Thoughts on Cameras, Beasts, and Babies

My last full day in York, and a bonnie afternoon it was. (That might be an Irish word, but it’s just the one to describe it.) The sun decided to give us a bit of a showing, and for the last part of the afternoon, I was able to take B-roll under something that didn’t feel like a collapsed tent canopy washed gray by too many storms.

I know I shouldn’t make fun of the weather, because if you’re traveling in England, you can expect a little rain. But the effects of this varying climate on the people of York (Yorkmen? Yorkians? Yorkers?) is nothing short of hilarious. I’ve never seen so many consternated people as I did in the city center today, baffled-looking groups of them walking in full sunlight, clutching umbrellas still beaded with rainfall from a few moments before. I saw equally consternated people dressed for an afternoon in Bermuda — practically what the morning forecast promised — running through sudden downpours in the Coney Street shopping district. The kids snowboarding in the area where a ski company had brought several tons of artificial snow for a festival today looked the most bamboozled of all, having been confronted, all in the span of a quarter hour, with weather ranging from warm sunlight to faux-alpine frost.

I’m slowly warming to the idea of being a cameraman. When I first reached Europe, I realized that taking care of an expensive camera was going to be more difficult than I had imagined — downright terrifying at times. I imagine it’s similar to carrying a baby, or conveying the skull of a newly discovered dinosaur from the excavation site. It’s a positive factory of paranoid feelings. For example: not too long ago I was walking with Adam along a dock on the Isle of Man. We were next to an access road to Peel Castle, and I found myself wondering what would happen if one of those cars got too close — just a little too close — and clipped me so I spun and fell ten feet into the water. Forget any damage to my own person. Would I be able to save the camera in time? I pictured myself shrugging out of the backpack in midair and, with a Bruce Willis snarl of exertion, pitching it to safety just as I landed in the grimy-looking water. (A maneuver that might be possible for, say, Jackie Chan, or an exceptionally well-trained wire team working for Industrial Light and Magic.) It wasn’t until I had, in my mind’s eye, climbed dripping to the dock to furious applause and accepted the backpack from Adam that I realized just how implausible — just how implausible — such a situation would have been. Like I said, when you’ve got a camera, it just happens.

But to be honest, this trip wouldn’t have been the same without the documentary aspect, and I’m grateful that I took on the challenge of filming my way across Britain. I’ve always enjoyed taking pictures, and the ability to take video footage — moving photographs, in a sense — has added new depth and dimension to my travels. The more I use the camera, the more I find myself thinking like a cameraman: measuring angles and appraising lighting conditions at a glance, mentally framing everything I see into a rectangular field designed to bring out the very essence of everything it sees. On a more mechanical note, I’m getting better with shots as well: I no longer film horizontal panning shots as though I’m suffering a youthful onset of palsy, and I’ve managed to iron out some annoying little jerks in my zoom shots that turned out (oddly enough) to be my heartbeat wobbling down the length of my finger, and putting a minute but rhythmic “twitch-twitch” into shots designed to be smooth and seamless.

Without a doubt, the three most dangerous enemies of the cameraman are high heels, drunk people and babies. I filmed an interview with a ghost tour guide last night, and for the most part, the audio came out crisp and satisfying — except for thirty seconds of solitary high heels, coming and going, during one of his best segments. Most sounds don’t interfere with the equipment that harshly, but the sensitive boom mic picks up the click of high-heeled shoes with painful clarity, so it sounds less like a slightly tipsy Yorkshire woman is walking past, and more like an old galleon is blasting the walls of a fort with nuclear cannonballs. Speaking of slightly tipsy Yorkshire people, there’s some kind of a derby on in town this weekend, which means that several of my outdoor interviews are punctuated by raucous yelling from distant revelers, and passerby. I’d love to do indoor chats, but the ghost guides (especially the least commercial of them, the ones who have studied up and really know — and love — what they’re talking about) are busy, elusive people who actually tend to have lives, and jobs, during the day.

Let’s get something straight before I talk about the third one I mentioned: I have nothing against babies. They’re the consummation of one person’s love for another person; the perfect expression, bound in flesh, of human devotion. They’re adorably clumsy. Only a truly hard-hearted person can resist smiling when a baby is stumbly-wumbling down the sidewalk, or mostly failing to eat crackers, or making that utterly delighted “Gah!” noise that happens when they come across a dog, or a balloon, or something that squeaks.

