Very Long Entry
It’s 9:50 in Pragelato, Italy, and I am exhausted. It seems like a month ago that I was relaxing in Venice, and about three years since I last enjoyed a Cozy Burger. That said, while I miss my home(s), I am in the midst of the most exciting opportunities. More importantly, the experience is showing me how blessed I truly am, and opening my eyes to the 99% of the world that most Americans never get to see.
I’m a little upset that I haven’t written for so long, because I have so much to catch up on. Namely, everything that has to do with my job here. I may have to glaze over some details, but I hope to convey just a bit of the excitement that’s building here.
Monday
If you’re looking for a lot of excitement, you can skip this day. Looking back, it was the day I met everybody, which has now became one of the best parts of my time here: the people I work with. As you know, I am working at Pragelato Plan, the cross-country skiing venue. I have learned that the Finnish are some of the world’s greatest cross-country skiers (and have been assured many times that they will be bringing home at least the first two gold medals). As such, they are also the world’s greatest cross-country TV producers. 80% of our cameras our from YLE, the Finnish television network hired by TOBO to produce the games. They are working with the Swedish, who are also experts in this sport, and have brought about 20% of our cameras. There are two production trucks, one Swedish and one Finnish, and together they will produce the multilateral signal from the venue.
On Monday, I met many of the Finnish, as well as a few more of my colleagues (sometimes European words sound so much nicer than American words, like coworkers). Unfortunately we were all rather helpless the entire day, because many of the scaffolding platforms had not been completed, and it was impossible to build cameras on them. My first hour working for TOBO was spent in a catering tent, sipping coffee. We were told we could just relax there, but I had gotten pretty tired of sitting, so I decided to walk around. Apparently, some of the Finnish camera crew were able to begin setting up the cameras that were not on platforms. I began my real work by loading up a van with expensive metal boxes.
Oh, I almost forgot, there are two snowmobiles used by the camera crews, for Steadicam shots of athletes. For this, they brought in two Norwegian snowmobiles and drivers, who are extremely nice, and somehow seem like the Norwegian version of a NASCAR fanatic.
Anyway, Monday was pretty boring, and we played the waiting game for so long that all of the different places that I waited blurred together.
Tuesday
There was still plenty of waiting on Tuesday, but I was learning a lot about how things work, and how to be more efficient and where the places were that needed assistance. I started the morning by riding out on a snowmobile with the Finnish jib operator Geitte (I’m taking guesses at spelling with all names). For my less-nerdy friends, a jib is kind of like a see-saw, but one side is a lot longer and has a camera on the end of it. The opposite side contains a monitor, joysticks and lots of controls. The whole thing is balanced so that it is easy to swing a 200-lb. crane as fast as a skier flies down a hill. I helped Geitte to set up the camera, move around some boxes, and prepare her camera. I also helped to make sure that the camera would never get close enough to the athletes to hit them (although it is quite close).
Speaking of weights and distances, thank you very much for making me look like a complete idiot to the rest of the world. You don’t realize how often you describe how large, heavy, long, hot, cold, or short something is, until you realize that absolutely nobody uses the English measurement system. Distance is somewhat easy to convert in your head, but it’s frustrating to pause for a few seconds when you’re trying to quickly communicate how far things are. If I told you that somebody was 500 meters away, how long would it take you to figure that out?
Anyway, after things got going though, I didn’t have much to do. We did a fax, where each camera position is checked, and the operator shows the director some of the shots they can get. When this was over, it was lunchtime.
Lunch is in our catering tent, which is large enough to hold all one hundred (or so) TOBO production employees. While it is still outdoor catering, it is remarkably good, with several choices of decent food. We have all worked very hard and eat a lot, taking plenty of time to get back to work. Oh, forgot to mention that we started at 8:00am.
After lunch, I went with Giette, and two others to move this jib (the see-saw part is 8 meters long… you do the math). It’s quite a large contraption, and we had to move it 600 meters downhill, by snowmobile of course, but this still took four trips. After it was moved, I stayed with the two other employees to “help” set it up. I say this, because I contributed about 10% of the effort. The two other workers were the new Finnish operator, Juha (another guess; it’s pronounced ‘eeyo-ha’), and a German technical assistant, Mikael. Unfortunately for me, they both spoke German fluently, and like most here, their English was not as strong, so much of their communication in setting up was impossible for me to understand.
Even if I had been able to understand nothing, I still learned a lot from watching them set up, and it was great to watch their German efficiency firsthand (everybody here speaks very highly of this). They were both very kind in helping me understand how the jib is put together; it’s a pretty complex device, with several pulleys, many support cables, and a whole bunch of wires. Also, in moving it to the new location, we converted it to a 12 meter jib, which is very long. Over 120 kg of weights were used to balance it; again, enjoy the math, especially with a computer next to you. Oh, and the German word for those little clips that rock climbers use is “shenkle.”
Building the jib took a little over an hour, and then they went through the same fax procedure of testing the cameras. Although Juha was supposed to be the camera operator, a jib is rather complex, especially a long one, especially in uneven terrain, especially with fast-moving athletes. For this reason, they tried something that I’d never seen done before, and they had Mikael move the actual jib (elevation and rotation), while Juha operated the camera (pan, tilt, focus and zoom). This meant Juha would hold two joysticks in his hand, while walking with Mikael around the jib. This really isn’t sounding as cool when written down, but it produced some amazing shots. Since Mikael didn’t have to watch the monitor, he was able to watch the camera end of the jib, letting the camera glide just a few 2.54 centimeters above the snow. We were in a great location where the skiers go over a bridge and down a hill, and I’m sure this shot will be used many times, with beautiful results.
