Technical Skills: Lighting, Camera and Sound

 In order to get a feel for the single camera unit, we got into groups and experimented with the main three elements of media production: Lighting, camera and sound. For each task, we used the same extract from the same script to get us familiar with the material that we were working with.

Camera

The first task we did as a group, was the camera task. This involved experimenting with the difference between single camera and multi camera. Single camera is pretty self-explanatory  and involves only using one camera for a whole production. This is typically used in films, and can be hard work as the scenes would need to be re-filmed from multiple different angles at a time. Continuity is essential when shooting with one camera as things have to be the exact same in each shot, which we later discovered with this task. Multi-camera on the other hand, is the use of more thamn one camera; this is easier and is usually used in television shows. 

For the task at hand , we started with multi-camera which involved setting up three different cameras on tripods, but putting them all at different angles. (One behind the actors, one to the side of the actors and one at the door which pointed inside of the room. All cameras started recording at the same time so we had three different viewpoints of the same scene. This is handy because it means in editing, the cameras can keep cutting from the different angles to get multiple different perspectives. We did this a few times so we made sure we had plenty of footage to choose from. 

We then tried single camera. This entailed setting up one camera in one position throughout the whole scene. This meant that we had to get loads of different shots, and continuity was important because if we wanted shots from different angles, since we were only using one camera, we would have to make sure everything was the scene. For example, making sure that props were held in the same hand or making sure that the actors were standing in the exact same place for continuity purposes so it didn't look wrong or different when the camera would cut to different angles.

Sound

The next aspect of production we tried, was sound. We used multiple types of equipment for this, which included: a TASCAM (hand held and non-handheld), a Boom Mic, shotgun mic, power pack  and the actual DSLR camera for in-camera sound.