“The Amazing Race” has been setting up elaborate scavenger hunts around the world for nearly 25 years now, but viewers don’t know the half of it.
“It’s hard to actually portray how complicated it is on television,” director of photography Joshua Gitersonke told TheWrap of the long-running reality series, whose recently aired Season 37 has been nominated for six Emmys. “The show is based on the relationships, how hard it is for the contestants to get from place to place and do the events and deal with other teams. But it doesn’t really show that the camera and sound teams are doing basically everything that the contestants are doing while also shooting a television show, making sure that they don’t get run over by a taxi or run over by a bus in a random country, keeping themselves safe as they run through a city.”
Quite deliberately, camera crews are rotated amongst the contestants as they travel across the globe as their numbers are narrowed down from 14 two-person teams to one winning pair.
“Every episode, the teams will have a new camera and sound team,” Gitersonke said. “It’s only toward the end of the race, where once they’ve gone through all of the camera people, that they will again see a crew that they’ve run with. I do my best to make it as fair as possible. You’d be amazed to see how, in real life, what the camera and sound people are doing — they’re running with 50 pounds of gear, split between the camera and sound person.”
Gitersonke, who joined the CBS reality series as a camera operator in 2010’s
Season 17, has served as DP since Season 30. “I know exactly what everybody’s
going through,” he said. “While it’s an amazing, visceral experience, it’s still a
pretty difficult one. The people working on the show are like very high-level athletes as well as great cinematographers, because you have to be both to follow a real race around the world, up hills and down hills, through cities. The show has
complete trust, since the cinematographers are following, essentially, by them-
selves from place to place. The show transforms from a single-camera, documen-
tary-style show to a multi-cam show minute by minute. Wherever they’re going,
everybody has to be really good at knowing when other people are around.”
One constant in the operators’ tool bag is the show’s classic zoom-in shot that
occurs when a team makes a costly error along the way, and the camera points
out their mistake without alerting the contestants. “We are pretty good about
panning to things when they’re not paying attention,” Gitersonke said. “You
only have limited time to get the mistake or shoot them running by something
and then also panning up to the sign that says they should have run the other
way. I don’t believe I’ve ever known any contestant who really paid attention to
the camera people. They are in blinders, they don’t pay attention to what we’re
doing most of the time, but everybody does try to time those things so that
they’re not telegraphing what the contestants need to do.”
For Season 37, the 14 teams raced more than 29,000 miles through 10 countries across three continents, careful to follow each country’s laws and customs. “All of the crews work on the idea of respecting the country we’re in,” Gitersonke said. “Most of us wear lightweight pants and shirts with sleeves, so we’re not running around with shorts and a T-shirt if the event happens in a mosque or a church or a federal building or something like that. Everybody looks respectable.”
And after working on “TAR” for 15 years, the DP admitted it’s impossible to
pick a favorite locale. “With ‘The Amazing Race,’ you could be in the most innocuous country and end up seeing the most interesting thing,” he said. “We go to places where a regular vacation wouldn’t take you, or where you wouldn’t go if
you were a tourist. I always tell the contestants that it’s the best vacation you
can’t pay for.”
This story first ran in the Down to the Wire Comedy issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine. Read more from the Down to the Wire Comedy issue here.
