People often mention things that bring back lost feelings about friends and family, places and times. For me, this measuring tape is the genuine item. Having used it for the majority of my camera-assisting career during the 1980’s, I didn’t remember squirreling it away, but was nonetheless happy to stumble upon it during a recent clutter-purge.
Holding this little artifact in my hands was similar to hearing a forgotten song from childhood. It would be impossible to list the great characters and experiences that sprang to mind, but they were palpable and sweet. The feel of it was exactly as I remembered, as was the sound it made when reeling the tape back in. I was surprised to see the improvised loop was still intact; apparently, years of dangling from the hook screwed into my front box had no ill effect. It’s a shame that high-res monitors have put an end to the assistant’s use of the tape. They’ll never know what fun it was to run it out to the actor’s eyes. I recall Harrison Ford always guessing his distance from the film plane – and he was usually right! In addition to being the biggest movie star in the world at the time, he was a master carpenter with an excellent eye for measurement.
This common, inanimate object stood witness to an appreciable chunk of my working life. Though the minutiae of that time are lost to the ages, the good stuff remains. If only this Lufkin Hi-Line 50′ Non-Metallic Model 403 could talk…what tales it would tell!
The zen of a 1st ac is something I have always admired. Watching an actor miss their mark and still being accurate AND surviving dailies the next day when everyone got to see your prowess, not for the faint of heart.
Jeff – Like everything else, digital technology has killed a lot of the mystery of the job…
I remember when I started using the measuring tape and being close to the lens to check the distance and the mark. Probably I was one of the last doing this, because just few years later I moved to laser pointers and then wireless follow focus. Now, the few times I still work as AC, I barely get a rehearsal and everyone expect you to be sharp without mark, tape measurement and just look on your wireless monitor and get the shot correctly. The technology moved the shooting to a pace so fast that sometimes I feel we are rushing too much. On film you couldn’t waste too much stock, but now your camera starts rolling minutes earlier just in case, with little preparation before the take.