outsidebroadcast-rigging-bitesize23-videotapedevelopment.mp4

This video is part of a series that shows how riggers placed cables, cameras, microphones and other vital equipment in place at the beginning of an outside broadcast assignment.

This footage was filmed in May 2016 on location at Northop Hall hotel near Hawarden in Flintshire, United Kingdom.

A team of veteran television outside broadcast camera operators, electricians, riggers, sound engineers, producers and production assistants who worked on BBC outside broadcasts in the 1960s and 1970s recreated various aspects of their work.

Their working practices and memories were filmed using fixed miniature cameras and recorded using wireless microphones. The recreations and conversations were free-flowing with occasional questions and interventions from the ADAPT crew.

ADAPT (2013-8) is a European Research Council project at Royal Holloway University of London. The project studies the history of technologies in television, focussing on their everyday use in production activities.

ADAPT examines what technologies were adopted and why; how they worked; and how people worked with them. As well as publishing written accounts, the project carries out 'simulations' that reunite retired equipment with the people who used to use it.

Participants in these simulations explain how each machine worked and how different machines worked together as an 'array'; how they adapted the machines; and how they worked together as teams within the overall production process.