TribLIVE: “Gaffer”? “Key grip”? “Foley artist”?
As the Academy Awards approach, let's explore the origins of those strange job titles that scroll by during movie credits. We'll get help from Richard Weiner's book “The Skinny about Best Boys, Dollies, Green Rooms, Leads and Other Media Lingo” (Random House, $14.95). Action!
2 comments:
I always find these film articles interesting because I really do know very little about film production and the crews that make them up. I especially like the names for members in the crew, because it give them specific roles as opposed to just ‘backstage crew’ for example. I also find it interesting that all of these titles have ancestral words or titles behind them for their origins. For example, Foley artists, “This job is named for Jack Foley (1891-1967), who pioneered these techniques at the dawn of the “talkies” era in the 1920s” which is a super specific and amazing that one man made an entire profession out of what he liked to do. I would be super interested to see how a film production crew works on the set and maybe see how a film site is laid out as well. Having never seen one (except for those movies about filming movies) I am curious as to how they actually operate and function all together.
Constantly surround by all things theater, I often forget that is this whole other sector of "backstage" television work. To be completely honest, before this article, I had no idea what a "grip" was. I'd heard the term, "best boy," but only in context with the gender-binary-centricity of the film industry. Reading this article, it becomes apparent that while the mediums and the individual terms may be different, the jobs are basically the same. Insert "stage hand" for "grip" and you've got a basic understanding of the job description. Of course, job positions like a focus puller aren't present in a theatrical setting, but you get the point. And I guess this is where "gaff tape" comes from. While this article is relatively simplistic when it comes to job descriptions, it gives a reader like me, who has no real footing in the film and television industry and overall sense of the roles behind the camera.
Post a Comment