The Indie Dispatch - William Gazeckis Rules of Engagement - Part 2by John NeelyPublished on Sep 6, 2006 1:00 PM 
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Dispatches from the world of independent filmmaking.
William Gazecki’s Rules of Engagement, Part II
We continue our conversation with the acclaimed documentary filmmaker about the trials and tribulations of shooting at a maximum security prison, working overseas, and why Auto mode can be your friend.
Canon's XH A1 and XH G1 - Heirs to the XL2 Dynasty
William Gazecki’s career in the entertainment business spans three decades, beginning in the early 70s as a recording engineer in the music business. He soon went on to establish himself as a talented record producer, earning Gold and Platinum Record Albums. In the early 80s, he moved on to build a successful career in sound mixing for television and film, earning three Emmy nominations (two for Hill Street Blues and one for the mini-series, Foxfire) and his first Emmy win for St. Elsewhere.
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In the mid-90s, William turned his talents to documentary filmmaking, earning an Academy Award nomination and a second Emmy win for his first feature documentary, WACO: The Rules of Engagement. William is also a recipient of the International Press Academy's Golden Satellite Award for Outstanding Feature Documentary -- an honor he received for his second feature documentary, Reckless Indifference. With five completed feature length documentaries and numerous film festival and other awards under his belt, William Gazecki is showing no signs of slowing down. He is currently working on the history of the Screen Actors Guild at his studio in Venice, California.
I recently spoke with documentary filmmaker William Gazecki about his approach to making documentaries, his one-man-band shooting style, and his advice to novice filmmakers.
Camcorder Info: I talk a lot about how a good filmmaker can turn an adverse situation into usable or even great footage. Can you talk about one of your toughest shoots?
William Gazecki: Yeah, we were shooting a documentary film that involved some young people that had likely been wrongfully sentenced. We were visiting Pelican Bay State Prison in California, one of the highest-security automated prisons in the country. They put the worst of the worst there. So we had to clear it with the warden that we were going to videotape this inmate…
CCI: And you brought your full production package up there.
WG: Yeah, we took our cameras up there only to find out upon arrival that they would not allow us to bring in any of our gear. We could not bring in even a pencil or a pen or cell phone or anything. We had to leave everything other than our wallets at the door. So they said, “We have a camera.” Well, I don’t even know what kind of camera it is… They lead us into this small conference room lit by fluorescent lights, and there is this full-size VHS camera! It was a full-size, older camera with an on-camera microphone, on a plastic tripod.
CCI: Sounds like a nightmare.
WG: That’s what I was presented with, and we had like no time. We have this prisoner for only an hour. There were three people involved [in the interview] so I had to arrange the interviewers and the subject into a configuration that also gave me a usable background. I also had to get the camera at a distance from the primary subject so I could pick up his voice with the on-camera microphone. I had to get as close to him as possible, but still be able to be able to shoot the two interviewers.
So I did sort of a three-point setup where I put the subject directly in front of the camera across a narrow table, one interviewer with the back of his head to the camera, so that I had an over-the-shoulder of him when I was wide, and I put the other interviewer, Senator Tom Hayden, directly to the left of the subject, so I could pan over and get him when he was asking a question. Basically, I had one interviewer in an over-the-shoulder, and the other interviewer on screen left in a wide shot, and the subject in the middle.
CCI: Were you able to monitor sound at all?
WG: No. I had no headphones, and I had to rely on the camera’s auto level adjustment, which fortunately wasn’t too bad. The other thing is I made sure that we turned off the air conditioning. People forget that a lot, and it can be a big problem when you’re interviewing and have lights in an enclosed area and it starts getting warm... Air conditioner sound can be a problem later on.
CCI: Especially if the camcorder is automatically riding levels, it’s going to magnify the AC sound when someone’s not speaking.
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William Gazecki on set |
CCI: So it sounds like a limiter, essentially.
