In the first week, the class decided on doing a quickly set Aerobics show. For this show, I had the pleasure of commanding from the studio room as Director. As a student, I see directing as a potential career path especially as its my biggest interest in film. This means I was right in my comfort-zone. Before, I have had the role 4 or 5 times before so it felt fairly familiar, and I knew where to start and finish the equipment organisation (i.e. blocking, audio set, cameras checked for batteries and composed and then finally lighting.)
The show, as stated above, was aerobics which required a certainly amount of blocking required for the talent to be able to put on a decent 5 minute show that wasn't seen to be completely disorganised. The show has 3 people, 1 aerobic instructor and 2 random guests that attended the instructor in various physical activities.
For a aerobics show there are certain conventions, and I will be studying in split categories depending on the research taken. These are; Primary or Secondary research.
Week 2: Casting in News show - News
The second week was a vast change from the directing I had done on the previous week. This time, I was playing the guest for a news-styled show. Being centred as the cast isn't my strongest play to make, which is why I decided to do it for the 2nd week in. The role is fairly simple though, it only involved sitting down and talking about the relevant information that was either in front of us or from memory. The hardest part was probably attempting to endure the burning light that was almost blinding.
The production was quite slow, this meant my experience as the cast was quite tedious. The majority of the time, it was just sitting there waiting for cameras to be wired, microphones to be set, etc and by the time we had to give our performance we had become slightly bored.
Week 3: Vision Mixing in a Quiz show
In this week, I was offered the opportunity to be a vision mixer in the studio. It was great having a headset whilst the rest of the team got all sorted and I gave feedback to the camera crew on composition, exposure and other requirements. Though, this was the week when one of the cameras mysteriously became grainy and no one knew why, so that as a technicality was an annoyance as it had a massive effect on the overall show.
Furthermore, I learned alot from my experience, even how to chroma key which was good, though with the fault in the lights the end result wasn't great so we ditched it for the next week.
Week 4: Vision Mixing and Light operation - Quiz show
One week later, I was stuck on vision mixing again but saw the opportunity to also do lights as no one seemed to be doing them. So I took the initiative and set all the lights and even some cameras up because they was framed wrong, and off centre. So after all the lights were set and the gels were placed, we decided to give chroma key another chance with a tester background, and though it wasn't perfect, for a second attempt it wasn't too bad at all. One of the problems we had was the cast were wearing blue, and blue on a blue screen doesn't work well. You just result with a floating head and a pair of legs.
Though the lights were all functional, we managed to get a light operational but manually and wasn't controllable from the studio its self, so we just went with the flow. This week was productive for some of us, but eventually became a pain because people weren't doing their jobs properly and began to procrastinate. Eventually the very few that were doing stuff, including myself, got very tiresome and just went for rehearsals as it was visually as best as we were able to achieve (given the time).
We decided not to do rehearsals due to lack of time.
Week 5: Camera Operator
This was the next rehearsal for James' quiz show. In this show, I volunteered myself to go on camera, as its one of the fewer places I haven't been but I'm also quite confident with them just a tad rusty. After a couple of minutes with familiarising myself with the set up, I went onto framing, and ensured everyone had nice composition. Then went white balance, in which I decided to set manually by zooming in on a white crew card with the tungsten lights to ensure I got the right colour temperature and this was a pain due to communication issues with the light people as they were also testing. Eventually, I got an accurate colour temperature of 3100 kelvin on 2 cameras and 3000 on the 3rd (which didn't make a difference at all). So, once they had all been white balanced, and ensured everyone had their framing, I got the other operators to set an aperture of f/2.8 and then I added the 1 ND filter on top to bring exposure down.
Whilst the cameras were set, I went to into the studio to explain that its bad to blast too much last a people, especially when it hasn't been diffused at all. The skin tones, especially on paler people becomes way too light due to harsh lighting and looks horrid on cameras.
For my final quiz show, I will be bringing in diffusion to place on certain lights.
Week 6: Camera Operator - Brenan's Quiz show
In this week, I took the position of Camera Operator once more. When we began setting up, I straight away pulled each camera into position, wired them up, and then checked batteries. Each week, we have a continuous issue with battery power. They are never charged and its a very tedious process to do when battling that of battery power. One by one, we set each camera's composition, exposure, white balance and then focus. This isnt a very long task, through-out the lesson, I do have to keep checking on them because people like to touch cameras for some reason, meaning they slightly move. Other then that, to ensure I have work to do, I continue to concentrate on lighting. Luckily, I set all the cameras exposure, and I study a lot of cinematography, so I have an idea of where each light should go.
A common mistake students make with lighting is that they blast it to 100%. With diffusion it would be okay because it would soften the light on making skin tones glare less but they don't have any diffusion so our only resort would be to set lights from 20-50%.
Week 7: Camera Operator - Social Swap
My role in this week was exactly the same as the week before. But, to spice it up, I decided to use the dolly. The dolly was fairly easy to set up, taking only two of us to set in 5 minutes. When using the dolly, it would hard to keep re-framing with cast movements when shooting at a low angle.
Week 8: Chroma Key
During this lesson, we sat down and got taught how to use chroma key as an effective tool, and how to implement digital studios into our work. We got told the benefits and the draw backs, how to light the blue screen and what to consider when planning for this kind of effect (i.e. any individual wearing blue in front of the screen, will become invisible and how to light the screen properly.
