The life of the Production Manager on a shoot can't be that different to that of the Marketing Manager at a trade show. Despite weeks if not months of careful planning, crossing every t and dotting every i you can think of, something will always endeavour to go wrong on the big day.
For me, it's all gone a bit tits up' at this year's NAB Show. I sit writing this blog in the middle of what closely resembles a warzone, next to our booth which is being dismantled and moved 5 metres because it was erected in the wrong location. We also have no power, no internet connectivity (fairly critical for a company like Aframe!), no audio visual equipment and no refreshments for the many prospective customers that will be visiting us in a little under 24 hours. To cap it all, our company name on our booth graphics has a typo!
It must be similar to how a Production Manager feels during a hectic shoot. Worrying about going over budget after spending money you don't have on additional hard drives because the shoot ratio turned out way higher than was planned. Or fretting over whether there was enough logging to ensure that the mountain of footage can be indexed and searched. Panicking when the carefully planned tape labelling system (that was agreed, communicated and double checked before the shoot began) has now mysteriously been replaced with a strange hybrid system, which only the runner can understand.
Perhaps the most frustrating disasters Production Managers experience are technical. Partly because technical problems are so unfathomable to most people, never mind resolve, when technical goes bad, it tends to go bad BIG TIME. FTP headaches as you wait for the progress bar to move just a millimetre in the right direction. Your producer literally turning the air blue screaming at you because the file format you sent for review won't play on her machine. Realising after 3 weeks of solid filming, that nobody remembered to give the 10 different cameras, 10 different names, resulting in lots of very similar file names...
Problems like these are no easy task for anyone to rectify. So the next time you feel that everything is going wrong, spare a thought for the poor Production Manager who everyone is relying on to get the show back on the road. And if you are not in video production, spare a though for the poor beleaguered Marketing Manager!
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The life of the Production Manager on a shoot can't be that different to that of the Marketing Manager at a trade show. Despite weeks if not months of careful planning, crossing every t and dotting every i you can think of, something will always endeavour to go wrong on the big day.
