Monday, August 4, 2008

First Day of Work

While it was technically my first day of work, we didn't really work. It was more of an orientation day. We were told who are crews were and what we'd be doing. Each crew consists of a camera operator, a camera assistant (me), and a logger. My camera op's name is Lee Cheng Wei, but he goes by Hank. He named himself after Tom Hanks. When I told him that Tom Hanks was one of my favorite actors, he smiled and said "Life is like box of chocolates." It was funny. I like him. Our logger's name is Ada and she's a local Chinese student. I haven't gotten to know either of them very well yet, but they both seem really nice, and they speak pretty decent English which is nice.

We spent an hour or so in the morning getting a presentation on the new P2 HD cams from Panasonic that our camera operators would be using. It was pretty cool. A Japanese guy from Panasonic gave the presentation, and one of the Chinese guys was filming him with a Sony mini-dv cam, and another one of the camera operators looked at him and told him to get rid of the Sony because he might upset the Panasonic guy. He was joking of course. It was more funny in person I guess.

In the afternoon, we went over our assignments and whatnot. My crew is covering archery, tennis, and table tennis during the first week. I'm not real sure what we'll be doing the second week. We'll probably be sent out on random assignments. It's looking like I'll be work around 10-11 hour days and having enough time to still get to the markets and stuff in the evenings. Good deal.

We got done around 2:30pm and a group of us were going to go to the Great Wall, but found out it closes at 5pm and it would probably be useless to try and go at that time, so about 6 or 7 of us went to the Forbidden City instead, and then hit up a food court in one of the malls. After that, we proceeded to ride the subway around looking for a market that Jeremy and Tim had been to once, but failed to find it. Now, I'm just beat. We got some hilarious pics at the Forbidden City (which we saw very little of, so I may have to go back). I'll try to post them soon.

Again, the Chinese workers here are so darn helpful. I love it! They're great.

2 comments:

Romania-eseverns said...

I want to go and hug a chinese person now! Haha. I hope that you have a ton of fun and I can't wait until you get back so that I can hear in person how your trip went! I'll be sure to check out the events that you are helping with :)Praying for you Andy.

Ben Wyman said...

Hey, best of luck, Willis!

When I was in Torino I had lots of conversations with people saying that when they worked with Chinese camera operators, they would always be extremely technically proficient but would never do anything creative outside of what they were ordered to do. If they were a camera op at a golf tournament and you told them "y'know, after the ball lands on the green, you can pull back out and reveal the whole fairway, or reveal the distance between the ball and the hole, whatever you think works depending on what happens," they wouldn't do any of it. But if you ordered them to pull back and get the whole green afterwards, then they'd do it.

Let me know if that's true or not.