Handling change

It doesn’t matter what the job, there will always be change.  Things will throw off the schedule, gear will break, weather will interfere and crew will get lost.  I find it is not so much the things that go wrong, but rather the way you react to them that matter.

Last week, I had a nice two day shoot for an agency out of Chicago.  It happened to coincide with another snow fall here in Nashville that turned 30 minute commutes into two to three hour ordeals, mainly because it happened mid afternoon while everyone was still at work.  It was a mess and it caused major changes in the shoot locations and times.

The agency asked me to add video to the shoot so on day two, I brought in an associate to capture video as I was shooting stills.  They really wanted to take home the footage with them at the end of the second day of shooting so I also hired a media manager to help download our files so that we would not get bogged down at the end of the day.

The card reader specific to the video camera did not make it to the shoot so we had someone bring it to us half way through the day.  The card reader would not mount a card on my computer or his so we had no way to download footage except to plug the camera straight into the laptop.  This of course means that while the camera is downloading it is not shooting so our video coverage of the day was not what it could have been.  It got to the point where we had to keep shooting and eventually ran out of cards for the video camera.  Just when we thought we had shot the last shot and filled the last card to capacity, the client walks over and asks if we could shoot some video testimonials.

Now, we were not really prepared for this request.  Realizing that we just didn’t have time to download a video card, we grabbed a DSLR, a small LED light and went to it.  We both have experience shooting motion with a DSLR so it was not that much of a problem, however we did have to take a quick run through the camera’s menu system to make sure we shot it right.  There are any number of things that could have gone wrong there but we ended up with good footage.

Without the working card reader for the video camera, we were not able to deliver the drive at the end of the day due to their flight schedule but we got it to FedEx and delivered by the start of the next business day.

Point is, plenty of things went wrong that day.  The client was probably not aware of most of them (except for the lousy weather) and appreciated us being able to accomplish the task at hand.  We motored through, got the job done and above all had the “yes we can” attitude that made the shoot a success.