daurril
video productions: choirs of advent 1999
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daurril |
J Austin |
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2001/12/16: As the following text indicates, the COA
production as captured in 1999 was actually unsuitable for playback. In order to make something viewable in the
two hours scheduled, I added almost a full second hour from the
first-generation unedited van tapes of the award-winning COA from
1987. I straddled the hourly-bounded
intermission (10 minutes of each hour) with the following 20 minute commentary:
Hello, my name is Joe Daurril,
and I am the public access producer responsible for the tape you have just seen,
and a dozen others rendered somewhat more professionally over the last
several years. I’d like to take this
opportunity, my first in the new millennium, to tell you a little about my last
program from the century before.
And also to share with you why I do
the series,
from perspectives that are
alternately Christian, democratic, and personal.
This commentary will be followed by
first cut excerpts from the best of Choirs of Advent,
to complete the program to the
nearest half hour.
For those of you who may be taping
this and want to skip the entire commentary on replay,
I can tell you now this section is
___ minutes ____ seconds long.
For those of you who want to go to
the music right now,
I will raise this pencil (again) when
there are exactly ____ minutes remaining.
First I have the following general
program notes:
Twenty one years ago several churches in the town
& country area decided to do their Christmas caroling indoors,
and the sanctuary chosen at first for
those celebrations was that of the local United Methodists.
Then, almost as soon as it was built,
it was hard not to notice that the new Catholic church had the most
seating,
hence the Incarnation
community has consented to host this annual event for more than the last dozen
years.
In addition to Wesley Memorial
and Incarnation,
these events are regularly joined by
the Lutheran Church of Our Savior (who prepare and distribute programs),
by the First Reformed Church,
by the Presbyterian Church in the Pines,
and by St Christopher Episcopal
Church.
Although some of the ministry have
been with this event for a long time,
none of the pastors associated with
the founding event in 1978 are still with it,
and only Incarnation’s Clark Bokor
and Savior’s Gary Griffith continue among its music directors.
Second only to the music directors’
tenure has been the presence, under my direction,
of Public Access to videotape these
Ecumenical Christmas Carol services,
known to us as Choirs of Advent. The origin of that relationship was also
quite simple.
As a then recent convert to the
Incarnation community, and a producer in training at Access,
it seemed only natural in 1987 to
bring my new hobby to my new church.
I have since incidentally taped for
the Diocese and for Sacred Heart in Tampa,
for St Leo’s and the Episcopal
House of Prayer,
and extensively for the School’s
Music Department at Seminole Presbyterian.
But we have been at the
Ecumenical almost every year since
1987,
when that year’s Choirs won 2nd place
in Access’ annual achievement awards ceremony.
One year was missed because there was
no van engineer during that particular December,
and last year’s 20th Anniversary
was lost under circumstances I will explain shortly.
As far as tonight’s program is
concerned,
I could close with some politically
correct blameless assessment of its deficiencies.
These notes would finally allude to
equipment difficulties,
with some reference to the
inexperience of its volunteer crew.
The churches involved would be
gracious enough to accept that, and we may even be invited back again.
But I am reminded of a Producers’
meeting held a few years ago just a couple of blocks from this Access
Center.
Its Secretary and one other member from
the preceding year’s group had one impression of what transpired,
and a majority consisting of
all new members wanted an alternate version, a politically correct
version.
Its not surprising that no one can
now recall the politically correct minutes to that meeting.
But the producers who wanted to tell
the truth at Access were also made to disappear, just like in the real
world.
It is no more of a problem for me now
than it was in 1992 to insist on the telling of uncomfortable
truth.
But this time the alternate guidance
presumably reinforces that compulsion, and comes from James Austin
in his gratuitous response to my
program concerns, when he said “nothing is really lost if we learn by
it.”
I am going to start by telling you
the truth about December 19th which, like any other rendering, always
emanates from a particular perspective.
That perspective is the hypothesis that Public Access in Tampa
does not want to cablecast mainstream religious programs, and the clues
supporting that hypothesis are abundant and readily apparent.
When I submitted my proposal to do
1998’s Choirs,
I tried at that time to obtain a
current copy of the Crew Volunteers list similar to what I had used
every preceding year.
The receptionist told me, and the
Access manager confirmed, that the computer’s copy of that list
was inadvertently destroyed by Time
Warner (who apparently destroyed any remaining hard copies of it as
well).
Asking about plans for
reconstruction, I was told people just didn’t want to be on that list any more
anyway.
The receptionist did provide me a handwritten
list of about 4 names, and that was the end of that.
Surprisingly, I was able to recruit
two cameramen from the year before.
The fourth on the list also seemed
willing to do it, though he was short
on prior experience.
But when I called the studio the
night before the scheduled event to do the final planning,
I was told that the main van engineer
would not be available for the shoot.
I was aware that other Center
personnel could run the van and they might even know of additional crew:
Henterlong agreed to ask while I
waited on the phone.
The answer, with no further
explanation, was finally that the van
would not be available to me in 1998.
I mentioned that this was to be a
celebration of the event’s twentieth year and that the participants would be
disappointed, but he persisted instead (and here I use imagery familiar even to
WB Kid’s programming)
persisted instead on wiping his
ass with my proposal.
And I would say that certainly
constitutes not wanting to do the program,
and I would say further that COA is
about as mainstream a religious program as you are libel to find anywhere.
So all we have of that anniversary
celebration
is a single super8 recording
made by the natives, which has not been aired because I do not have a
super8 player.
For last year’s program (the one
currently of interest)
I was far more conspicuous in advertising
my intent to tape the 21st Annual Ecumenical service.
