Nano-thin patience

I’ve been talking through something with my brother that’s had me puzzled for a few years now. It seems that I have to somehow prove to certain people that I know what I’m doing and can do my job to a professional standard? Mulling it over with David brought up a couple of interesting traits in the people that seem to give me the most grief, the biggest one being a connection to “fandom”.

I’ll let Harlan take it from here (props to GD for alerting me)...

Now, before someone gets the wrong end of the stick here, I’ve nothing against genuine amateurs - those who are taking their early, faltering steps on the road to becoming, in some way, ‘professional’. What I do have a problem with is an attitude that reeks of ‘if you’re prepared to help me, you must be not very good at your job’ or, worse still ‘I’ve been on a course, so I know what I’m on about’. And don’t for a second think that I view myself as some kind of “know-everything” veteran, skilled in every martial art as well as being an undercover agent and celebrity pharmacist...

I don’t know where it comes from, but I’ve witnessed actors, directors and writers being buttonholed at conventions and told how to improve by ardent fans. Do these people, to paraphrase Bill Hicks, go to an Eric Clapton concert and start trying to give the man guitar lessons?

Hmm, I’m wondering whether a parallel between myself and Eric Clapton might seem just a teensy little bit, umm, preposterous... ;-)

Still, fuck that. If a professional needs to be told how to do something, they’ll usually ask. Otherwise, if they’re just getting on with it, it’s probably safe to assume that they may have a fairly good grasp of what they’re up to, no?

Which, circuitously, brings me back to the (as usual) fairly nebulous point I was making. A recent exchange of messages on Good Dog’s reply segment with Irascible Ian demonstrated that there are even amateur teachers, charging money for “documentary film-making courses” which are, it seems, clueless shit. Having people teaching film-making that don’t have the faintest idea of what they’re on about (and only half the gear the students needed to shoot footage) isn’t helping those of us that have a bit of an idea what we’re doing.

Fuckers like this are propagating lazy working practices, slack attitudes to work and building a culture of anti-professionalism amongst those that are attempting to break into this business. They are producing jumped-up runners from Channel 4 who believe that calling themselves film-makers (while not knowing what a white balance is, or the difference between region encoding and video standards) makes them the next Scorcese. If they’ve even heard of Scorcese. These are the same people who describe their PCs as having “two hundred gigs of memory” and should be hurt with un-earthed electrical appliances. Harrumph...

Example: On two documentary projects that are currently running through the pipes here, the chap we’re working with seriously thinks that scripting a show comes just before the edit. Not necessarily his fault if he doesn’t know any better, but where the fuck did he learn to think like that? And why, more worryingly, is he resistant to or suspicious of other ways of working?

And don’t get me started on the BBC’s working practices and guidelines...