Cutting the crew down to one: how Marcus learned to shoot his own reports

Marcus came to us in the early weeks of autumn. He had spent years writing for a regional programme, working with a camera operator who handled everything he did not want to think about. Then the crew was reduced, and he was told that from the next month he would film, record and present his own items. He was not worried about the journalism. He was worried about the bag: a compact camera, a tripod he had never fully opened, two microphones and a phone mount he had been given with no instructions.

He phoned and described the problem plainly. His last attempt at a solo piece had taken him three hours to set up, and the interview audio had been unusable because the wind had found the microphone. He needed to be able to arrive, set up and be recording within a quarter of an hour, and to trust what he had recorded before leaving the location.

I arranged the first session around his own kit, not a list of things he ought to buy. We laid everything on a table and went through it piece by piece, asking one question of each item: does this earn its place on a single-person shoot? The second microphone, a heavy shotgun that needed a stand he did not own, stayed in the cupboard. A small clip-on lavalier and a handheld stick microphone stayed.

Marcus found this reassuring. Much of his anxiety came from the feeling that he was missing equipment. In fact he had too much of it, and none of it was arranged in the order he would need it. We packed the bag again so that the tripod, camera and primary microphone came out first and the spares sat underneath.

• Keep one main microphone and one backup, not four
• Pack in the order you will use things
• Label cables so nothing is guessed at under pressure

The hardest habit to break was framing by eye alone. When you are the interviewer and the operator, you cannot watch the monitor while you ask a question. We spent the second session on a fixed routine: set the tripod height to the guest's eye line, lock a medium close-up, then stand in the chair yourself and check the picture before inviting the guest to sit.

We also practised the standing piece to camera. Marcus tended to drift out of frame as he walked into his words, so we marked a spot on the floor with tape and rehearsed delivering a short line without looking down. It sounds basic, but it removed an entire category of retakes. By the end he could frame, check focus and exposure and start recording in a little under ten minutes.

Wind had ruined his previous attempt, so we gave audio proper time. Priority one was getting the microphone close to the speaker: a lavalier clipped to the guest's collar, a stick microphone held low for a quick street question, and headphones worn at all times so that he heard exactly what the camera heard.

We took the bag outside on a breezy afternoon and recorded the same answer four ways, with a foam cover, with a furry windshield, with the guest turned away from the gusts and with none of these. Listening back together made the point better than any explanation. Marcus now carries a small windshield in his jacket pocket and checks a few seconds of playback before every interview ends.

• Wear headphones from the first test word to the last
• Record ten seconds of room tone before leaving
• Listen back to the opening of every interview

By the third session we stopped teaching techniques and started building a sequence he could run on autopilot. Arrive and walk the location. Choose a background and check what is behind the guest. Set the tripod, then the camera, then the sound. Test, play back, adjust. Record the interview, then the cutaways: hands, details, the wider scene. Check the card before packing up.

We wrote the sequence on a single card that fits in the camera bag. Marcus laughed at it at first. Two weeks later he told me he had stopped looking at the card because he no longer needed it, though he kept it in the pocket anyway. That is the outcome we aim for: a routine that fades into habit.

His first solo item after the coaching was a short report from a flooded car park, filmed in light rain. He arrived, set up, and recorded the interview, the cutaways and his piece to camera in about forty minutes on site. The audio was clean and the framing held steady. He sent me the rough cut, not to be praised but to ask whether his cutaways were long enough, which told me he had moved on to thinking about the story.

He still finds solo filming tiring, and he says so. But the bag no longer feels like a puzzle, and he has started suggesting shoots he would previously have declined because they needed a crew.