Yerevan, Armenia
August 20, 2007
By Dan
Our cameraman has left us.
Old Istvan pulled the plug, threw in the towel.
To be fair on the guy he gave it a fair crack.
He tried.
But we are a disorganised rabble. We wake up late, drive through the night, spend an hour refilling petrol, make painful progress through the hills, breakdown constantly, stick to a schedule intermittently, change plans every few hours, discuss much, resolve little.
He was almost the prefect candidate to follow us.
With a military background, he was a hardy chap with bush skills who could sleep anywhere and drive well into the night.
He’d shot for news channels during the Kosovo conflict, along with big budget feature films. He had a good eye for a shot, and would climb up crumbling buildings to get an angle.
He liked a drink, a smoke, had a sense of humour and some crazy left wing conspiracy theories.
But he didn’t speak more than a dozen words of English.
“Problem”, “Big problem,” and “No problem’ were his most common phrases, helping us judge the scale of our fuck up.
“errr...and no light, filming, why? Please. No light. Why? No filming. Big problem. Please. No filming, big problem.”
That means that we’ve wasted the day by being disorganised and lost the light just when we hit the good scenery.
“err....and please Dan, please, speaking, please.”
Means I should do a to camera piece.
“errr...and Benzine and no and why? Why and no? fucking problem”
Means we’ve run out of petrol again.
“errr...and fuck and Zsofi, FUCK. Big problem, Andrew, FUCK, and telephone, FUCK, (garbled Magyar), no speaking, FUCK, big problem.”
Meant he couldn’t get through to Andrew, his boss.
“errrr...and fuck and fuck, big problem, please, Zsofi, Zsofi.”
Meant he couldn’t adequately express his displeasure with his English vocabulary and he would wait to rant at Zsofi, our Hungarian trekker, so she could interpret.
The main problem with this is that, not only could we not understand him for some help and direction with his shots, but he couldn’t understand us to film the dialogue.
When someone’s telling a good story, or there’s a little bit of comedy, he didn’t know when to jump in and start filming.
Plenty of important side stories were missed because he didn’t know what was going on.
Plenty of potentially good narration wasted because he didn’t have his camera out.
To be fair to the poor guy, he tried to learn English in Ireland. Not sensible.
He announced his departure in Yerevan, and kindly gave us a three hour tutorial on how to use the cameras, what he thought of the film and how we could make the best of the rest of the show. He wants us to succeed, but he can’t be a part of it.
He’s a good man, even though we may have demonised him.
He said he missed his two young children.
Istvan gave me a powerful hug and walked away.
I don’t know where he planned to fly too, but he told us he is not welcome in Hungary, where he has somehow upset the politicians with his work.
Maybe he’s back in Ireland, waiting tables and scrubbing pots.
Who knows.
I miss him.
The crazy Hungarian camera guy.
We’ve lost our cameraman, but not our camera. So we film on.
We’ve lost our producer, but not our production. So we’re sticking at it.
I think the end result will be less scenic, cinematographic shots.
Less stunning camera work and sweeping images.
But more dialogue.
More story.
More chat.
And shots are useless without a story.
But if we’ve got a good story, and we do, then we should be able to find the shots.
Ends
mrdanmurdoch@gmail.com
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