FACTUAL TV
MULTI-CAMERA REALITY AND DOCS
are a lot of people that want to see the show before it goes out – the execs, in compliance, at the network. But we can’t all spend eight weeks in Majorca.” Like many other multicamera shows, Love
Island also innovated during the pandemic. Because of travel restrictions, series seven employed remote production workflows: it was shot in Majorca but the main gallery and edit took place in London, connected via fibre which ITV installed to the villa. This year, the show moved away from a
remote production workflow. “We were at a new villa and so would have to set up the infrastructure again from scratch and we were keen to avoid the risks associated with relying on fibre, which in our case travels between the UK and Majorca through multiple countries,” says Cowles. “If something goes wrong it has to be located and isn’t necessarily going to be dealt with quickly. The production process is also much more efficient if the team is together rather than separated…Down the line, there may be a world where the fibre infrastructure allows remote working to happen more regularly, but this is some way off.”
SCALING UP One thing that has changed for many fixed multicamera shows is the sheer scale of the production set up. Envy Capture – the specialist remote workflow division of post house Envy – has worked on productions including ITV’s The Cabins, Amazon Prime’s Lovestruck High, C4’s Five Dates A Week and MTV’s Ex on the Beach, providing services such as specialist recording tech, media management and on set processing and archiving of content. “From my first shows over a decade ago when we were recording at most four streams of video, we’re now doing
“FROM MY FIRST SHOWS OVER A DECADE AGO
WHEN WE WERE RECORDING
TWENTY OR MORE STREAMS QUITE REGULARLY”
AT MOST FOUR STREAMS OF VIDEO, WE’RE NOW DOING
twenty or more streams quite regularly,” says head of technical operations Ricky Martin. “Editorially, the use of fixed rig cameras has
changed significantly – from being a tool to film in covert or fly on the wall locations like classrooms or hospitals to capture all the angles and reality less covertly across huge sets like a Love Island or an Ex on the Beach,” adds Martin. Envy Capture solutions architect Toby Weller
adds that the quality of rig shows has also got better. “Rig shows can no longer get away with that CCTV look when sat next to high-end productions.”
REALITY TRENDS It’s clear that big multicamera shows have a bright future. Gibson reckons that the “bikini reality dating market” feels saturated at the moment and that commissioners are more interested in social experiment and non-dating shows. “The latest commissions are reflecting that – they are going for more strategic psychological gameplay,” she says, citing C4’s greenlight for Studio Lambert and Motion Content Group’s Rise & Fall and Netflix’s reboot of The Mole. Gibson says that tech continues to drive
“meaningful change” in reality. “When you look at sports TV at the moment, they are miking up players and you’re getting a running commentary from people on the pitch, talking about what they are doing.” Just as people now “producing their own lives and their own content” for social media, she thinks that contestants narrating their own stories could be the next big turn for reality TV. “It feels like we are moving in that direction
of people telling their own stories,” says Gibson. “Coupled with cameras getting smaller, are we going to get to a place where we’re literally seeing a show from someone’s own point of view?”
42
televisual.com Autumn 2022
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80 |
Page 81 |
Page 82 |
Page 83 |
Page 84 |
Page 85 |
Page 86 |
Page 87 |
Page 88 |
Page 89 |
Page 90 |
Page 91 |
Page 92 |
Page 93 |
Page 94 |
Page 95 |
Page 96 |
Page 97 |
Page 98 |
Page 99 |
Page 100 |
Page 101 |
Page 102 |
Page 103 |
Page 104 |
Page 105 |
Page 106 |
Page 107 |
Page 108 |
Page 109 |
Page 110 |
Page 111 |
Page 112 |
Page 113 |
Page 114 |
Page 115 |
Page 116 |
Page 117 |
Page 118 |
Page 119 |
Page 120 |
Page 121 |
Page 122 |
Page 123 |
Page 124 |
Page 125 |
Page 126 |
Page 127 |
Page 128 |
Page 129 |
Page 130 |
Page 131 |
Page 132 |
Page 133 |
Page 134 |
Page 135 |
Page 136 |
Page 137 |
Page 138 |
Page 139 |
Page 140 |
Page 141 |
Page 142 |
Page 143 |
Page 144 |
Page 145 |
Page 146 |
Page 147 |
Page 148 |
Page 149 |
Page 150 |
Page 151 |
Page 152 |
Page 153 |
Page 154 |
Page 155 |
Page 156