The problem with babies for footage is that they will occasionally discover a noise that they like making, and when this happens, they will continue until forcibly halted. I was getting some fantastic footage of a street pianist who really belonged in a concert hall, in my opinion, when over my shoulder, I heard a baby in a stroller making just such a noise. It was making it over and over, a kind of “MmmmmmNAH!” that sounded like a a screen door that creaks for a half second before snapping shut. I looked over several times to try to get the mother’s attention, but she was engaged, rather mysteriously, in debating with a girlfriend the price of one bar of soap over another, a difference of maybe 40 pence. (From my distance, they looked like the same bar of soap.) As my frustration grew, a second voice joined the first — and I realized, to my horror, that the second woman’s baby in the stroller just alongside had picked up the sound of the first one, and was repeating it in a kind of cacophonous infant call-and-response chant:

“MmmmNAH!” (“MmmmmNAH!”). “MmmmmNAH!” (“MmmmmNAH!”)

The pair eventually moved on, having apparently resolved the world-shaking toiletry crisis. In the meantime, a fantastic rendition of “Georgia on My Mind” (can you believe it? What nods I would have gotten, what fond exclamations, to have a Yorkshire street pianist playing a traditional Appalachian tune in the background of my documentary!) has come and gone, forever sullied by an ebullient baby bassline.

Anyway. I digress.

I know this blog, as advertised, deals mostly with Black Dogs and the folklore aspects of my journeys through the U.K. But the task of carrying the camera, and learning its use, has been such an immediate and fascinating part of the trip that I feel compelled to talk about it from time to time, especially because some of the things that I notice because I have it in hand are so absurd, or wonderful, or otherwise noteworthy — and because I probably wouldn’t have even detected them, or comprehended them in the same way, if I were just walking down the street.

I could go on forever about the finer points of being behind a lens, but I want to talk some more about Black Dogs. I’ve found a strange kind of paradox in doing research. Much of the benefit of being over here in the U.K. is having access to resources and materials I can’t get anywhere else. When I met Spalding yesterday, she handed me two folklore books about this area of England, one dated 1903 and the other, 1897. The binding was crumbling, and don’t tell anyone, but I lost a couple of little flecks of it just turning the pages. Amateur folklorists — hardly amateur for their time, but lacking standards by today’s terms — amassed a great deal of lore, much of which has probably faded with the centuries.

It came as a surprise to me that a good deal of information would also come from the ghost tours in various cities, a few of which I’ve already mentioned. It’s worth mentioning that York has more ghost tours, it seems, than stoplights. (With the way people drive around here, that’s only half a jest.) Although some of them are heavily commercial, stamped with “Equity Approved” logos and similar nonsense, boasting costumes and false-vintage reenactment flavor and light on actual storytelling, there are plenty of people who do it for love as well as money. These are the people who have looked in the books — the old books, like Spaldings’ — swapped notes with folklore types and other ghost guides, and know enough about the stories to answer questions without just following a script. You can tell these people by their willingness to tell you even more, long after you expected the well to be dry; it’s as though every story they mention reminds them of another, better one, sure to tickle your fancy. The other kind, by contrast, gets a little edgy when you throw them a question. They’ll look a bit nervous, say they’re no expert, and then (in the case of one man I talked to this evening) pop off to the pub for a swift one before the next group meets in fifteen minutes.

These “real” guides, then, are reliable veins of information waiting to be tapped. They definitely don’t breathe authenticity at first glance, the way the old folklore volumes do; but one can’t judge a book by its cover, if you’ll allow me to abuse the metaphor a little bit. So I find myself pulling simultaneously from very different authorities of knowledge.

And that isn’t to say the common people are left entirely out of the process. In the Isle of Man, I encountered more than one person, several each day in fact, who had heard Black Dog stories from friends, or taken them with their mother’s milk. It raises interesting questions about the authority of storytelling. Just who’s reliable? What lends one story, version, or teller credence over another? These things must, I think, be evaluated on a case-by-case basis. So far, though, it’s safe to say that this trip has, in less than a week, radically changed my thoughts on what makes a story a story. I take that as a sign of resounding success.

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