BostonVideoCrews.com
Title
Boston Video Crews
Description
Excerpted from the website:
- Boston Video Crews. Three award winning freelance television photographers with a passion to make your product better. Our resumes are diverse and substantial. Each of us shoots consistently for America's best-known, most respected news, documentary and syndicated programs including CBS News 60 Minutes and 48 Hours, ABC News 20/20, The Daily Show, Frontline, NOVA Science Now, Dateline NBC and OPRAH! We have extensive experience with foreign networks like ARD and The BBC. We work with a hand picked roster of audio techs, gaffers, grips and production assistants.
Languages
English
Most people don't really think about how television news programs get made. Viewers assume that the American news networks, ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN and others, have their own crews out in the field shooting the reports that comprise the nightly news broadcasts. While it is true that the networks have some photographers on staff, by and large, the news is photographed by freelancers who work on a per diem basis for the networks.
In the late 1980s when Jack Welch ran GE, NBC's parent company, in a move to save operating costs, many employees at NBC were laid off or offered buy-out packages. Some of the younger technical workers, the photographers and audio engineers, used that small windfall to purchase equipment. They, in turn, began offering their services back to NBC on a daily hire basis. Freelancing had been a smaller part of the networks' labor pool up until that time. However, the advent of the 1990s brought a number of changes that moved freelancers to the fore.
The two most important dynamics of the freelance labor shift at the American networks were 1. the change in television camera technology from tube-based cameras to CCDs and 2. the ascention of the news magazine format. Prior to the late 1980s, television cameras produced an image using vacuum tubes. They were large, heavy and balky and required significant amounts of light to produce useable images indoors. With the introduction of the CCD, the charge-coupled device, as a replacement for the larger cathode ray pick-up tube, television cameras immediately became smaller and more sensitive in lower light. The size of a typical television camera was reduced in half. By the end of the 1980s, two companies, Sony and Ikegami, were mass producing lighter weight Betacam cameras that had built in videotape recorders. Now a television photographer could shed the bulky two-piece system (camera and external VTR) and capture footage with much greater freedom. Audio engineers, who had formerly carried the video recorder tethered to the photographer in the field, were freed up to use small portable audio mixers with multpile wireless microphones.
