What's been your biggest screw-up?
 

We're all only human. So, springboarding from this thread, what's the story of your most infamous DV-related bungle?

This isn't DV-related...but the moral applies.

When I was a young lad in college, my photo prof came up to me one day and asked if I could shoot a bunch of drill teams that were competing in a regional competition. He wanted 20 shots per team and there were about 20 teams.

So, being a starving student and wanting to maximize profit by limiting expense, I went out and bought 20 24-expososure rolls and figured I'd shoot four extra frames per drill team.

Things went fine, I shot all day, and when the last team was up, I finished off the last roll.

I hung around, talked to a few people, felt good about the job I'd done, when they started up the awards portion. Suddenly...over the loudspeaker...the announcer waved to me and said "We're about to get started here with the awards...could the photographer come up to the stage?"

Talk about mortified...I didn't have any more film. I walked up to the stage in front of a couple thousand folks, trying to figure out how I can relay I didn't have any more film without making a total ass of myself in front of a whole crowd.

I went up the side of the stage, and then again over the mic he said "Okay...you can stay right there. Girls, after you get your awards, let the photographer get a shot before you leave the stage." and then he went right into the awards. No chance of me getting a word in. And there were tons of awards.

So, I stayed up there for what seemed like forever, and every time one girl or a whole group would win, they'd come over, strike a pose...and I'd pretend to shoot. Toward the end, it was such a ridiculous situation that I decided to have fun with it and spent time reposing them, telling them to smile bigger...

When it came time to deliver the prints, I told them that I accidentally exposed that roll while processing it. How embarrasking.

Anyway, the moral is...always take extra film (tapes)...and nail down all the facts of what's expected of you before you get started.

My biggest miniDV screw-up? Never had one---but..., there was the time my friend gave me his SLR camera to shoot some poses for his portfolio, like right there and then after shooting about 4 hours of video. I wound and clicked away. After I hit the 38 mark, I thought, "this is stange. Why is it still winding?" Agh! The stupid guy forgot to put film in his camera; and stupid me was unfamilar with his camera---I though the non-existent film wound just fine! There went an hour of my time. (Didn't care about his hour because it was his mistake as well as on his dime.) :)

After finishing editing a 5 minute techno dance clip for a musicians demo I had to render the effects and then export it to QT. I set the computer to render and then went and made some lunch.

After lunch I decided to go for a surf. I got may wetsuit and my board from my room and thought, "better turn off my computer". Just after I hit shutdown I thought "DOH! It's rendering!". I thought I'd just have to re-render the clip. HA!! As the processor was running at 100% when I hit shutdown the OS (then Win98) had a stroke and corrupted the entire hard drive. I had to re-capture, re-edit and re-render the entire clip. I also replaced Win98 with the much more stable Win2000.

I left auto-focus on during some dolly shots on my first short I
did (yes, it still is in editing stage) which ofcourse kicked back
at me with constant focus drifts...

Auto-focus is a classic. Has happened to me too (and probably everybody else I know).

Another classic that happened was when the guy operating the camera said "Opps, forgot to press rec." after we recorded a pretty tough scene to set-up (at least for our no-budget production).

I've had one guy forget to fasten the lens-cap in a long tracking shoot, causing massive headache for me in editing. It's no fun keyframing away the sound of the lens-cap hitting the camera every other second in a two minute shot.

But I have myself to blame a bit; the guy operating the camera had never really tried it before and I should have dubble-checked before I'd say "Action".

But in every mistake you do, you learn something!

Personally, I got record and pause out of sync. I paused the camera when I was shooting, put the camera on shoot when I should have paused it. All the shots I needed were from on top of a Mardi Gras float at the Krewe of Tuck's. Too darn bad.

Next was trusting my wife to operate the cam while I had to be in the shot. She wasn't looking through the EVF. When a boat pulled into the slip next to us, I asked her if the boat was in the way. She signalled 'OK' and the scene went on. We got 5 minutes of my, subject's head and of course the canopy on the top of the boat. Too bad I didn't review the shot while I was there, instead of 500 miles later.

Good news was the rest of the shots she took were OK.

