Week 4

27 August 2007

This week we once again recapped Hello Riverina. I think this was mainly to let the 1st year student directors be more exposed and feel more comfortable in their roles. The roles I was given this week were camera and talent with Michael being my director. It was interesting to be able to really feel the different styles of my peers as directors and personally I think the four that are taking up this role would probably be the four most competent in this role.
Taking direction from Mike on camera compared to Mark the week before, I found that Michael's style was more meticulous in exactly where he wanted to block us and what shots he wanted to take, whereas Mark seemed to give us a degree of creative freedom. I cannot fault either of these styles as Mike obviously wanted to go for a particular look that he had imagined whereas Mark gave us the chance to show what we have got.
As we slowly delve deeper into the intricacies of multi-camera setup I decided to research a bit about its history. First used in television by Desi Arnaz and DOP Karl Freund on the sitcom I Love Lucy, it was developed to be faster and less expensive than a single camera setup, although taking away some of the directors creativity with limitations in each shot. In todays industry, most drama's are shot single cam whereas most sitcoms are done multicam.

Reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple-camera_setup