I used Access resources not
generally advertised to capture stills for these two posters,
which I created at home on my own
equipment.
The one advertises my additional
contribution to the Christmas season at Access:
it is for cablecasting again this
year the University of Tampa’s 1990 Christmas appearance at Sacred
Heart Church.
The other is both an announcement
of and a recruiting poster for the 1999 Choirs of Advent.
The actual words of
recruitment are interesting.
I suppose not a few of the audience
to this bore strong allegiance to the Extravaganza:
I was not worried about losing
them. I did hope that someone from Joe
Ramsey’s group might volunteer,
but they all declined. Staff (not management) did eventually
produce one volunteer,
so I went forward with just as much
crew as I proposed the year before: four volunteers including myself.
This should have made for some
semblance of a successful shoot, but it did not.
The van arrived at the site late on
the 19th.
It was a Sunday, when the entire
Access Center is a spare parts box for James Austin,
and yet he arrived with insufficient
parts for two of the four cameras that were to be used that
night.
Then in his role as Access staff, he
assigned tasks to me requiring knowledge
of which he had been the sole
custodian on all previous COA shoots.
That night suddenly he remembers nothing,
particularly on where exactly to get
the audio line feed which usually holds the program together.
So I now have to find music directors
in rehearsal to re-obtain this old knowledge.
When I do get Clark Bokor to
the Church’s sound board, we seem to have the wrong end of the audio cable
there.
I take that end back down, and Austin
detains me at the van while Clark disappears.
Eventually Gary Griffith will
come by, and lets me know that he has established the line feed.
In addition to helping with the
sound, the principal crew position I have assigned to myself is technical
director, which means once the program begins I cannot leave the van. But I cannot start recording until all the
equipment is phased in, and that is at least still one of the jobs Austin
reserves to himself. So the program
starts without us. When Austin finally
turns the van over to me, he mentions (in very few words) that this was
not going to be a very successful shoot.
As if to underscore that, he left
without turning on the SVHS backup, which omission I, never having done
it,
did not notice.
Of course you know already that
somehow the line feed disappeared.
And I had no communication
with my cameras for the first 10 minutes of the program.
When it came time to switch in the
second tape,
I did not anticipate the modification
to tape deck behavior when an edit controller happens to still be
attached.
So both recording decks were stopped
and I had no idea how to get out of that until Austin showed up.
It was, for those of you old enough
to remember 60’s radio skits, for me like the story about the man who,
after several iterations of trying to
get a load of bricks to the roof, finally lost his presence of
mind.
This is the point where I lost the
first half of Incarnation’s anthem,
and I would later learn that the second
tape which would later be our only recording, was not getting sound.
So we have the program you finally
saw tonight. I have tried to get some objective
assessment from James, and all I get is pedagogical defense,
basically that I did not anticipate
enough setup time for a crew with so little van experience.
Yet in viewing this program, I think
that once set up, with communication,
this is the best camera work I’ve see
in the twelve years of this annual production.
What I also see is that a van arriving
late reduces however little setup time there may have been.
Some issue was raised that I had a
fourth operator when I said, exactly, that “there probably wouldn’t” be
one.
Does that categorically mean
that on a Sunday the van engineer shouldn’t carry
the small amount of extra gear that
would modify the fourth camera he already carried for use by a human
operator?
That in fact his fourth camera did
not even carry its assigned configuration for remote operation.
He also does not seem to understand
that this is not a rock and roll concert: handheld equipment
is neither desired nor appreciated: I
don’t want it, the operator didn’t want it, and the program doesn’t want
it.
I was also told that I should have gone
out to Incarnation earlier and established the location of our line
feed.
Now I find it patently absurd that we
could not gather and implement that knowledge the same night as the shoot; or
I could have done it earlier if I had
any idea James would divest himself of all his previously assumed
responsibilities.
I am more concerned about the detracting
presence of console equipment which
should not have been there,
like an edit controller which
expected one of the two designated record decks to be used for playing
tape.
Granted all forms of tardiness,
by van and crew, setup was in full progress by 6 PM. I am told by James that the finest and most
experienced crew could not set up in the time I allotted for this, which is
conservatively an hour and a half.
Now we are talking about setting up
just three cameras and two microphones on a ground floor, with no extra
lighting.
Yet with all this work easily done in
the first hour, we seem to have the van engineer totally
lost in the sound booth for the
next and final half hour, playing with that
single fourth camera.
While the engineering duties, that
are his principal and exclusive responsibility, go blissfully unattended.
I think Mr Austin has on this shoot
completely abandoned that role as a facilitator that won for him over
the years
so much affection by the producing
community. He has elected instead to
be totally obstructive: to come up empty on equipment, to magnify every
operational imperfection, to remedy nothing, and to always be in every wrong
place.
But as he is also a company man, I
sincerely doubt that he descended to this performance by his own decision.
So nothing is lost if we learn by
it: and what I think I’ve learned is that while Access did roll the van for
Choirs in 1999,
James was not expected to
return with much more program than in he got in 1998, which was no program at
all.
I believe Access is manifestly
anti-religion, either because it finds religion per se threatening to its community,
or because it actively seeks to
develop ideals of truth not
ordinarily professed by the American experiment.
Of course, I may also be given this
impression because Henterlong has applied what I call “judgmental
opportunism”
to me on a personal level. So his extra motivation for getting
rid of the Church is incidentally to be rid of Joe Daurril.
But let him hope that he has not
misconstrued the intent of his management and the County and the City.
Else he is more likely to enjoy the
reward of full unemployment before he gets to enjoy the loss of me.
Your comments on any of these constructions are welcome. You may email me at [email protected].