Gee... There have only been one or two screw up... yeah, right! Let's see, doing a two cam shoot and only put filters on one cam. That was tough to match together. I have also had circuit breakers blow, causing me to lose all audio on my hard disk recorder.

The best one ( Worse?), was editing a video for a client. After finishing the thing and putting it to tape, I decided to check it one more time. I'm glad I did! Right in the middle of the tape, you could hear the sounds of Star Trek doors opening. Somehow, the PC's sounds had bled over during the capture. Since then, I have no sounds on my edit machine :)

LOL! I used to use those Star Trek doors for maximizing and minimizing windows. That was probably back in 1995, when it was all the rage to customize the sounds, cursors, and icons on your Windows 3.1 box. I remember buying a pack of fewer than a hundred wave files on floppy disk for $20 from CompUSA--they were marketed under the name SoundFonts.

Then in 1996 I got AOL and found you could download all those same Star Trek and STAR WARS samples for free.

Yeah... I can finally laugh about it now. At the time, I was ripping my hair out trying to fix this sizable project, and ended up having to just redo it.

I did a class project on an old-school AB-roll U-matic system. After 6 hours straight of editing my footage, I was finished, beaming with pride over my master tape. I gave it to my professor who played it, and then asked me why there was a 30 second blank spot in the middle of it. WTF? Sure enough, there was 30 seconds of dead space. After testing it, we realized the tape was flawed, and nothing would record in that spot. Who gave me that tape in the first place? The prof... I got an A+ on the project.


I think we've all confused Pause/Rec at one point or another. :)

I actually went to shoot a wedding in the wrong town once. They clearly told me Martindale, but for some reason I headed to Wimberley. Fortunately the wedding was seriously delayed due to other reasons, and I got turned around and set up (in the right church this time) about ten minutes before proceedings began. Afterwards I decided to call it quits as far as weddings were concerned... that was my last one ever.

There was a dance recital where I blew the first performance; the classic Nathan Gifford rec/pause confusion <g>. After the finale, I explained my mistake to the studio owner and she had the duet from the first dance come out and perform again. Turned out she liked their second time around better than the first, but I was still pretty embarrassed!

Well I haven't shot that much, so haven't had much happen except when I was shooting a seminar where I had to setup 2 cameras between when one class exited the lecture theatre and another entered (i.e about 5 minutes) Got it all up except

1) Forgot to white balance camera 2 (Corrected in post ok - phew)

2) For got to put the xm2 into manual exposure, so when the speaker, who was wearing a dark blue shirt, moved back and forth against the pale white whiteboard and walls, the exposure recorrected and the whole thing kept going light->dark->light.

At least I'll never forget that again.

Aaron

Did anybody call you on that, Aaron? I'd be a little surprised--the human visual system has good capacity to auto-correct for most subtle color balance and exposure issues. On a movie shoot this might be pointed out as a big mistake, but to the untrained eye, a straying AE or AWB in event video is usually little more than subliminal.

Hi Robert. Well I was sort of lucky. I mean I noticed it straight away when I was editing, but when I printed to crappy old VHS then it's a lot less noticeable. Although not a lot of people have seen it, noone's mentioned it...I would have hated to have had to go through the whole thing correcting it bit by bit ;)

Cheers
Aaron

I shot a great series of interviews while underweigh on a replica sailing ship. The lighting was was great, the framing was good. Everything would have been perfect if only I hadn't bumped the switch on the lav so that I was recording dead air. I learned then and there never to shoot without headphones.

I had a shoot last year where I had to shoot Betacam instead of XL-1.
At one point I flipped off the ND filter, not knowing that this new setting has its separate white balance, which in that case was totally off (images came out as green as Kermit the Frog - unusable).
You can do that with the XL-1, but not with a Betacam, which has a range of 8 WB settings that are stored in connection to the filter wheel (A & B settings x 4=8).

One thinks: it's not called NEUTRAL densitiy for nothing, right?
WRONG! Pffff.


Dan.

I received a Century Optics Full zoom through wide angle adapter for my XL-1 last summer as a bonus for a big video job. I received it without a filter and I assumed you couldn't put a filter on it so I just put it on the camera like that. I haven't shot anything that puts my camera in danger of getting banged up so I thought it would be okay.

