Today has been one of the best days of my university experience, so let me jump right into it.
As a Film and Television Production student, I have spent many hours in our department's TV studio, trying my hand at all sorts of different roles. Vision Mixing is one which I've not had much chance to try out, so when I heard that an alumni student was coming in to give us a couple of lectures and practicals, I was intrigued. However, what excited me most was when I learnt that she vision mixes for none other than my favourite show, EastEnders!
Last week we learnt all about the technical side of the mixing desk, however, this week, we not only had a lecture where we watched footage of last week's EastEnders being recorded and learnt some interesting backstage secrets, but we also got the chance to vision mix (live edit) several scenes as if we were actually working on the show.
Basically, four cameras were used in each scene and each was recorded alongside the vision mixed (edited) version of the scene. So, these recorded camera feeds were linked up to our own monitors and vision mixer so that we could pretend we were cutting the footage live, as if the actors were actually in our studio. It was fab. We did 2 scenes with specific camera directions (one being where Billy reads the kids a story at Halloween, and another being when Honey comes home) and one as directed (so without specific camera direction, and this scene was of Martin and Jay in E20).
Here are some clips of our studio when we were doing this mixing exercise:
- Here is Jamie Borthwick giggling before a take. It's cool to see this sort of footage, as EastEnders rarely releases bloopers, etc.
- And here's an example of what happens when an actor fluffs their lines:
Now, on to some interesting things I learnt about the production side of EastEnders:
-> Whilst Coronation Street and Emmerdale tend to always script which cameras to cut to in scenes, EastEnders tend to go for an as directed approach on the whole.
-> The rehearsal process goes as follows: actors do a line run, then the scene is blocked with the director, then there is a camera rehearsal, and then any camera changes and notes are discussed before a recording.
-> On all the soaps, 3/4 cameras tends to be the norm, with all camera feeds being recorded in case the vision-mixed edit requires some changes.
-> The EastEnders actors tend to do a lot of ad libbing, Jay's 'cutch dourage' line last week is an example of this. They also seem to change the wording of their lines a lot, which makes precise vision mixing quite difficult as you are waiting for certain cue words in order to cut to another camera. It's interesting to consider how much lines are changed and how we should perhaps re-evaluate how much we analyse them.
-> Obvious, but it really is weird how different the scenes look before colour-grading. They look a lot more stark and drained.
-> I noticed that a lot of effort must go into post-production sound design, as everyone in the un-edited footage definitely sounded like they were talking into microphones.
-> When music is playing in the background of a club scene, the music is usually played for a few seconds to get the extras and actors into the rhythm of the song, but then turned off to record the scene. However, for last week's E20 scenes, the music was played in the background during recording. I was informed that this is because the director, Michael Owen Morris, prefers a more old-fashioned BBC approach and likes to ensure that as little editing is required as possible.
- The Martin/Jay E20 scene being cut by one of my classmates; you can hear the music playing in the background:
And that's about it! All in all a fascinating and great day!
-ASIS
Comments