[Mark Suszko]

DOD has a media clip database of stuff that’s public domain.

Try here

https://www.defense.gov/Videos/

or contact a Public Information Officer to get hooked up with b-roll packages.

[Mark Suszko]

I advise you to strongly consider recording the dress rehearsals as well, full gear, not just for the practice, but to use that opportunity with no audience in the way,to obtain additional angles and shots that you could never do during the actual performance.

I did that once on a shoot of s ballet recital: I had two cameras one for wide and one for closeup work, and for the dress rehearsal, I put them in completely different spots and used them for some quick matching action cut-aways, making the final production look like a 4-camera shoot.

This also saved the day for the real performance, when one dancer who had nailed her solo in dress, got stage fright during the actual show and forgot all her steps. She just vamped until the end of her music cues and went offstage crying. I swapped in her perfect take from the Dress shot, saved the day, made her and her family super happy too.

[Mark Suszko]

Late to the party, but I wanted to mention I had the exact situation happen to me in terms of not being able to hang wireless lavs on the talent. Stage was very small as well. No PA, all lung-powered. Huge cast, lots of changes, impractical to share lavs.

What I did was, I laid 3 PZM type boundary mics along the edge of the stage, and I put a helper in the third row with a long, very narrow-pattern shotgun, a venerable but high-end Sennheiser with a very good rejection of off-axis sound, formerly used for birding. The helper’s only job was to sit low and keep it pointed at whomever was talking from moment to moment.

The PZM’s were “zoned” to be in the areas where most of the dialogues happened. Being flat and black, they were not easy to see, but they had good pickup.

Each mic was hard-wired to its own recording channel. I live mixed between sources to feed one of my cameras’ extra channels.

I also had the shotguns on my cameras, and a go-pro for additional audio sources. No one source was optimal for the entire performance; I had to mix and match between them as I went in post, felt like the ABC mix scene in “The Conversation” at times, but I DID end up getting “intelligible”, if not Emmy-quality sound.

[Mark Suszko]

You might look at it this way: the company that deploys equipment is a production company. A producer does multiple productions. So if the company is there to provide services and infrastructure to support the making of a program, then it’s a production services company, like xyz production group. A company that provides creative services and direction for multiple programs and customers, is QRSTUV productions.

[Mark Suszko]

Your TED example is not relevant because TED speakers are not addressing the camera as primary audience. TED presentations are third-person observations of the speaker talking to a crowd, interspersed with cut-aways to graphics and more.

Know Vince? “Hey, are you seeing this, camera-guy?”

Vince’s presentation is all first-person to the camera. Yes, he has cut-aways, he has wide-shots, he has close-ups, but wherever you see his head, his eyes are on the lens. Always. He is talking “first person” to one person in that lens, one viewer. He’s not giving you a profile shot of his head looking at someone off-camera as a cut-away. It would not make sense in the context of the presentation.

But people who don’t get this first-person/third-person distinction are making this mistake every day.

When Ron Popeil is presenting, he’s presenting to a live studio audience. There, you CAN take a side profile of Ron, with or without his rotating ginsu knife broiler. Because it’s a third-person view of a conversation he’s having with an audience.

https://i.makeagif.com/media/11-03-2014/MW73rc.gif

I really don’t know how else I can make you understand the distinction.

[Mark Suszko]

You’re not going to convince me that a profile shot of the presenter’s face makes any sense in a context of that presenter addressing the lens in the main shot. If you are having an eye to eye “first person” conversation with the lens, the lens standing in for the audience, a sudden side profile cut-away of your head looking 45 degrees off the lens, though the same conversation is still taking place, makes no sense to me and I don’t think it ever will.

It’s an attempt at an affectation, like the one used so much in soap operas, where a person in a 2-person conversation turns away from the other person and keeps talking, but they’ve turned 180 degrees to face the camera, usually in extreme closeup and close foreground, maybe with the other actor in the frame over the shoulder, in deep background.

It’s an artificial construct from stage acting.

Nobody really holds conversations like that, not for more than a few seconds, anyway, in real life. If I talked to you face to face and suddenly did a 180 turn on my heel and held most of the rest of the discussion facing directly away from you, you would think there was something wrong with me.

The point of the soap opera 2-shot is to communicate some interior emotional information in the facing actor, usually their attempt to hide a deep dark secret or disguise an emotion that would give them away.

None of that artifice applies in the presenter shot you’re talking about, when that presenter is addressing the camera.

It is “okay” to use that shot when your camera is an omniscient 3rd person view…

Because the lens is not the entity being addressed. It’s witnessing but not involved.

[Mark Suszko]

Thanks, Ann, that worked perfectly.

[Mark Suszko]

As I see it, Its people who like to combine social media with whatever their interest or professed area of expertise is. With the accent on the social media aspect of it. I guess people that might feel intimidated going to a more “pro” forum would feel more at ease posting questions there.

[Mark Suszko]

Not if you’re switching to unmotivated third person viewpoint for someone having a first-person conversation with the audience.

[Mark Suszko]

https://www.tally-lights.com/

Tally lights are easy to hook up if you’re using a switcher: there’s a built-in relay that trips the lights when you switch –

Without a switcher, just using a camera by itself, you’re talking about extending the camera’s own tally-light to an external repeater, and that can be quite a bit more work if the camera doesn’t have something for that built into one of its connectors. So a deep dive into the camera manuals is your first step, to see if there is connectivity for that.

If you’re into Rube Goldberg solutions, and you’re a whiz with a soldering iron, I suppose you could mount a sensor to detect a physical tally on the camera and build a circuit to relay that to an external light.

Or, tape a Push-on, Push-off (not momentary) thumbswitch, next to the camera’s start/stop thumb switch, wire it to an LED puck light with red gel on it, mounted to your prompter frame, hit both switches when you are recording…