Life in Video Village

Video Village. It's the place on a film set designated for video monitors. It's the place where the director, producer, script supervisor, art director, and other crew members watch what is being filmed. It has to be in a location close enough to the camera because of all the cords needed to achieve video feed.

Watching the monitor is a helpful tool... for various reasons. Like checking to see if the boom is in the shot. As you can see, our boom operator (the striped shirt in the photo below) had to boom this shot from below.

This is the view from our location in Video Village.
Our prison set for Under Jakob's Ladder basically consisted of two rooms. When we were filming in one room, we set up Video Village in the other room. (Switching rooms was a bit of a headache, but that's another story!)

Sometimes, as it happened in this scene, Video Village ended up being right in the same room as the actors being filmed.

Here's what the camera saw. (Left to right: Quentin McCuiston [Yasha], Matthew R. Staley [Karl], and Jeff Stewart [Jakob].)
It was an odd feeling to watch the actors on the monitor when, in fact, we could have just turned our heads to see them!