This has been a major benefit to use, as with out the use of blue screen, the studio only has a white and black background which is visually boring and looks horrid on camera (especially Blacks). This is because the studio cameras, their sensors get starved with light and despite exposure settings the footage becomes grainy. As a potential technique, blue screen was always a massive choice for me and the group I work with as we want to implement backgrounds.
Comparisons: Ours Shows vs. Professional Shows
In this section, I will be selecting two different types of shows (e.g. Quiz Show) and comparing it to a real life counterpart. In terms of comparisons, the topic of discussions will be based around that of; Format, Conventions and Multi camera or Single camera. In order to stop any confusion, I will be doing 2 comparisons based on the different types of research; Primary & Secondary.
Primary
For my examples, I will be using all 3 groups examples and then individually talking about the relevant topics as stated above.
Social swap:
The first group was our group called Social Swap. As a brief summary, the show is about two people who answer a series of questions. The winner of each round gets to pick out a card which will have a sentence on it. As a format, the idea is at the end of this show person with the most rounds wins the game and will get two choices. They can either; stick with the selection of sentences they have or they can make their own up. Once they have decided, the other contender must then post it on their social media. We chose this because social media is a huge market and is continuing to grow. Its got an easy target audience to appeal too and the idea of celebrities putting embarrassing tweets out there to public and the announcing the response on the show with live examples is that of a minor nightmare. But viewers love watching celebrities get embarrassed, look at I'm a Celebrity, get me out of here! and its success.
So this show is a quiz show with a couple of game show elements. At its core, it has a series of questions that are based on recent news with a game show element at the end to give somewhat of climax to the show. As concerns to conventions, each question will be relevant towards the target audience of our show, which is young adults to middle age. So, the news questions will have to be about something that age group would know. Seeing as its a competitive show as well, there would be teams so as an example we would have blue vs red and thats the colour they would be lit in to give a visual aid to those who have disabilities. Other conventions are, having a presenter and cast members, a set whether its practical or digital is a creative decision a Producer and Director would discuss.
Dan's Quiz show:
This was the other quiz show in our Group C class. The shows format was that of asking questions about news that has recently occurred. Each group will gain a point per correct answer - like ours. At the end, the losing contestant has to participate in a physical activity that is based around one of the topics discussed earlier.
The connotations for this show were very similar to that of our show, Social Swap. We have 3 angles, 1 for each person, the presenter shot being wider then both others (which were typically zoomed mid-shots). We have lighting filling all angles, foreground and back. Each person had their own section, indicated by tables to diverge teams. Each show is shot on tripods, this is to avoid the annoying shaky cam that you seen in films. Other conventions matched that of our Social Swap, with having a presenter, contestants, lighting, camera work, live cuts, security (to an extent) & floor manager.
Brenan's Game Show:
Unlike the last two shows, this one was different. Where as the other two were quiz shows with a game show twist towards the end, this is a pure game show with wacky activities to keep the audience entertained. The format of the show was that it incorporated different trends from youtube. For example, if someone did a popular prank, then that would incorporated into the show in some sort of technical way.
Conventionally, for game shows they have some sort of aid to help reach their target. This can be handicaps, props (i.e. padded weaponry) and other equipment. In this show, they had props to enhance the entertainment so on the Chubby bunny section they had actual marshmallows to give a live reaction - as you would.
For each of these shows, we all chose to shoot multi-camera (3 Canon XF305 to be specific). This is literally because theres 3 people on a live set doing unscripted activities. So captured this to a professional standard on a single camera would be way to hard since each person is doing their own thing that is close to random. This means if something entertaining was to happen, then there's a high chance the single camera would miss it. It so speeds up production, having 3 cameras creating coverage can give the vision mixer and director the chance to create some sort of pacing.
Equipment relevant to my jobs (What are they, what do they do, pros and cons):
Canon XF305:
This the cameras we have in the studio. There is currently 3 of them that we use, and we connect them directly to the Trickster (explained below).
The main cons about this camera is that we only ever used auto white balance. This proofed to be a hardship as custom white balance is faster, and doesn't restrict you on creativity (as some people like different colour temperatures). Another con is the batteries. Though this is not about the cameras, and more to do with whoever is responsible for the battery charge, its still a point to be brought up. There hasn't been a week where we haven't fought against the battery power, putting batteries in with 2 or 1 bar and then trying to conserve battery through the lesson whilst other departments are set up. Its a small problem, but a tedious one at that.
Though there are a couple of cons, there are more pros but I'll only talk about the most important ones. The cameras are great, the lens give a sharp image and the cameras have a 3 stop ND filter built in which is handle for using low f-stops.
Tricaster:
The Tricaster is a vision mixing software and hardware that we use in the studio. When I mentioned about live feeds, this is what I was relating too. To make it work, we put video leads into the inputs of both the camera and the tricaster and its projected onto the screen as options to change too. The tricaster is great, its easy to use, and its fast. When you put the cable in, its almost an instant response. There isn't actually any major cons, its exports in RAW 1080i which is always a preference when available because RAW is uncompressed.
The Tricaster is easy to use, but also has many other inbuilt mechanics that are great. Seeing as everything is live, its extremely important not to make any mistakes. By using a couple of buttons (which takes a couple of seconds) you can set up the next camera (in which you can preview before you select it) and you can even do live transitions such as fade-to-black and lots more. As well, you can build 3D environments for digital sets. You can implement these straight into the image, setting up overlays and linking them to the videos so now you can have live graphics! Even chroma key is avaliable to use, which is extremely important when you light the screen properly and then modify the settings to sort out the colour problems with the finer things such as hair.
Behind the scenes video:
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