Multi-Camera Setup Quotes

In the theater there are 1,500 cameras rolling at the same time - in the cinema, only one.

'How the West was Won' was very hard, because it was a three cameras technique, meaning three cameras wide. Therefore I wasn't speaking to my fellow performer, I was speaking to a camera, or a line next to the camera. It was difficult to do, because its not real acting. I had to pretend that I was 'seeing' Agnes Moorhead or Jimmy Stewart or Carroll Baker. I wasn't, I was acting to a drawn line. It took me personally two years to make the film, because my character starts at age 16 and I end up being 92 years old in the film. By the end of that production, I was ready for a long nap.

'Good Times' was with a live audience, three camera, and that was really intimidating. Because there were people on both sides, moving from set to set, and it was pretty scary. As I say, I didn't have a foundation in Hollywood. I hardly knew anybody. Just at the social level. I felt pretty isolated here, I really did.

I did a lot of multi-cam shows when I first started coming out to L.A.

When you're working with film, you can only shoot one angle at a time, and then everything has to stop, and you re-light it and shoot everything else from the opposite side, so it's really important that you stick exactly to what's written. But with the multi-camera digital setup, you're getting both sides of the scene at the same time, so it gives you that freedom to go off-book.

A sitcom, you rehearse for four days of the week and then you shoot it all in one night in front of a studio audience. It's like a play every week, you just shoot it over a seven or eight-day period with a single camera. I enjoy this format of show much more. I'm a feature guy. I like making movies. So the four camera thing I didn't love it that much. I found myself slightly out of my element.

Sitcoms are like summer stock. You put it up in three days, and then you do it in front of an audience, so it's a really great transition from theatre into camera work.

I definitely prefer the single camera better. For me it's the simple fact that I enjoy working in front of an audience, but when you're trying to create a suspension of disbelief it's much harder to do in front of audience because they become a partner. Moreso than that, they become in charge of the timing. From the simple, mechanical fact that you have to hold for their laughter. The actual timing of the scene is in the hands of the audience. As a control freak, I don't enjoy that as much as the ability to be able to control it in an edit room.

To me, a multi-cam is just like the feeling you get from the audience.

If you've got five cameras, you're making sure that you're in the right position for each one of the cameras.

I always wanted it to be multi-cam from the beginning. In the first seeds of the idea, I wanted a live audience, multi-cam show. That was very important for me.

The last jobs I had were fixing cars and covering football games for a local access tv station. As in driving the mobile van to the field, setting up 3 cameras, teaching depressed grownups and interns how to use them and directing the game from the van and then wanting to kill myself.