I shot a friend's S/M performance and in this show they were using grinders and they had a woman with a steel vest on and they were grinding away with all the sparks flying up in the air. The sparks were going either up or down so I figured the best spot would be to shoot them straight on, but one woman turned it towards the crowd and I got a full shot at my lens, a small piece burned into the glass a bit, so now I can only use that wide angle adapter in dark situations, in well lit scenes you can see the chip in the lens. So this free adapter will cost me about $300 to get it fixed. Once I get it fixed I'm putting a filter on it.

The last Feature I was camera operator on, using my XL1, we were jumping between lapels, boom mic, and the onboard camera mic. The last night of shooting we went to the onboard mic, (one of the only times I'd ever used the on-board mic), and I neglected to switch the mic selector to "mic".

DOH!!!

That was a nice waste of 5 hours...

Another reason to make sure you always have your headphones on.

I hope the XL2 will have an audio meter in the actual eyepiece, and not on the side of the camera.

-Nori

Where to start?
drove a live truck into a low hanging, clearly marked tree. pushed the mast back 8".
double punched more times than i care to admit.
left camera at the station on the way to interview a 3 star general. got to base, opened hatch and had a heart attack. he was cool enough to wait for me to go back and get it.
shot a friends band and came back w/o audio....
my share of blue video back in the day.
ripped the ass out of my pants on a story far from home and was not wearing any chones (underwear)!
went to a state prison in shorts cause no-one told me not to. warden would'nt let me in so i had to wear some prison "bench" pants. Community clothes the inmates wear to go in front of the judge. my reporter got video of that one.
had to buy a beta tape from the competiton in the field once cause i ran out.

but im really a good photog, honest.

"shot a friends band and came back w/o audio...."

For a couple of bands I know this might not be a bad thing.

well to my amazement I for some reason forget to hit the record button. Even though it will say rec at the top corner of the screen. I guess I forget to look.

My first mistake:

Taping a horse clinic and forget to record the one person I need to get a ride from to get home.

My second mistake:

While up in Alaska just last month, I forget to hit record while a bald eagle is catching a little bird in its claws. Zoomed in and all I was to excited to press the button.


Now I feel stupid.

Why cant the thing just say "Press the record button you idiot!"

crap....now I crawl into my bed and don't come out until next summer.

Rob:D

Another Screw-up.

(Like you guys have never done this)

The last wedding I shot, I forgot to hit stop after the ceremony, quickly ran inside to get the signing of the registry, set up my tripod, and then pushed stop. It was snowing really heavy outside where they insisted on the ceremony, so I was busy drying off my camera as they were signing. I got some realy nice close ups that would of been perfect for a montage, when all of a sudden my camera turned off. "Nooo.... The battery is dead!" No, I just forgot to push record.

I Mentioned it to no one, and no one asked were the signing was...

screwups
 

went to go get lunch with rest of crew because nothing was coming out of court that day...spent the rest of day begging affiliate tape

went out drinking thinking its safe they wont raid elians house tonight its a weekend (and a holy weekend besides, they wouldnt do that in miami right?)....

shot a friends wedding enough said...

Not really my screw-up, but:

I was shooting some lions in the zoo, and suddenly they struck up a harmony. Man! It was really cool to have 8 lions roaring to each other. And then...

This joker dude was impressing his girlfriend with his great lion roar immitation, right next to my cam, screwing up the lion song that I was taping.

So I told him to give me a 30 sec window to grab some real lion sounds. That pissed him real bad and he walked off with his girlfriend in pretty foul mood.

Next time, I'll get a uni-directional shot-gun mic, one with 0% sound captured from sides and back. If only such a mic exist.

Who gets the prize?
 

Now who gets the prize for the biggest bloop?

I have another one:
I was shooting a no budget short here. We improvised a travelling. The actor walking on the sidewalk, me with the XL-1 in a wheelchair being pulled backwards alongside of him by an assistant, along the empty parking lane, very smooth asphalt surface: splendid. Viewing the rushes was like this:
The actor doing his thing: young man's energetic pace, kicking an empty coke can on the way, walking 50 feet more, then looking at the camera shouting "¡¡Cuidado!! (look out) then him disappearing, sky and trees, shouting, the assistant's face upside down, then more faces and black.

