MULTI-CAMERA REALITY AND DOCS


FACTUAL TV


that if Love Island is Pop Idol or The X Factor, then Too Hot to Handle is The Voice. It looks like a sexy dating show like Love Island, but it turns it on its head,” says Gibson. “In all TV formats, if you want to create something new, you’ve got to move the genre on a bit.”


REFINING THE TECH Multicamera shoots like Love Island, Too Hot to Handle and Ambulance are hugely complex affairs. There are 80 cameras alone that record the antics in Love Island, capturing some 21,000 hours of rushes over its eight week run, while the crew will peak at around 350 people. Too Hot to Handle, meanwhile, shoots in the Turks and Caicos with a crew of around 130 people, having shipped out a wealth of kit to the islands in advance. Even though Love Island has been on air for


seven years now in its latest iteration, the way it is produced has essentially stayed the same, says Richard Cowles, managing director of Lifted Entertainment, the ITV Studios label behind Love Island and I’m A Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here!. “The technology [non-linear editing] has


changed a bit and got better. But fundamentally, the system we use to make Love Island is kind of the same. It’s the same system that allowed I’m A Celebrity back in the early 2000s and early Love Island and Hell’s Kitchen.” The content is still recorded by multiple


cameras, with gallery producers watching the feeds and choosing which stories to follow. The


IT LOOK BETTER, MORE QUICKLY”


A LOT MORE. WE CAN GET IT INTO THE EDIT MUCH FASTER. AND WE CAN MAKE


“WE’RE STILL RELIANT ON NON-LINEAR EDITING AND STORAGE, BUT WE CAN STORE


content is then pulled into the edit as soon as possible, and honed into the stories that appear on TV. “That is exactly the same since we started [I’m A Celebrity] in 2002. But the difference is that the technology is faster and more efficient.” “We’re still reliant on non-linear editing and


storage, but we can store a lot more. We can get it into the edit much faster. And we can make it look better, more quickly.” Cowles recalls that Avids “would crash for


seven hours at a time” on the first series of I’m A Celebrity. “But that doesn’t happen anymore fortunately.” It means, he says, that time-pressed editors have more time to craft a programme before it TXs. Remote cameras are still used, as they were


back in the early days of Love Island and I’m a Celebrity. “But we use more of them. They are much more technologically proficient, and they can be used in lower light, which is fantastic.” Another “game changer” is LED lighting,


which consumes less energy, allows lighting directors to be more creative and is easier to transport. So too are drones, which are a more accessible and cheaper way of creating epic scene-setting shots that were once only available to those who could afford a Cineflex on a helicopter. The result is a show that looks much slicker


than its first incarnation as Celebrity Love Island in 2006, says Cowles, who notes that it now also shot in HD. “The production values are so much higher. You can get it into the edit quicker,


Autumn 2022 televisual.com 35


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