WG: That’s what it is. It keeps the high-level sounds from distorting and boosts the gain of the low-level sounds. The problem with most is that they boost the low-level audio too much, and bring up all the background noise, like traffic, air conditioning or planes, and it compresses high-level sounds, which can sound funny.
CCI: How did the footage from Pelican Bay turn out, and what happened with it?
WG: The footage Pelican Bay turned out okay. The biggest problem I had was the little plastic tripod without a fluid head, so I didn’t move the camera much. I stayed still as much as possible and only moved it in between speakers. The only audio problem was my own breathing because I was so focused, and I was sweating and I was just completely betwixt.
CCI: You’ve got a senator for the hour and you’ve got the inmate only for an hour…
WG: Yeah, and the warden [who was the other interviewer]. The film actually had five different kids that had been put in prison for life, but this was the only one I was able to get access to. The whole film hung on the appearance of this one interview. So here I am in this prison with this camera…and I’m breathing heavy! It’s in the film – I can’t do anything about it. The guy’s talking, and every once in a while you hear this big breath, and it’s me, because my mouth was right next to the camera mic. The film is called Reckless Indifference. Recklessindifference.com is web address.
CCI: Are there any clips online?
WG: Yeah. So you’ll be able to hear every little nuance [of my breathing] if you have a good speaker system on your computer.
Shooting Interviews
CCI: How do you approach interviews under more optimal circumstances?
WG: Since I often do commercial products, I like to shoot interviews with two cameras. It does make your equipment outlay a little higher, but I use two matched cameras, of the same make and model, side by side. With one I do a close-up, and with the other I do a wide shot. That way I can cut between the two cameras and pull up interview segments without having to cut to B role.
CCI: And so do you literally place them side by side?
WG: Yeah, I do. Sometimes I’ll place the one that’s zoomed in a little bit behind (I’m talking inches here, maybe six to eight inches), behind the wide angle camera, and that way you can really get them right next to each other. You want them as close to each other as possible laterally to get the same angle on your subject. I use that particularly for interviews that are long or cover complex technical or historical information, where you’ve got somebody who’s not a professional interviewee and where it’s necessary to have them talking for a long time, explaining something in detail, and they might screw up or repeat themselves. You need certain parts of [the interview], and this ensures you always have something to cut away to. If you’re doing something that’s extended, having two cameras on an interviewee can really be a lifesaver because you can always just go from the wide shot to the close-up, a classic two-camera move.
CCI: The way that I was trained was to make sure that you get a couple framings with a single camera, but that requires that you zoom in and out, and sometimes one shot might not match the one you want to cut to…
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The director working in China |
CCI: But it can box you in when it comes to the edit. You may have a tight shot and want to make a cut to another tight shot later in the interview, and end up having to cover it with B-Roll.
WG: Right. When I edit I capture only one of the angles initially. I pick the one that I like the best, pretty much subjectively, the close-up or the wide shot, and I cut with that. At the end of the cut, I take a look and see how many jump cuts I have and I go back and get the other camera just for those pieces and plug it in. And I don’t bother with matching the timecode or anything like that because the video runs at a constant speed and you can sync it up manually. Once you get it synced up all you have to do is replace the jump cuts with the other camera angle.
When to Shoot in Auto Mode
CCI: Earlier, we talked about the pros and cons of shooting in auto mode. There are times when things are just moving too fast to shoot in full manual…
WG: Auto mode is generally not recommended, particularly for stationary camera work, like interviews. When you’re in auto focus, the camera has a tendency to focus on whatever’s biggest in the frame, and it’s often not the person you’re interviewing so the camera may focus on the wall behind the interviewee.
It’s different if you’re in a very transient situation where you’re moving around a lot and the light level is changing a lot. For example, I was shooting Future by Design in Florida, and we were following a group of people in and out of these domes that had been built by this inventor. He was giving these people a tour, and he was on a radio mic. We had two cameras, and we were following this group of people as the inventor was leading them in and out of his workshops, so we were going from bright sunlight into dim rooms without a lot of windows. So we were changing six F-stops with each move, and I was on manual, and that was a mistake. I should have been in auto, because I was missing things.
