Katie Doyle, Girl About Town

Friday, May. 12, 2006 - 10:52 a.m.

(sigh) I had hoped to spare you guys this, but damn it, I must blog from work again.

So, yesterday, the director of this fiasco came into the room and talked to the whiner about this one piece of "awesome" footage wherein our star actually accepted blame for having screwed something up. It was great, he said, awesome footage. I had just logged what I thought he was talking about, so I asked if the footage I had was the "fuck up" in question, and he said yes. So in what I hoped was an anticipatory and pre-emptive strike to cut off more aggressive work avoidance on the whiner's part, I wrote the tape number down on a post-it and gave it to him. Then, since it was the end of the day, I left.

Now, let me explain how reality tv scripting works.

Someone - usually a story editor, but in this case, the director - reviews the footage and field notes and decides what's interesting and that there's enough of to make a cohesive story thread over an entire episode (or more), and then they put all that together in the form of a "script," which is really just a storyboard with words instead of pictures. They then start hunting up timecodes and tape numbers for the "bites" they want to use. All the tapes are labelled by date, camera, and order of having been shot. For instance, tape 0508A01 was shot on May 8, by the A-camera, and it was the 1st tape he had in his camera. 0508A02 was shot May 8, by A-cam, and it was the 2nd tape he shot. And so on. (0508B02 was the second tape B-camera shot on May 8) So if Bobby says to Susie, "I have always hated your stupid hair," and the story editor wants to use that, in his paper cut (which is what he gives to the editor so the editor knows which bit of footage to use), he labels the bite as having come from tape 0508A02, at 19:34:05 (7:34 and 5 seconds pm).

Now, in order for this to work, someone else (in this case, me) has to watch all the footage and "log" it. Which means I sit at a computer and start a document (a log) with the tape number and opening timecode (12:00:30 or whatever) and type out all the stuff that happens between the opening timecode and roughly 3 minutes in (at say 12:03:30). That's called a clip. At three minutes or so, I give it a closing timecode and start a new clip with that timecode as the new clip's opening timecode, and then I log the next 3 minutes. Thankfully, there's software for this, so generally when I hit the end of 3 minutes, I enter the closing timecode and hit "new clip" and it opens a new one up, inputs that closing timecode as the new opening timecode, and I just keep typing, repeating the process 3 minutes at a time until I come to the end of the tape. This document for tape #0508A02 is what the story editor or his assistant, the assistant story editor, will search to find where Bobby tells Susie he hates her hair. So when whomever is searching for that bite, he opens the search function of the program we use (everyone is networked together) and enters some search terms into the description field. In this case, Bobby, Susie, and hair. That will pull up all the clips that contain the words bobby, susie, and hair. He then looks thru those clips until he finds what he's looking for, looks at the footage to make sure it's usable, and then puts down in his script the tape number and at what time the footage exists or begins.

It's all very straightforward and basically easy.

Unless you're a lazy, whining, piece of crap.

So now, to return to my story, I hear the director say "this footage is great, use it," I ask him is this that I just logged what you mean, he says yes, I write down the tape number and give it to the whiner. All the whiner has to do now is open the program and search the term "shades".

Seriously. That's all he had to do.

Fast-forward to today. As soon as he walks in the door this morning - at like, 10, he spends the next 30 minutes - the 30 minutes immediately preceding this blog entry - haranguing the living shit out of me over the 5 fucking seconds of tape he needed yesterday. First he couldn't find it. I said dude, just search for "shades".
whiner: I can't find it, Katie, are you sure it's there? (bear in mind, I am trying to work on something else)
me: Yes, G, I'm sure it's there.
whiner: Well where is it?
me: Well, I don't know the exact timecodes, G. It's during the reveal. She points out the shades are too big and need to be made smaller and that that was a mistake.
whiner: Really? Coz I can't find it. Are you sure she says lampshades?
me: I don't know what word I typed, exactly, lampshades, lightshades, probably shades. Just search "shade". (which will pull up anything with those letters in it)
whiner: I searched that. I can't find it. What time was it?
me: I really don't know, G. It was the 2nd or 3rd clip during the reveal. Just scan the log.
whiner: Well, I can't find it. It didn't happen on this tape.

(sigh) I get up and go to fucking pull it up for him, fighting really hard to keep my face an emotionless mask, rather than give vent to any of the ton of frustration struggling to get out at this point, because I KNOW he's just being a lazy freaking putz. I walk over to his computer and don't even bother with the search function. I just scroll down the log, and voila. There it is, big as day. Shades. As in, "She says the shades are too big."

"There you go," I say, and return to my desk. My peace is short-lived, though. Right about the time I settle into typing again, he interrupts.

whiner: I'm sorry to interrupt, Katie, but she doesn't say it's her fault the shades are too big.
me: She says the shades are too big and she mismeasured them, so she'll have them cut to half size and then returned to the client.
whiner: But she doesn't say, "it's my fault".
me: Okay.
whiner: Well, I need her to say it's her fault in exactly those words. The director said she said it was her fault.
me: She did, G, she just doesn't use those exact words.
whiner: well I need those exact words.
me: Well, I'm sorry; I don't know what to tell you. she doesn't use those words on tape if they're not on the tape. (I doubt seriously he watched the footage. I didn't type out "it's my fault," so he figures it didn't get said, and I was not about to drop what I was doing to bail out of my current log and footage, load another, search for footage, bail from that, and then have to reopen my log and find where I was on the tape)
whiner: I need those words. Are you sure this is what the director was talking about?
me: I don't know, G. All I can tell you is that when he said it happened, I asked if that's what he was talking about, and he said yes. So I wrote down the tape number and gave it to you. The rest is up to you.
whiner: But I need her saying it's her fault. If she doesn't say it's her fault, I can't use it. He said she said it's her fault. Are you sure she didn't say that?

I should probably tell you that Wednesday he made me drop what I was doing and delay my lunch (I didn't get to eat until 2:15) to search for an hour for something that did not exist, basically because he's an idiot and misread a note he was given that said they needed to shoot a pick up of a particular statement. Rather than clarify his misunderstanding, he just decided he'd pull me off of what I was doing, tell me it was an emergency that this bite be located as soon as possible, and then HE went to lunch while I searched for something that when he came back and I said I couldn't find, he's all oh, okay, nevermind. So by now, it's all I can do to maintain control. I can not be held responsible for the exact vocabulary choices people use to make statements. I can also not be held responsible for whether or not said statement was actually captured on tape. I'm sure she did say it if the director says she did. That doesn't mean camera was on her when she said it, and as I am not gifted with the ability to time-travel, pretty much you are on your fucking own as to whether it's on tape or not. After half an hour of this, I finally snapped a little and said look, dude, sometimes people say shit that sounds awesome out in the heat of the moment, but which is less so in the cold light of fluorescents and flickering video, back at the office. Or it didn't actually get caught on tape. I'm sure she said it. I'm sure it was awesome at the time. But if it's not on that tape, then she didn't say it on tape, and there's nothing *I* can do about that. You're on your own. Which pissed him off, but at least he finally freaking shut up about it. And I managed to tune him out when he asked Jonny-C for something similar, and now my lovely b-roll is over and I have to go back to logging A tapes. (sigh)

Have a good weekend.

Peace out,
Katie

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