From the course: Pro Video Tips

Understanding the challenges of shooting live events

From the course: Pro Video Tips

Understanding the challenges of shooting live events

- Of all the various things you can shoot to pay the bills, often the most fun and engaging are live events. In the best case scenarios, these gigs can be easy money in your pocket with minimum setup, little audio hassle, and only a few hours of shooting compared to other types of productions. And once in a while, in the very best case scenarios, you can even get a great seat to a coveted show. However, in the most challenging and more common scenarios, live events can be fraught with unpredictable problems, complex audio setups, and coverage nightmares for the uninitiated and unprepared shooter. So, today on Pro Video Tips, I wanna deal with one of the more tricky live event challenges, and that's how to successfully pull off a single camera coverage of a stage performance or speaker. The hardest part of covering a live one-time only event like a performance is getting enough interesting and appropriate shots to cover all the action. To do this the easiest way, I highly recommend doing multiple camera recordings for any show or live event whenever it's possible. However, many of us with more limited resources are fortunate we can scrounge up one good camera, least of all several cameras plus camera people. So, many times it just ain't possible to pull of a multi-cam shoot with the budget, clientele, or production circumstances we have to deal with. To be clear here, covering a live event with a single camera is not something that's easily done. It's not impossible and it's been done plenty before, but I wanna be clear before we get into this, that it's not easy. The two biggest challenges you'll face in covering live events, shows, and performances with just a single camera, is first, making it not look like a single camera shot from a single view point, and the second problem is covering all the main action adequately. You essentially have to know exactly where to have the camera at any given time, and learn to edit the sequence in your head as you're shooting it. This mental skill of editing in your head as you shoot is better known as shooting for the cut, or shooting for the edit. And the best way to learn to do this is through studying, shooting, and editing similar sequences. This is one of those filmmaking skills that you're really only gonna understand fully after some trial and error shooting, and then editing that material together. After the first time or two you attempt to shoot a live show with a single camera, every shot you really needed when editing will become painfully obvious during the editing process as you're trying to make the sequence work. Make it a habit when editing such footage to take postmortem notes on the shots you should have gotten or should have held longer to make the sequence cut together effectively. The very act of thinking them out and writing them down will help make sure you remember to get those shots the next time out. Once you've burned yourself a time or two by not shooting things that would have taken you an extra 30 seconds on location, but later costs you several hours to work around or remedy in post, you'll definitely start to pick up the vital skill of shooting for the cut much more quickly. However, my whole point in sharing these Pro Video Tips with you, is to save you from learning film lessons the hard way, so in this episode I'm gonna explain and demonstrate how I actually shoot for the cut by talking and walking you through the process of shooting a live performance of a song with a single camera.

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