What else does the person who operates the sync slate (clap board) do during a film’s production? Is that their only job? And what is the name of their job in the film’s credits?
"A clapper loader or second assistant camera (2nd AC) is part of a film crew whose main functions are that of loading the raw film stock into camera magazines, operating the clapperboard (slate) at the beginning of each take, marking the actors as necessary, and maintaining all records and paperwork for the camera department. "
Thanks Andy. What does “marking the actors as necessary” mean?
Peeing on them.
A “mark” is the spot on the ground where the actor is supposed to be, often indicated by tape on the ground. I presume that “marking the actors” is the act of putting that tape on the ground.
By the way, if you want to know how important the clapper boards can be, look at the long history of the 1972 documentary that Sydney Pollack shot of an Aretha Franklin concert in Los Angeles. He shot twenty hours of footage but forgot to bring clapper boards to the shoot, so it was nearly impossible to synchronize the pictures and the sound. Recently computers have helped synchronize the footage, but Aretha Franklin has been fighting the release of the documentary.
Couldn’t one just find some event in the film – someone closing a door; someone setting a coffee cup down on a table; or similar – that could be used to synch the entire take with the sound?
I assume they tried that. The article mentions that the choir director from the concert tried to lip-read to synchronize the footage but that after spending months on it, they didn’t have even one entire song.
Many years ago I was at one of the No Nukes concerts in NYC. Above the stage, out of view for most of the audience, were digital displays that showed hour/minute/second/frame. I presume one channel of the audio tape was recording this data and every so often the video camera operators would tilt back or up to catch a second or few of the display.
Makes sense to hand that job to the camera crew, since marks are often critical to tight focus shots.
What are these strange objects of which you speak?
Arf! Arf! wags tail
These are the “marks” that actors are talking about when they say things like “Show up on time, know your lines and hit your marks,” right?
In the old days, we used to read paper *magazines *(kind of like blogs, but static) about cameras, and get a greasy *film *on the pages from our fingers. A little-known job of 2nd ACs is to carefully polish the grease off each page for the next reader.
“A Magazine is an IPad that doesn’t work” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aXV-yaFmQNk
Oh! (That is little-known!)
Gee, I wonder if that’s yet another of the jobs that robots will end up taking away from us…:eek:
(Seriously, I’m grateful for this thread because I hadn’t known about that unseen 1972 Sydney Pollack doco that Dewey Finn mentioned; very interesting that in the absence of the mechanical aid to synchronizing sound and picture provided by clapboards, the synchronizing apparently can’t be accomplished by human judgment, but requires computer work.)
Hey, now! :mad: