Hauntings and Honkey Tonks
Let's go out on a high note.
This is part two of my experience capturing footage for a reality show that featured a well-known country artist. Be sure to read the first part of the story and then come back here.
Here’s part one:
Big Stumps and Fat Stacks
It had taken me a while to find the house, since it was tucked away down a very long drive on an impressive amount of acreage. This was the pre-smartphone era, where n…
Now, on to this week’s conclusion…
It was dusk as I drove back up the long dirt road leading to the house. The sun was below the horizon but its fading light still provided the evening sky with faint glow. I was returning from town where I had ordered a fast food dinner and ate it by myself while seated in a sparsely populated mall food court.
Those quiet moments are the times in life when we get to reflect on our life and our choices. And I was no different. This gig wasn’t at all what I had expected, but at least I was still getting paid. Still, the introspective self-doubting questions rose up in my mind.
What am I doing here?
Is this all there is for me?
Will my business ever take off and hit its stride?
I thought my career would be in a much different place at this particular point. My goal had always been to build up a small-but-mighty production company with a team of about 4-6, creating long-form videos and commercials for agency clients, non-profits, and small businesses.
But here I was, still working solo, scraping by as best I could, persisting in the pursuit of a vision that always seemed just beyond my reach.
I entered the house and everything was just as quiet and still as when I left two hours earlier. I climbed the staircase up to my room and tried to settle in for the night. There wasn’t much to do, however. Without a TV and in an era before smartphones, my options were limited. Of course I really didn’t feel like doing much anyway, so I turned off the light and went to sleep.
It was in the middle of the night when the noises woke me up. The house was dark but now it was alive with noises of activity. Footsteps. Loud footsteps, running up and down the hall on the hardwood floors. It was a kid. Then I heard muffled voices.
What was a little kid doing up at this hour?
On the one hand, I knew that I wasn’t being haunted. But on the other hand, I didn’t want to roll the dice and actually step out into the hallway to find out. And even if there weren’t really any ghosts wandering the halls, I wasn’t 100% sure that anyone in the country music singer’s family actually knew I was there. The last thing I wanted at 3am was an awkward conversation where I tried to explain who I was and why I was there. So, I stayed put and hoped the noises would die down so I could get back to sleep.
At some point I drifted off and was able to get some sleep. I awoke the next morning to find that my situation wasn’t much different than the previous day. The main star of the show was still down with a back injury, but I was able to make the best of it by interviewing her kids and documenting their day.
It wasn’t until the latter half of my stay that I actually met the star. She was finally feeling well enough to get back into her routine, which included a live concert at a downtown honkey tonk venue. So, on what was to be my gig’s last night, I got the chance to ride along with her, her family, and her entourage on her private tour bus to the concert while documenting the entire evening. And even though I don’t listen to country music, I had a pretty good time.
I drove home the following day with an overall positive feeling about the job. Yes it was strange, it was solitary. It was confusing and sometimes a bit creepy, but it had ended on a high note.
So what lessons did I learn?
Well, first it’s important to properly vet any job before you take it. Yes I had done work for this particular producer before, so in my naiveté I had assumed that this shoot would be just as straightforward as the last. Youthfulness and overall inexperience breeds an overeagerness that can come back to bite you. Don’t be too quick to say yes. Learn everything you can before committing to the work.
Self motivation is always a plus. When I first arrived on location and realized that the main star was unavailable and that there wasn’t anything going on, it definitely caught me off guard. “Uh, how can I shoot footage for a reality show when there’s no reality to document?” But on the second day I started to get my feet firmly underneath me. I had no real direction from the Producer. There had been no shot list, no schedule. The whole thing was very loose, so I had to take some initiative and figure things out as I went along.
Live to fight another day. Sometimes the best part about a job is not the quality or content of the job, but the sole fact that it’s a paying job. Will you ever want to put it in your portfolio? Probably not, but it provides some money in your pocket so that you can pay your bills and keep working toward the kind of work you really want. Plus, you’ll probably make some connections along the way that will increase the reach of your network and help you out in the future.
Take everything in stride. Things won’t go according to plan. You will get derailed. You will get jobs that make no sense; jobs that are frustrating; jobs that you probably will want to forget years from now, but sometimes you just have to shrug and say “It is what it is,” and do your best to work through it. Trying to find the positives in whatever circumstance you find yourself isn’t a bad way to live.
Bonus lesson…
Keep your door locked whenever you find yourself staying in an eerily quiet house full of strangers behind closed doors who only come out at night.