The Indie Dispatch - William Gazecki's Rules of Engagement - Part 1

by John Neely
Published on Aug 23, 2006 12:00 PM



Dispatches from the world of independent filmmaking.

William Gazecki’s Rules of Engagement

A conversation with the acclaimed documentary filmmaker about one-man-band shooting, and why sound is as important as picture.
 

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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.

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.

CamcorderInfo.com: I know you are someone who has often worked “one-man-band” style. Can you tell me about your strategies for shooting without a crew?

William Gazecki: Shooting on your own is something a lot of people are interested in, and does call for a certain amount of training and experience. And shooting on your own is often required and necessary for a number of reasons, the first one being financial; you just may not have the money or the budget for more people. Or maybe there is no budget and you are trying to create something you are passionate about and you have bought your own camera…and in whatever manner are moving forward on your own. Shooting on your own is a tradition, in fact, in documentary film-making, which is where my expertise lies.

CCI: And nothing beats the flexibility of not having a crew to direct…

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William Gazecki on set
WG: True, the communication aspect of it is very much simplified, because you don’t have to coordinate and create an understanding or rapport with another person in terms of priorities or methodology.

The first thing I would say about shooting on your own is prepare at every level. There are two primarily levels: what you want to get out of the shoot, your objective, and where you are going to be. You’ll need to consider what the weather is going to be like, what the terrain is like, whether you’re shooting inside or outside. Is your subject stationary or moving? What’s the lighting situation going to be, and are you going to have lights or not? And understanding your camera is important.

The other level is knowing about the person or situation you are shooting. Know your subject and [his or her] background because if you don’t know enough about who you’re shooting, you’re not going to get material that you can use later. Preparation is the key to a successful shoot.

Knowing your equipment is fundamental because when you’re shooting on your own you have to be able to think on your feet. There is no other replacement for being able to do things by rote or second nature, especially exposure and focus. Those are the two main things that you have to be able to do quickly and without fussing around.

Another thing to learn to do is to walk backward and shoot. You’ll be surprised how many times that’s the shot you want, and when you’re walking and talking and want a subject in motion, you have to shoot from the front and walk backward. So practicing walking backward with your camera is a good idea.

CCI: What about sound when you’re shooting a moving subject?

WG: If you’re shooting a subject that’s moving, I highly recommend a radio microphone. I wouldn’t recommend shooting a moving subject with a cabled mic, unless you have a second person running a boom. [That introduces] a whole new set of contraptions that many people aren’t going to want to buy…a boom and mic and a mixer. There are inexpensive radio lav mics that are suitable for a proximity of 20 feet or less.

Radio mics [can be] problematic because they are subject to interference, especially in today’s world, with more WiFi and cell phones. There’s much more use of the radio frequencies that radio mics work on, so if you’re doing a sit-down interview and you have a lavalier that has a cable, plug it into your camera. If you have a camera that doesn’t have an XLR connector, a semi-professional camera, get an adapter that adapts an XLR connector to your camera’s mini stereo jack. This is very important. These are not minor considerations. You will not get good sound with a microphone that uses a mini plug as its main connector; those are high-impedance mics and they generally don’t sound very good.

CCI: Now, I think it makes sense to talk about what an optimum one-man-band setup for you is.

WG: Right, well, it’s a trade-off between sophistication and mobility, weight, and ease of use. So I think simple is better in general. I think your basic kit for a one-man-band is your camera and either the on-camera microphone or a better quality microphone mounted onto the camera. I once read about a guy named Richard Leacock, who is one of the classic documentarians, and he was one of the people who invented the vérité method of shooting, which is capturing things as they occur. He swore by a good high-quality short directional microphone (a shotgun microphone), which are about a foot or nine inches long, mounted onto the camera, as his only sound source.

He would also spend time with his subjects, sometimes for days, with a camera in his lap, not even turned on, so that they would get to know him, and get used to seeing him in front of them, so that after a while the camera became just another appliance and people didn’t feel self-conscious having a camera on. It’s a time-consuming approach but it is valid information for people who want to do a vérité-style film. And many people do this since it’s an inexpensive way of shooting.

I was a sound engineer for fifteen years. Some of those years I was in film sound, and the other half I worked on music recording for records. But in film, I found that sound is almost half of what you’re doing, even though it doesn’t seem that way because people tend to focus on getting a good picture. But if you don’t have good sound you don’t have anything. You can have the most interesting picture, the most interesting vérité footage in the world, the most interesting subject, but if the sound is no good it minimizes the quality of your work drastically – by 50 or 100%.

