Ed & Red’s Night Party: Our Adventures in Multi-Camera

A couple of weekends ago, we shot an episode of Ed & Red’s Night Party, the great Canadian TV show hosted by a sarcastic sock. I won’t go into detail about the show’s history because the Wikipedia entry does that better than I could. Nevertheless, to see a homemade show from cable access channel become a Canadian late-night institution is encouraging to anyone who picks up a camera hoping to give up the day job.
I don’t know where I could verify this, but I suspect that Ed’s show is likely the longest running Canadian late-night talkshow. If it’s not the Canadian champ, it’s definitely the Toronto and Ontario champ. The national networks have both created and abandoned talk shows—CTV most notably with Open Mike with Mike Bullard, Global with subsequent The Mike Bullard Show, and CBC’s infamous Friday Night with Ralph Benmergui—but Ed the Sock has fended off all of them, probably by not trying to appeal to as broad an audience as the others did. He knows his audience and gives them exactly what they want: edgy late-night humour, a healthy dollop of pop culture’s highs and lows, and plenty of sex-related humour and features.
The current version of Ed’s show, partnering him with Liana “Red” K., doesn’t have the traditional guest interviews where the guest comes out and is interviewed, but in our two appearances, we’ve been interviewed while in the hot tub and lounging on a couch where we were watching the show. The interviews weren’t conventional by any means, but we managed to plug our stuff.
I’ve never taken a TV production course, so my exposure to multi-camera shooting has been limited to a couple of occasions where we happened to have 2 mini-DV cameras on shooting day, and we used both at the same time to speed things up. It wasn’t true multi-camera shooting—the 2nd camera usually shot the same angle but at a different focal length so that we could get the closeups done at the same times as the master shots.
When we appeared in the hot tub on Ed & Red’s, there was only one camera assigned to cover us, so it was a single-camera situation and we worked to just one camera.
For our second appearance, we had 3 segments during the show, with at least 3 cameras on us (one across the floor for a head-on angle, one beside the couch for a side view, and a third somewhere in the middle). We weren’t required to work towards any one camera, so it was similar to a stage appearance where you only have to be aware of a general zone to work to. Mullet, sitting on screen right, had a camera directly to his left with the others spread out in front of him, so he couldn’t really turn to face me without turning away from the audience. I, on screen left, was looking almost directly into a camera when I faced him, so I made sure I turned to my left (screen right) when we were seated during the 3 segments so that Mullet wouldn’t face away from the camera best positioned for his closeups (but, rest assured, I was also pointing my face at that camera, so I wasn’t doing him a favour—I was doing us both a favour).
We got progressively more physical through the 3 segments, so not having to worry about where the camera was definitely freed up how we worked.
For no-budget filmmaking, multi-camera likely isn’t an option. You need at least 2 cameras of the same quality, video format, etc., etc. Hollywood always drags out extra cameras for those thigns even they can’t afford to do more than once (I recall a making-of doc on the Indiana Jones & the Temple of Doom DVD where Mr. Spielberg had 14 cameras rolling for the one-time-only destruction of a footbridge), but the same could apply on a no-budget scale. If I were shooting something where I had to get a lot of coverage done in a limited time (a well-known actor is giving you a break by doing a scene for you but can only give you an hour, for example), or you’re shooting something that can only be done in one take (like having your character jump into a parade), I would definitely budget for a 2nd camera and an extra person. Likewise, if I were shooting a scale model’s destruction, I’d have to weigh the costs of making multiple copies of said model for repeated takes or renting a 2nd camera to shoot it once.
Another aspect of multi-cam shooting is that the lighting has to be designed for multiple camera setups. This means a lot more work at the beginning of the day, but the lighting guys only had to make minor adjustments here and there during the shoot. This also means you can move the cameras, zoom in for a closeup, etc., on the fly. Our area was pretty well lit, and the crew defined our working areas for us, so your talent can be given an area to play in rather than being stuck on a mark. I think you could adapt this type of thinking for single-cam shooting on a set, and you’d be able to go from setup to setup without keeping warmed-up actors waiting for lights to change. It wouldn’t work in every situation, of course, but if you didn’t need special lighting, you could probably get away with it.
We won’t be using multi-camera for our DVD, but doing Ed & Red’s was still a good experience, and I’d recommend to any no-budget filmmaker that they check out a traditional 3-camera TV shoot if they ever get the chance—watch those cameras work!