If you have been following the flow of what is happening between the characters, you should be able to guess where the interesting bits of drama and reaction will be. Most scenes are not going to be as obvious as the one above, however, in most scene, there will be an element of drama.
How to shoot for capturing reality full#
Remember it isn't just a case of wip panning, to have a decent full face shot, you will need to shuffle around and be to the side of one of the characters, if you are on the Dr when he says " you are pregnant" you'll be too slow to get the initial reaction. Option 2 sounds okay in practice, but the reality is you will be panning at the wrong time and miss the vital reaction.
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The shot will also be a hard profile of each person, as they will be talking face to face and this doesn't look great. If you shoot everything on a 2 shot this will leave the editor with nothing to cut to. Option 1 will mean you capture everything, however, the editor might want to cutaway the middle lines as they don't add much. The Doctor on the other hand will be fairly non plused and we just need to hear his audio. The drama in the scene will all come from the patient, chances are, she will either burst into tears or be ecstatically happy. At this point the main story is the patients reaction not the Doctors. I would always advocate going with option 3 here, the reason for this is that you have the audio, you just need the reactions. So there are three possible ways to shoot this:ġ) You shoot it all on a 2 shot and get everything that is being said.Ģ) You shoot everything in singles, quickly panning from one to the other.ģ) You shoot the first line the Dr says and then only shoot the patient. Here is an imagined scenario to better illustrate this idea: The audio should always inform your shots. To film effectively you need to concentrate on what is being said, and respond to it. Observational and reality shows are all about the characters in them and what they say. The sound recordist could be picking up audio some distance from you through radio mics, you need to be able to respond to this as much as possible. It is worth getting a solution to this, even if it is as simple as a mini jack splitter, so you can both monitor camera audio.
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These days sound recordists will be laying audio down on a digital back up, so they'll be happy to monitor off their own rig, however, sometimes they will want to use your headphone jack, to monitor audio that they are sending to the camera. Remember the edit producers will read through story notes and lots of the audio that is recorded, if they hear a vital conversation and want to cut it into the show, they won't be impressed if the camera is busy filming a pretty shot of the sun set. It is hard to stress just how important this is, if you aren't tuned in to the conversations the sound recordist is picking up, you won't be tuned in to what to shoot. Audio is massively important when shooting reality and I would always advise wearing headphones, I usually do this in just one ear, leaving the other ear to hear what is happening around me. There is a lot to get through here, so I'm going to break it up into bullet points.ġ) Audio is everything. The action often happens very quickly and there won't be time for a director to call the shots for you, often you'll have to do the thinking for yourself.
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Observational documentaries can be slightly tricky to shoot as there often isn't an interview or a graphic to cutaway to, so the cameraman needs to supply all of the buildings block necessary to make the edit themselves.
How to shoot for capturing reality tv#
Even if you aren't working on a full blown reality TV show, there are many programmes that will incorporate a small amount of actuality shooting, where you can't control the action.