CCI: I remember there was a communications study that came to the conclusion that audiences are actually more tolerant of bad picture than of bad sound.

WG: That’s correct. People generally tend to watch the mouth or the eye and listen to what people are saying; they’re not watching the background or really keying in to much else. Of course you want your image to look good, but sound is as important. When shooting alone, I’ll get a basic [audio] level for my interview, make sure the signal’s good, and then I’ll go ahead and shoot. I monitor the [sound levels] to make sure I’m getting the appropriate level and haven’t lost the signal, which can happen if you forget to put a new battery into your radio mic. Always work with fresh batteries, and keep track of the time that you had your battery-powered equipment running if you don’t have a battery meter for it….because once the sound goes out, you can’t get it back.

It’s very hard to interview somebody when you’re listening to them over headphones and shooting. The best thing to do, if you can manage it, is to put one earphone over one ear and keep the other ear open; that way you can hear the voice of the person you’re interviewing and still hear what you’re recording. [That way you can still hear] cloth rustle and “P” pops, which are really a hassle later on…particularly with women, who have clothes that rustle more than men and don’t have as many convenient places to pin a lavalier. That’s the other thing about lavaliers; have one or two different kinds of clips so you can clip them horizontally and vertically or by a pin.

 CCI: How do you reduce sounds from clothing rustle?

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WG: One interesting thing I’ve seen is double-stick tape; rather than trying to create more distance between the actual microphone and the cloth, you tape the cloth to the microphone with double-stick tape. That way you have no movement at all. You don’t have to worry about any rustle because nothing’s moving around the microphone. The cloth and the mic are essentially stuck together.

CCI: It sounds like you generally don’t worry about hiding the mic, though.

WG: Well, hiding the mic is fundamental to fictional video work. You cannot have a microphone in any kind of fictional setting; that is obviously, suicide. But in nonfiction… if you’ve seen any newscast, you see two little microphones on the lapels. That’s a very common sight in any kind of information programming and documentary filmmaking, it is kind of an outgrowth of various forms of nonfiction broadcast and filmmaking. So I guess my point is you have permission in nonfiction recording to show things like lavalier mics. For some reason, I don’t ever show a boom, unless I want those kinds of shots where I want the audience to see the production crew at work, which is rare, quite frankly. That’s a motif that I think was exciting for about a day. I don’t think it serves much anymore.

CCI: What mics do you like to use?

WG: There are a couple mics. The Sanken is a great mic, but it’s really expensive [$800]. I have one of those.

CCI: Oh, like the Sanken CS1?

WG: Yeah, that’s a great mic. [And the Rode NTG-2] is a less expensive option for around $250.

CCI: Have you ever used the Octava mics?

WG: No.

CCI: They’re Russian-made and for $300, you get a mic with three different capsules, and they sound really good.

WG: Oh, I’ve heard about those. Yeah, right…

CCI: Now that we’ve talked a lot about sound, what about your approach to getting good picture?

WG: Well, there’s a whole style of production and editing that’s come about as a result of bad shooting, basically. In the early days of cheap, inexpensive handheld cameras, there were a lot of people out there shooting that didn’t get very good material. They didn’t hold their shot long enough, or they weren’t quite sure how to track a moving subject – things like that. So what you ended up with were field recordings that had very short moments of usable material, which propagated this very fast editing style because the way the editor would deal with material like that was just to pick whatever’s good and move along….So the fast cutting style has become a very popular way of working that really originated [in part] from not having very high-quality, usable material. That’s how I see it, anyway… *laughs*

CCI: Right. So you’ll save yourself time in post, and end up with a better product, if you shoot with editing in mind.

WG: Yes, you have to shoot with editing in mind. You have to have an understanding of what makes a good shot, and one of the things that makes a good shot is the camera being relatively stable and steady. So one of the things that I often bring with me is some sort of camera stabilizer. There’s a whole plethora of those…from a Steadicam to a monopod, and I use a monopod a lot.

 Monopods are amazingly productive and useful for almost no money. You can buy one for 25 bucks, and all it is is a single stick with a telescoping body that you mount your camera on. You’d be amazed at how much benefit you can get just by being able to place the camera on one pole and steady it with your hand. And you can get that nice handheld look where the camera’s kind of floating a little bit but you’re still relatively stable. [Another benefit is] you don’t wear it. Your arms can get tired really fast holding a camera up to your eyeball.

