Today was the shoot date, we were doing a breast explant and reimplantation with fat grafting, essentially restoring a nice ladies' breast to their former glory using her own fat rather than implants. It is kind of the way of the future in plastic surgery, using the patients own assets rather than implants.

I had engaged a local production company some months ago, they had a great portfolio and my communications with the owner had made me feel very confident in their capabilities. I usually don't get too excited about product names or model numbers of cameras, so when they told me they couldn't find a Cam Mate or Jimmy Jib (jib crane names) in the area but they had an alternate solution, I said I was OK with it.

Well they brought some homemade piece of ***** with worm gears and crank handles, supported by rope and bungee cords. I was pretty disappointed, but willing to give them the benefit of the doubt. As it turned out the s***ejib, as it came to be known, was the least of my worries.

I had them do a site inspection a few weeks ago, and when they were there they had liaised with the head nurse and determined an arrival time of 1000h to be ready for an 1100h start time, as it turned out we didn't start until after 1300h.

Despite having advised them of the need for synchronized time code in the 2 cameras they didn't start to work on that until after the patient was in and sedated and just before the surgeon arrived. Despite the fact they were their own cameras, they didn't know how to sync the TC between the units. The cams were pretty modern Panasonic P2's, full HD, small form factor but oddly most menu items were handled by a small remote control.

At some point as the both the owner and the DP flailed trying to sync the TC, somebody muted the cameras. We had two lav mics, and the receivers mounted to the camera body and plugged into the chassis. From there we had muxed SDI output to a pair of SSD recorders. (My apology if I lost you!).

The surgeon was ready to start, and he's not going to wait for us, nor should he, we had 3 hours to get it right! What makes that the most heartbreaking is we had tested both mics that morning, all the way through test record and opening the resulting video in my NLE on my laptop. Then at the mission critical moment, it fails due to negligence on the part of the operators! Grrrrh!

We end up recording the audio on the second camera's boom mic, a less than ideal solution as it captures everything anyone says, and also prevents us from putting the host and operating surgeon on discreet channels. All in all about the worst CSAPS shoot in my 16 year career working for them.

The shoot starts late and goes long; following the procedure I need to transfer the jib file from the SDI recorder to my laptop. It is about 250 GB, luckily USB 3.0 but still takes about 45 minutes. I don't get out until about 1700h so my plans to go for a city tour are kiboshed.

I spend the evening working on the footage, preparing it to be presented for offlining to the surgeon, synchronizing the 2 cameras is a nightmare as there isn't any audio on the jib camera, and we never got a clapper in to give me a visual cue.

I pop over to a pub across the street for some supper, all attention in the bar is focussed on the TV screens watching Little league Baseball. Those 'mericans love their BB in all forms. I ask one of my fellow patrons seated next to me at the bar who the odds on favorite is and I met with a cab driver like blank stare. So much for the City of Brotherly Love!