The parking lane had ended in a concrete curbstone and the assistant had fallen backward, pulling me over him. Nobody got hurt and no damage was done to the equipment, but it could have been otherwise. The footage was hilarious and we thought about changing the script to include it, but didn't. Haha.

This thread has no winners, only losers.
 

So far, the best story is Locke and his chutzpah to keep shooting the award winners without any film in the camera, but the part about him posing the subjects is over the top, so he's disqualified for exaggeration.

Gary Chavez in prison clothes is an award-winning image to be sure, but not strictly DV or photography related. And who's to say--he may dress like that at home, when he's not gallivanting about our criminal reform system in his speedo.

Nobody's been fired or frightened into a different career yet, so we'll leave the thread open for a little bit. C'mon everyone--spill it!

All true...I swear...strap me up to the lie detector...beat me with a wet rope if I'm a-lyin'.

Think about it...about 19 or 20...male...wouldn't you prolong it as long as possible?

Yow...so did his girlfriend seem impressed by him making lion sounds? Class...repeat after me..."dork"...D-O-R-K. You should've taped him instead.

The winner...
Hmm, my vote is torn between John Locke, who made the best recovery, and Chris Hurd, who made the best blunder (wrong town? Priceless! :)

Hey, I recovered! But only because the wedding party had blunders of their own, heh. Let's keep the thread going, this is most entertaining!

OK ok, I never wanted to admit this...

*sigh*... I dropped a pd150 in a toilet once... it was my universities...bathroom shoot and i was pirched up over the toilet.. looked down to do something, strap was broken, dropped it, cracked the edges of the toilet 3 times then went right into it.

The water was an off yellow colour too... was not a fun experience... i had to retrieve it... wash it, then pretend it got broken from shooting in the rain. I was never allowed to touch the equipment at my old uni again.

It was an accident i swear.

Zac

Here is a great one that i swear is true, just didnt happen to me.

about a year ago we had a new hire to the station. nice guy, was young and loved the snap zoom, swish pan, pictures in a blender style of shooting and editing. not my bag, but to each his own. he shared a camera with my best friend. one day i come in and my buddy is using my camera. whats up? well, it seems the new guy had used over the weekend on a story out of town. there was a native american ceremony at the springs of the a river in new braunfels. The participants blessed some flowers and sent them downstream.
well, the new guy got a brilliant thought in his head to JUMP IN THE RIVER! didnt take off his phone, pager, wallet, etc. he was wearing long pants to boot. well, he hit the water at about mid-thigh and he starts pacing with the flowers as the dumbfounded reporter watches him wade downstream. she loses sight of him in the shadows of a bridge.

as she catches up with him on the other side he is holding his betacam over his head and they are both dripping wet@ yep, he hit a hole and went completely under water, cam and all.
unbeliveably to the rest of us, he only lost the tape, story and camera (un-fixable) but not his job. there was even some management talk about his "commitment" when asked what his punishment would be!

audio goof
 

I was taping our school musical for the parents and kids but never checked the feed to the camera, not only was the feed muted but when the audio tech noticed it he pushed the fader all the way to the top (i was working backstage and yes the audio tech is a friend of mine) Lets just say i speant many hours attempting to get the sound to a point where you can understand the words

Last night takes the cake for me. And it wasn't even my screw up. I took a job shooting a proposed pilot for an MTV show. The concept was, live musical performance, with spoken word, and video/animations playing in the background. The "musicians" did one hour sets of some kind of syntho stuff.

I got there, and it looks like a Canon showroom- I've never seen so many XL1's in one place! There ended up being like 8 cams all going at once, including a guy with a little Sony consumer cam on a steadicam jr. Watching this guy was almost hilarious. He was swishing the cam back and forth, spinning it, and anything else that would get him in front of the other cams.

That coupled with a lack of experienced lighting crew, made for one verrrrry long night. We wrapped up around 3 AM, and I started my 2 1/2 hour drive home. I almost didn't make it several times.

There are a couple; most recently, I accidently sent a video of a photo montage (I don't do this stuff, but it was a favor for a production company's client's friend) for a wedding via UPS' next day SAVER. ARGH! It got there 20 minutes after they left for the rehearsal, which was 40 minutes away. The bride was pissed, but they had it for the wedding and she and her hubby watched it the day after and called me while I was working out. I was so scared until she told me she was sorry, and understood it was a mistake!