I would follow the group into a room, but I didn’t think, “Oh, this is way underexposed,” so I would take thirty seconds, sometimes longer if people were moving around a lot, to position myself and adjust exposure. And then, all of a sudden they’d walk out, and everything would be completely blown out and too bright. There are a couple of spots in the film where I’m tracking people out the door because the dialogue was important, but the shot goes to hell when I walk outside; it goes almost white. I was able to color-correct some of that in post, but if I had been on automatic, I wouldn’t have had that problem. Going in and out, from exterior to interior, back and forth, automatic would have been the best way to go.
The only thing about automatic is, you’ve got to remember where the light is. The worst thing about automatic is shooting into the light, where it shuts everything down and puts your subject in silhouette automatically. The other thing is, moving the shot from bright to dark quickly, you’ll see the camera pump up and down, and you’re going to see the automatic adjustment happening and that looks different from a manual adjustment.
CCI: So in a situation like that, would you keep focus manual but just put it into auto exposure, or would you let the camera take care of everything?
WG: In the situation that I was talking about, I probably would have left the focus on automatic too. I was so busy just trying to position myself within the group and get my shot, getting the leader of the group, making sure that I was in front of him and at the right level and that nobody’s shoulder or body was going to walk in front of me, just wrangling the physical positioning… I didn’t have time to think about what the camera was doing. It was enough just to get a good shot.
Shooting Crop Circles
CCI: We also talked about getting equipment into remote locations. You had some stories from shooting crop circles in England.
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William Gazecki in the field |
I did discover that I had to go and buy new bulbs for my lights. I took the same lights that I use here and just got 220-volt bulbs for them and plugged them and they worked fine. I used an adapter on the plug to get into the wall socket and a different voltage bulb in the lamp and I was good to go, so I didn’t need to buy 220 volt lamps, just new bulbs. The other thing is that I had to be prepared for completely mobile recording.
CCI: And were you one-man-banding this shoot?
WG: I was two-man-banding it, basically. I had an assistant there, although, initially, my plans were to do it all myself, so I had a camera and sound setup that I could fit into a backpack, with lavalier mics, a short boom with a shotgun mic, and my on-camera light.
What was relevant to me in that shoot, is that I had a wide range of situations I had to record in. In England, these crop circles appear in the middle of a field of wheat. That can be way out down a country lane, and then down a dirt road and you may have to climb over a barbed-wire fence and tromp through mud. And so I had to be prepared for a lot of movement, but I also had to be prepared for different kinds of situations where I might have had to cover anywhere from two or three people to a whole roomful. I had to be prepared for everything from a simple interview to a group, which is why I needed the boom and a mixer. I got a portable battery-operated three-input mixer so I could mix a lav and boom together.
CCI: What kind of mixer did you use?
WG: I used a Shure FP33. The other thing of course is you have to have a good pair of headphones and they should be able to shut out external noise and give you a reasonably accurate representation of what you’re recording.
CCI: So closed-back headphones?
WG: Yeah, closed-back headphones. At one point I considered noise-canceling headphones, but that’s a bad idea. They introduce a special circuit into the audio path when you want your sound as clean and unfettered as possible. I don’t even think it’s a good idea to have a volume control on your headphones because sometimes you forget [where your volume is set]. I wouldn’t get a pair with volume controls.
Camcorders – Panasonic AG-DVX100 & Sony HVR-Z1U
CCI: What kind of camera do you usually use to shoot?
WG: I have two DVX100A’s and two Sony Z1U’s. I’m starting to work in HDV now, so I use the Z1U’s for HD and the DVX100’s for standard def, with an anamorphic lens, because I do almost everything in 16 by 9. Now that all the new screens are being sold in 16:9, I think it’s really a viable format.
CCI: How do you like the Z1U?
