyn addiction. I said that nicotine is not carcinogenic, but she said that there was still a chemical reaction happening in someones mouth. The zyn-addicted gaffer rebutted that there was a chemical reaction happening in the mouth when someone eats food. I thought this was a perfect retort, but it was unconvincing to his art department girl interlocutor. I was reminded in that moment of the lesson I have to remind myself of all the time- I don’t care about convincing anyone of anything. Whatever I think or know to be true doesn’t matter. I want things out of other people, and I have to put their perspective above all else. I am not tasked with being right, and I am certainly not tasked with convincing other people of anything. What I am tasking myself with is excelling and convincing other people to trust me, whatever that may mean.
Throughout the day I often found myself feeling feeling foolish for being insecure. I started thinking that it was quite silly that I had this arbitrary wish to direct video and film when I was so introverted.
One of the actors in the ad did a voiceover3 line which addressed this:
I guess that should make me feel better. One thing I got from the whole shoot was that it was weird that there were jokes about ‘alphas’ and an oblique reference to gigachad. I recall this kind of stuff from when I was on 4chan when I was 14, and I thought we were all basically making fun of it even then. How fascinating how language and society change. I saw an instagram reel the other day that was BTS footage of a DIT in action, and he had all this internety stuff on his cart. The caption was like “why are all DITs such meme lords?” I remember thinking wow I’m glad I’m not so cringe. When I opened my laptop to start transcoding the producer/CEO guy saw my pepe the frog sticker and was like “do you own any pepe?” and then informed me there was a pepe the frog cryptocurrency that was doing well.
This actually isn’t a typical thing I’ve heard of DITs doing, but I assume it will become more common. I’ve noticed in general that there has been a notable uptick in how common streaming is. I would guess that the distal cause of this phenomenon is that the availability of prosumer level and relatively straightforward and cheap streaming equipment, in particular the BlackMagic ATEM has made streaming a more common expectation for both production clients and live events.
Color remapping settings- something akin to a filter, but for coloring raw digital video
I definitely shouldn’t be sharing stuff like this, but I feel like its unlikely to lead to negative consequences, especially bc how many people are really going to be exposed to this particular audio clip?