It’s all in the mix

• Article 1 of 1
• Televisual Entertainment handbook, October 2004
• View a PDF of the original article ~ 1.6MB

Page 1 | Page 2 | Page 3 | All 3 Pages

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.

Both panel shows and game shows share a common problem with comedy shows: getting clean audio. The panels of most panel shows are comprised of comics and most game shows are hosted by comics as well. Anyone with comic timing will usually not wait until an audience has finished laughing before telling another joke, to make sure the second joke gets a bigger laugh than it would otherwise. If that second joke then gets edited out, the editor will need to remove the comic’s voice from over the top of the laughter. But since most studios play the audio feeds from the stage microphones over speakers to the audience so they can hear what’s being said, cutting to the audience’s mike will not get clean laughter – it will pick up on the output from the speakers as well. So getting a clean “tail” to the audience’s laughter from some other point in the programme – perhaps the warm up – is important.

Since most panel shows and game shows are long-running, most producers will want a common style of editing for each show. That will mean either having the same editor on each show or ensuring that all the editors involved confer. Often the editor of the pilot or first episode will set the style in conjunction with the producer and director and those that follow will imitate that style as closely as possible. However, many producers feel that keeping the same editor throughout the series is the best and only way to ensure consistency, primarily because the editor will know what to do without too much “hand holding” by the producer; if a new editor comes on board, it will usually be some time before the producer is confident that he or she can leave the editor without direction.

Many panel shows are now filmed quite close to the time of transmission, primarily to ensure their content is topical. That means that like awards shows, live events and reality shows, they need to be turned round quite quickly. There is typically one big obstacle to this: the amount of footage acquired is usually far greater than the time allotted for its broadcast. There are various ways of increasing the speed of the edit: editing can be done on location to cut out the time involved in getting tapes to a suite; linear editing is still possible with a suitably experienced editor; and the new generation of hard drive recorders, such as Grass Valley’s Profile system, can record feeds straight to disk so that the editor can be editing without having to digitise the tapes, even while the cameras are still recording. Each of these techniques can benefit from good process, and each can suffer from bad process, so producer and editor alike have to be clear in advance how the edit will proceed and what conditions are necessary.

A suite with good acoustics and speakers is important or else the editor is likely to miss background noises that will still be picked up on the broadcast, so a hotel room is probably not suitable for many shows. Some post houses, such as Resolution, have their own mobile suites so are well geared up for location-based editing.

Linear editing is a dying art and many post houses no longer have linear editing suites except for online conforming. Getting an editor experienced in linear editing is far harder than getting an experienced non-linear editor; equally hard is getting a PA who has the timing skills necessary to make sure each shot is the right duration for the edit – with linear, there’s no going back to correct mistakes.

And while hard drive-based recording can save time, many producers are unwilling to accept that going back to correct things as more exciting events unfold is counter-productive – any time savings are lost if the editor has to keep re-editing completed material, so perfection cannot always be achieved with a short turnround.

A professional presenter can also help reduce the edit time. Many become less disciplined as a series goes on, and often start “messing round” in the words of one editor. “They start thinking, ‘I’ve done this for 13 shows: it’s easy’. In a tight turnround situation, you’re desperate to get stuff on to tape. They just want to have a good time.”

With a show like Big Brother, where 24 hours of footage from multiple cameras need to be compressed down into half an hour, proper process is the only way to get the edit done on time. In common with other entertainment edits, keeping a list of “scenes” and making notes of which are good and which are bad will enable the editors to easily find material to work with for the assembled show. Having several PAs monitor the footage from the cameras throughout the day, making notes of interesting events and shots, ensures that the vast amount of dull footage from a 24/7 reality show can we waded through relatively easily by the editors and without the producer or director having to stay conscious and alert the whole time.

Big Brother is in a sense the ultimate hidden camera show. But the contestants know the cameras are there, cameramen can stay by the cameras, pointing them at events, the cameras can be large and use broadcast-quality tapes. For hidden camera shows such as The Jamie Kennedy Experiment and Experimental, this is not always possible. Often, unattended mini-DV cameras and microphones secreted around a location or the star are the only possible ways to get the footage. So there is no cameraman to point the camera in the right direction and no PA to monitor the footage as it comes out to highlight the bad and good takes.

“Being DV material, time-coding is not-existent and I get an awful lot of DV recordings, even from professional cameramen, that are absolutely devoid of sound from beginning to end,” says John Sillitto, who has now had many years of experience working with hidden camera footage. “It’s extremely important to me that some sound is recorded, just as a guide track so I can sync it with the sound from the mikes.” Another tip he gives camera crews is to keep recording footage for as long as possible. “Once I’ve found a sync point, it won’t come out of sync till you stop recording. Once that happens, that’s two more syncing operations I’ve got to do with other cameras and getting it all back into sync is a problem.” Although that generates more footage, Sillitto says the way Avids handle material means it’s easy for him to scan through hidden camera footage to find good sound bites and visuals.

Although more editing work is done in entertainment post production than in many other genres, producers coming into entertainment for the first time will find that by putting in as much as planning as possible in advance of the shoot, many problems will disappear or become easier for editors to deal with. Even after the shoot, through good process, the edit can be quicker and smoother, even on fast turnround material. But whatever happens, don’t just leave it to the editors to “fix it in post” – they might not be able to.

Thanks to John Sillitto, BBC Post Production, Nick King, Evolutions Television, and Graham Hutchings, Editworks.

Page 1 | Page 2 | Page 3 | All 3 Pages