WG: For an all-around high def camera, HDV camera, I think it’s an excellent piece of equipment. The one thing I would say about shooting in HDV is to get your exposure right the first time. HDV does not have the adjustment latitude that DV has in terms of what you can do with the signal. DV is pretty malleable, so you can color correct it quite a bit, compensate for lighting problems, and the image stays pretty solid. I’ve found that HDV looks pretty good right out of the camera, but if you have to [fix exposure in post], it doesn’t like that very much.
CCI: Do you ever run into focus issues when you’re shooting HDV?
WG: Well, focus in HDV is a much more important matter, because you can see soft focus much easier at high resolution. I have not run into any extreme issues in terms of back focus adjustment or general focus as a whole. [The Z1U] is a good camera. The optics are good, the color reproduction is quite good, audio is good. Again, the only issue I see is getting a really good shot in the camera if you want a pristine product.
The other thing is the Z1U is a microprocessor-controlled camera, whereas the DVX100 has a lot of manual controls, and manual [on camera] controls are better for run-and-gun shooting. Getting into a digital menu any time during a shoot is a pain in the neck. When I use the Z1U’s, I make sure that all the settings are in place the night before, because there are sophisticated decisions that have to be made. Unless you have a ton of time to play with your settings on location, I would set the cameras up the night before so you just turn them on and go.
Gear to Bring on Shoot
CCI: Can you talk about some additional items you like to have with you on a shoot?
WG: One of the things I bought when I shot Waco – the Rules of Engagement was a set of portable stands and a crossbar that I could hang a background from, because we shot in a lot of hotel rooms and funky places. I [made the decision] to use the same background for all the interview subjects. It was pretty small; two tripods, a telescoping crossbar, and a cloth background that I’d fold up and put in my suitcase. It came in very, very handy, and it really helped the film look good because we had a nice, consistent background for everybody.
WG: I also have a set of collapsible flags. If you get into precisely lit stuff, and you use flags and diffusion screens, you know it’s very difficult to take that stuff on the road because grip equipment is cumbersome and bulky. I use some collapsible flag units called Road Rags. It’s a great little setup of flags and scrims that collapse to the size of a tripod, so you can [easily travel with] two or four flags and some diffusion.
I also carry three different kinds of gels, but one gel commonly referred to as opal is always in my kit. It’s what I see all the Hollywood guys using. I can tell it’s popular because every time I go to buy it, they’re out - every other kind of diffusion is in stock, but they don’t have opal. It doesn’t spread the light out too much and you maintain a good amount of your directionality. I also recommend soft boxes. Chimera is the original maker, and they’re quite expensive. There are a lot of Chinese knockoffs now that are very suitable, but probably not as robust. And finally, always travel with extra bulbs. If a bulb goes out when you’re shooting and you don’t have an extra, you’re screwed. You’ve got all this gear set up, and all you’re missing is a light bulb…
CCI: Right, unless you’re shooting in LA you’re probably not going to be able to pick one up around the corner.
WG: That’s right. Even in LA, it’s a major hassle.
CCI: Do you have any final thoughts for indie producers?
WG: Make sure, when you’re recording, that you have people’s permission. This has become a big issue now because there’s so much media out there and so much concern about what’s going to be done with it, where is it going to be shown, who you are, and all those kinds of things. [This is especially true] for beginners that don’t have a reputation, or don’t come from an established media institution like a network or a cable channel.
If you’re just a guy out there shooting, people want to know what it’s for and who are you, and there are all kinds of laws and rules about shooting in public and particularly with regard to any kind of corporate brand. I have seen people who have had more problems than you can imagine because they left a can of Coke on the table during an interview. So now they’ve got this Coca-Cola logo in their shot and they can’t use it, or they have to blur it out, or they have to do something about it. That goes for T-shirts, that goes for posters, that goes for McDonald’s, any brand.
Music is very much a problem. That’s another thing when shooting in any kind of a store or a public space of any sort where they have background music on, you are going to have to get clearance for that. Plus it messes up your editing. There’s nothing worse than trying to cut around background music when you’re trying to cut up the dialogue. My general philosophy is that, when a product is done, the efforts of the filmmaker are completely transparent. It’s sort of old school.