CCI: And, of course, if you’re using a monopod you don’t have to deal with a bulky tripod.

CCI: I really like that piece of advice. I’ve actually been considering picking one up for precisely those reasons. I really like having a tripod with a bowl level that you can deploy pretty quickly, but that’s even too slow for some situations.

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William Gazecki in the field
WG: Tripods are hard to move around, and there are so many situations where you just don’t have the room to move a tripod around and up and down. Unless you really are in a conservative situation where you must have a totally stable camera, a monopod is great. Now, I will say that if you’re in a situation where you’re using a zoom lens from the back of an auditorium and you’re shooting somebody at the podium, don’t use a monopod.

 The other thing about running and gunning is: don’t zoom in and out a lot. I see more people ruining what they’ve got because they want to zoom in really fast and they don’t hold the shot long enough and they zoom out. You’re much better off trying to move the camera gracefully than zooming in, because the more you zoom in the shakier you get. So my suggestion when shooting running and gunning is to shoot wide as much as possible. If you need to get closer to your subject, move in closer without making them uncomfortable. So when I run-and-gun shoot, I have as simple a setup as possible: a good short shotgun mic mounted on my camera in addition to the on-camera mics, which I don’t like to use very much; they don’t sound very good.

One of the things about running and gunning that people seem to forget so much [is lighting]. I mean, I’m working with a new guy now who’s very conscientious and…well informed, and just the other day he was shooting an event as part of a film we’re doing here in Los Angeles. He was shooting somebody against an open window, and of course the window was six stops or four stops brighter than the face of the subject, and we had all kinds of problems because he had too much light coming into the lens, and the subject was essentially in silhouette…and he just was too busy monitoring the sound, wrangling the subject, dealing with the background players, because there were a lot of people and it was basically like a party.

CCI: Sounds like a situation where you would have trouble moving the subject away from the window?

WG: Well, he could have moved the subject or he could have moved the camera and just had the light coming in from the side….you either want the light coming in to your side or to your back, no matter what. And he was too busy fixing other things.

CCI: So add that check box to working as a one-person-band, being very conscious of where the light’s coming from.

WG: Oh, yeah. The two things that are most important [to keep track of] are sound and where the light is coming from. Those are the two things that are absolutely fundamental, and of course the next thing is your exposure level. Those three things are paramount. Other things like not zooming in too much, holding the camera steady.... I try to keep it simple, which is a microphone mounted on the camera, a radio lavalier, and/or a wire lavalier depending upon the circumstance, an on-camera light if needed, and that’s it.

I think learning how to shoot with [available light] is very important and very doable. Film people do it all the time, and film has more latitude (you get two stops more latitude between the brightest and the darkest), but you can still do it with video. It really just has to do with thinking in three dimensions and thinking about where the light’s coming from, where your subject is, where the background is, how far away the camera is, etc.

An on-camera light can be very helpful if that’s the only additional lighting that you have but I don’t recommend running the camera light off the camera battery. It runs down your battery way too fast and you have to have a lot of batteries or you’re going to be spending way too much time switching batteries as you’re shooting, which is a pain in the neck in the middle of a shoot. So I use a camera light that has a battery pack with it when I do use a camera light.

WG: If you want [another] piece of advice, I’ll do one more. This is probably one of the most important ones we haven’t talked about, and that is cleaning your lens.

CCI: Ah, yes.

WG: Clean. The. Lens. I myself, so many times, especially working on Crop Circles:  The Quest for Truth, where I was outside… I was shooting wide a lot, and when you’re shooting wide the dirt isn’t as obvious as when you start zooming in.

 CCI: Especially when you’re monitoring the video on a little LCD.

WG: Right, and I ended up blowing this up to 35mm film.

CCI: Wow.

WG: And I’m outside in the dirt, in a field, and there are a number of shots, especially when I started having to point the camera anywhere near an angle to the sun, that would light up all the dust on the lens. You don’t see it when the lens is in the shade, but when it’s anywhere near the light, you see it. I got home and put it up on a big monitor and I was absolutely aghast at a couple of shots where I never knew that the lens was not clean. But it’s a very easy thing to forget.

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Read Part II of our interview with William Gazecki.