Logo Rob Buckley – Freelance Journalist and Editor

It’s all in the mix

It’s all in the mix

Minimising time-consuming and expensive edit work in post means co-ordinating and controlling every camera, keeping shots tight and the overall style consistent.

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Of all genres, entertainment probably encompasses more styles and techniques than any other. From the OB and single camera work of the drama or sports show, through the multi-camera studio work of the current affairs programme, to the hidden camera work of the documentary, entertainment has appropriated them as its own and is ironically perhaps the most complicated of all genres. For any producer coming into entertainment for the first time, the challenges are as daunting as the genre is wide. But with techniques as old almost as television itself, there is a long history and tradition for any new arrival to draw upon.

“From my perspective, I’ve always seen entertainment as a fairly unique sort of television,” says editor John Sillitto, who has worked on everything from comedy show The Two Ronnies (the original series and its current revival) through Tom Jones’ and Shirley Bassey’s music shows to game show The Generation Game. “Every other sort of show – drama even sitcom – is very largely pre-produced in the sense that the producer has got the script together, the cast together, arranged the situation, the lighting, waited for the right weather conditions and can shoot it till he gets the shots he wants. So the amount of post-production compared to pre-production is much less in those sorts of genres. In entertainment work, the post-production work is much greater – you only get one go at telling a joke usually – and the producer has to allow for that.”

Within the entertainment genre, there are various sub-genres each with their own styles and techniques, including reality shows, comedy shows, music shows, live events, game shows and panel shows. Virtually all need to capture far more footage than is ever used, but not through reshooting, as with drama, but during the first – and only – take.

Perhaps the one exception is comedy, which will often have scripted OB work. Since multiple takes are possible, it is far easier for the producer and director to get the shots they want, but with many sending out a DigiBeta camera for the main shots and a production assistant with a DV camera for secondary shots, it is still possible for the importance of the second-camera’s footage to be overlooked during the shoot.

“They need to be directed just as much as the main camera does,” says Sillitto. “I get an awful lot of stuff in where the DV camera’s flying around all over the place and it’s virtually useless.”

However, these kind of shoots remain the exception. The bulk of entertainment shows need to capture events as they happen – and so have more in common with news reporting than drama, even though they are typically filmed in studios. But unlike news, where the single camera perspective is accepted and editing is almost entirely confined to trimming for length, entertainment requires mixtures of shots for reaction, variety, rhythm and pacing (close-up for the gag, wide shot for the reaction, for example), so deciding where to position cameras and what to capture is the biggest choice that producers have to make and should be done in conjunction with the editor.

Graham Hutchings, md of Editworks, an editing company that has a long history of work on entertainment projects, says that typically editors at his company will want to have met clients in the studio to look at the set-up and sort out these issues. “Our experience tells us that if you sort it out in the beginning, you don’t have frustration later on and things knit together more easily,” he says.

The simplest set-up is probably that of a panel show, where isolated camera feeds of the host and the panels are the only typical requirements in addition to the vision-mixed output. Slightly more difficult, paradoxically, is an interview show. Since there is usually only two people being filmed, the number of possible cutaways and reaction shots is severely limited in comparison to a panel show, where there is usually always someone to cut away to. While there are a number of solutions to the problem, most of which involve having more cameras, a simpler approach taken by shows such as You Only Live Once is to have a camera behind the presenter and interviewer that looks out at the audience: since the camera can’t see what the presenter and the subject are saying, there is always something to cut away to, even if the isos are bad.

A game show, where the host is frequently mobile rather than seated, can be more complicated. Being able to acquire clean shots of contestants when they’re interacting with the host can be hard in the age of 16:9 acquisition. Camera positions need to take account of this additional problem. “In The Generation Game, for instance,” says Sillitto, “if you stand a contestant next to Jim Davison, it’s extremely difficult to get a close enough shot of the contestant that doesn’t include Jim. When Davison is interviewing a contestant at the beginning, that 30 seconds needs a lot of editing and you need a lot of shots – you can’t cheat the sound if you can see people’s mouths moving in the corner of the shots.” So clean, tight shots that don’t even include the hands or chin of the other person are extremely important if continuity issues are to be avoided.

Another caveat for game show edits is the tendency of vision mixers to over-cut. Since editors will generally have to trim parts for time or to make cuts for dialogue, the frequency of edits will appear to increase and become too rapid. The editor will then have to insert iso shots into the vision mixed sequence and remove the vision mixer’s cuts either side of the edit, which will only be possible if the editor has appropriate iso shots. Asking vision mixers not to cut at all for certain sequences and to leave everything on the isos will avoid this problem and reduce the amount of time the editor has to spend on the edit.

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