I helped them to pack up and stow the camera, and we left the venue around 5:30.
Wednesday
Like I said, each day has been getting more exciting, and today was great. I was a little worried at first, because I had walked around for about a half hour, looking for things to do, and none of my three supervisors had anything for me. I finally found some of the Italian students who had been waiting by another scaffolding platform, which was still under construction and so they could not do the rigging that was needed. I walked with them back to the “specialty equipment” room, which feels like the secret laboratory of our compound. Here I met another Finnish camera operator who was preparing to leave for his post, and his name was also Juha (it’s like the ‘John’ of Finland). He said he could gladly use an assistant, and I learned that he was a wireless camera operator. He uses a unique rigging device for his camera that is rather hard to describe, and I’ll have to wait for the picture of it. If you’re eager to research it, look for EZ-rig, made in Sweden.
Juha was perhaps the most understanding towards my anxious-to-help-looking-for-things-to-do-intern predicament, and was very willing to give me as much of a chance to be involved as possible. This is pretty hard, since a lot of the camera operators have to sit around waiting as much as I do. His task is to get close-ups of the athletes at the start and finish lines, especially before and after the races, to capture as much emotion as possible. He walks around in the big clusters of athletes and gets those types of shots. My job is to standby with extra batteries and to act as a spotter should he need anything. This will be especially important during the races, to help him identify athletes as they cross the finish line. In cross-country skiing, most of the races have staggered starts, so the first-place winner could be finishing fifth.
The exciting part is that I’ll be able to get a headset to communicate with him (and the one other wireless operator). During the downtime of the fax, he lead me practice with the camera, which has the absolute latest wireless technology, which actually works two-ways, allowing a controller back in the production trailer to adjust his exposure, giving him one less thing to worry about. The camera has literally identical controls to the cameras I have used in the past, although this one costs ten times as much (more with all of the wireless attachments), and is high-definition.
After all of the rehearsals, just before lunch, he gave me the entire rig (which goes on like a backpack), and handed me the camera to take back to the compound. While this is of course a very menial task, I was quite honored that he trusted me with a $30,000 camera, and that he was going out of his way to get me involved. As I began to walk back to the production compound from the stadium (it’s a five-minute walk, over some temporary bridges), he ran up and offered to take my picture and e-mail it to me as a souvenir. I made my way back to the compound, literally walking on ice the entire way, nervously carrying the 30-lb. camera. Five minutes after I had packed it and started charging all of the batteries, Juha walked in with my backpack, which I had to leave behind at the venue, because of the rigging equipment. It sounds like I’ll be working with him most of the time for the rest of the Olympics. He operates a fixed camera for one of the events, but is on the handheld the rest of the time.
I’ve been writing a lot about the specific production opportunities I’ve had, because I think that’s what will interest most of the people at home, but let me just write a few things about the people here. Everyone is extremely kind and great to talk to. As you’ve probably gathered, we have a lot of downtime waiting for other things to happen, and during this time, I’ve been able to meet and learn about a lot of great people. Juha has two children, three and seven years old, and his wife is at home, both working part-time and raising their kids. To make up for the month that he will be spending here in Italy, he bought her a Christmas present of a two-week trip to Dallas (where she grew up) and Mexico. They’ll be leaving for that a few days after he gets home.
There is yet another Juha from Finland who speaks excellent English, and who I could tell was an interesting guy before I even talked to him. During several of our waiting periods, I got to know him, and he talked for several hours about Finland. I can give you a rather detailed history of Finland, starting over a hundred years ago, and this is from several people, not just Juha. He told me about his summer cottage, how he hand-makes a fishing lure every night here in his hotel room, how you can drink the water directly from the lakes in Finland, and how he has two saunas at his house and two saunas at his summer cottage.
There have been dozens of other people that I have gotten to know really well in the course of three days, and I don’t mean on a cursory level either. I think it’s much more satisfying to learn a lot about someone than to talk about the weather with several dozen people. Perhaps it’s because everybody is from such different places and everybody wants to hear another’s story. There’s Tommy my roommate whose father is Irish, mother is American, grew up in Torino, and moved to Edinburgh when he was 19. There are the absolutely hilarious CCU operators (they call them vision monitors here) from London, who make the hour lunchtime go by so quickly, today with their intent desire to learn Italian from the “15-minute Italian” pocket guide.
I want to write so much more: I haven’t even discussed the absolute craze of languages here. The crew speaks Finnish to each other, and the production is in Finnish, many have to speak Swedish to some of the operators in the trucks, the Germans who assembled the jib, two French students, and everybody else who speaks Italian. And absolutely NOBODY who speaks Spanish, although that may be just as well for now.
It’s almost 12:30, and we start again tomorrow at 8:00. The bright sun and cold wind really take a lot out of you, and I know I’m just expending a lot of energy. To any Asburians who haven’t left yet: bring plenty of chap-stick and skin cream. I can’t wait to write some more, and I’m sure tomorrow holds even more than I expect. I got some pictures today, but I’m too tired to upload them now. Thank you all for the e-mails, it means so much to hear from home, Kevin is the only other person at our venue from the United States, and it’s still my favorite country. Buona sera and goodnight!