Wednesday, November 29, 2006

Q. In your book, Crafty TV Writing, you mention that it is a producer's dream to have one location or standing set, for shooting. In your experience have you seen this done incorporating the outdoors? Can the outdoors be considered a standing set?

Not really. While staying in one outdoor location for the whole story means you don't lose time moving the "company," shooting outdoors is problematic. Unless you are the prophet Joshua, you cannot get the sun to stand still. It is only available during the day, for example, and even during the day it persists in changing angles. That is, if the sun is not behind clouds. And it is not raining. Or snowing.

Outdoors you also have sound problems. Jets flying overhead. Trucks rumbling by. Teamsters blowing their horns during the take because you didn't hire their drivers. Inside of a sound stage, the world could be ending and you wouldn't know it until the end of the take.

Of course, in Los Angeles you can count on day after day of full sunlight for months at a time, which is one reason the film industry settled there. (The other was that in the early days, they were all violating Thomas Edison's film technology patents, and L.A. was about as far as they could get from his lawyers.) In those days they built their interior sets out in the sun, and sometimes even put them on turntables so the angle wouldn't change. But you probably won't be doing anyone a favor if you set your whole episode in Griffith Park.

7:51 AM

1 Comments:

Excellent TV 101 info, Alex...very nice

By  wcdixon, at 12:43 PM  

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