At school, I was behind, actually three feet behind, a 16 mm film camera that the professor had put on a STILL camera tripod. The head broke and the camera went down. I couldn't grab it in time, since I was only just standing, not operating the camera. Another time, I decided to keep a VHS camera on the tripod and put that on my shoulder. The camera disconnected and fell. Heck, even when I was 14, the new camera my Dad bought me fell because I put it on a bar stool for a tripod.

The absolute worst was when I shot my first feature on my then-new XL-1, and Chris Hurd here confirmed for me two years after that fact that it wasn't my eye! The late 1998 XL-1 models (I bought mine in early 1999, but it was a late '98) had backfocusing issues that I thought was just my slightly bad, but corrected with glasses, eyes. Nope! And, here's the clincher, most of the movie is slightly out of focus! You can only tell if the subjects are close to a wall and really look. And bingo, the wall is sharper while the subjects are slightly fuzzier. Someone else told me the camera's back focus was off and Chris told me what to do. Two years later...

Lastly, I thought, since I used DVCPro Cameras at work, the "zero" level (ideal) of audio was -20, so I set all my XL-1 levels on my first movie to -20. BOY WAS IT LOW! And boosting it up only made the "noise" sound worse...I learned, again, 2 years later, it should've been set to -12 for "zero"/ideal.

Oh, well...Ya live, ya learn, call Alanis Morrissette.

heath

Acutally, I have a story of two photogs at my station who were fired for stupid reasons:

1. This one dude slammed his finger in his car door and walked to the interviewee's house to get a bandaid and fell in the pool, destroying his Nextel, pager, etc. Then, several times we received his video to edit, and saw nothing but the camera on as he went to the interview then returning to the truck. The final was when he crashed his news van!

2. The other dude was in his mid-30s but looked like he was in his mid-20s, so he would pick up chicks on the job, or take forever getting to breaking news so he could drive down the "nightclub" street in West Palm Beach, FL. He finally blew it when he was tooling around in the news van, off the clock, and was on his station-issued nextel talking. He reached over to grab something and crashed the van. I was driving into work later that day, he was behind me; I slowed down to 20 miles an hour since school was letting off near the station. He honked his horn and at the station, asked why I was going 20. I told him the sign to slow down for kids was flashing. He blew it off! Unbelievable! He could've had two tickets that day! Suffice to say, he was fired. And failed the drug test.

heath

Heath- Does this mean you are hiring? I'll happily send you a resume! I would love to do something in the broadcast field. From the sounds of it, good help is hard to find :)

<<<-- Originally posted by Keith Forman : Heath- Does this mean you are hiring? I'll happily send you a resume! I would love to do something in the broadcast field. From the sounds of it, good help is hard to find :) -->>>

Hey, Keith!

That actually happened in March of 1999, but we're always hiring. You live a bit north of West Palm Beach, FL, but send your resume in. Call 561-655-5455 and ask for details or go to www.wptv.com and see if we're hiring. I'm no longer in news, but promotions, so I don't know what's up. Lately, contracts have come up (even the non-contracted people are moving on) so it's that time of year when we're hiring, I just don't know what.

I think you get us, we're NewsChannel 5, WPTV. I think we may have one or two editor positions coming open, I think...One guy is moving onto photog, but I don't know if anyone else is leaving.

heath

Thanks Heath- I don't get your channel as I have kicked the Cable habit. I have an antenna that gets a few of the good stations if they're local... and the wind is blowing the right way :)

I will call in Monday morn, and send down a resume. Like I said, I would love to do broadcast work. Thanks again!

<<<-- Originally posted by Keith Forman : Thanks Heath- I don't get your channel as I have kicked the Cable habit. I have an antenna that gets a few of the good stations if they're local... and the wind is blowing the right way :)

I will call in Monday morn, and send down a resume. Like I said, I would love to do broadcast work. Thanks again! -->>>

Once you're in though, the pay sucks and it's hard to get out. I'm in L.A. now editing, but head back tonight. I hope to get out of news once and for all ASAP. Even if I am in Promotions.

heath