Holocaust denier confronts death camp survivor - video of a play
 

Be gentle! My first time shooting a play. This is an interesting excerpt from the DVD I made from it. My usual gig is producing training and lifestyle videos with top level bodybuilders, so this was very different for me!

It was a very low budget production, just an archival kind of thing for the actors, their friends and family. Still, I wanted to do as good a job as possible. We used three cameras and shot two different live performances, cutting them together to minimize audience noise and line flubs.

We had a shotgun mic on the camera closest to the stage and a lavalier hanging from the ceiling just above the actors' heads transmitting to another camera. The third camera was running unmanned in the back of the very small theater and was not used for sound.

I learned a lot from this and next time I think I would insist on more even lighting across the stage and a chance to rehearse our camera movements with the actors before shooting. We were winging it this time and missed a few key shots because of it.

Let me know how you think it flows, where you think improvements could be made.

YouTube - Holocaust denier confronts death camp survivor - Excerpt from DENIAL

It's tough to do live events and I think you did a nice job. The one thing that caught my eye several times, mostly in the first half of the clip, was several instances of intrusion into the safe zone -- one actor at the extreme left of the screen and the other at the extreme right. Now that almost everyone is viewing on flat screen monitors without overscan, it is less of an issue than in the past but I think that prinicple should still be honored. By comparing to other scenes, it didn't appear that the camera was full wide, so perhaps the cameraperson was trying too hard to be as zoomed in as possible?

Thanks for the input. You are right on with your comments. My second operator was a little green. I have since pointed out to her the necessity of leaving a bit more space for the safe zone.