Tuesday, May 05, 2020

A trick we learned

The subject of audience response has come up a lot lately.  Here's something else along those lines.

I’ve talked about how we shot multi-camera shows in front of studio audiences. At times we pre-shot scenes for one reason or another. The scene took place outside, we had a guest star only available for one day, kids or animals in the scene, tricky special effects, they were in cars, etc.

What happens is those scenes are usually filmed the day before the audience filming. The editor would hastily put together a cut and during the audience filming they would be shown on monitors at the appropriate place in the story. The audience laughter would be recorded and eventually married to those finished scenes.

But when David Isaacs and I were showrunning we had a trick.

We noticed that the laughs were never as good when the audience was just watching the scenes on monitors. So we tried an experiment. Instead of showing the scenes we tried to recreate them live.  We didn't film them.  Only the audience audio was recorded.

Now this was not always possible, but when it was we felt it was worth a try.

A good example was car scenes. If they were filmed on the stage you would pre-shoot them with either blue screen to add scenery out the windows in post production. Or, for night scenes there is a process with whirling lights that simulate headlights and traffic.

But for the audience, here’s what we did. We set two chairs on the stage (like an improv show) and just told the audience what we were doing. Imagine they’re in a car. Same if a character was at a gas station. We’d say “pretend he’s holding a pump.” They did and we were rewarded with laughter.

We found we got much bigger and better laughs even with two actors sitting on chairs. The lesson learned here:  You just can’t beat the immediacy of a live performance.

8 comments :

  1. Canadian Dude5/05/2020 6:53 AM

    Hi Ken! I have a possible Friday question about live audiences...

    did you ever have a situation (or hear of one) in which a crowd got too rowdy, or an audience member became disruptive (being too loud - shouting out things - trying to be 'helpful' - etc.? And if so, how did you handle it?

    Thanks!

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  2. Seinfeld did this a lot, too. I can totally see how live dialogue and performances would get bigger laughs than pre-recorded video.

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  3. From what I've read, Seinfeld did these audience reenactments as you describe also. I wonder though if the laughs fell in the correct places, because people don't always say the same words at the same speed. Of the 5 or so sitcoms where I saw episodes filmed, only Becker filmed every scene in front of us the audience (though a couple scenes were filmed at angles where the audience couldn't see the action except on the monitors). All the other sitcoms had 1 or more pre-filmed scenes.

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  4. Jay Moriarty said...

    Re audience reaction, on the Jeffersons we began shooting a show and watching in the control booth when a weird thing happened: The audience would laugh, then moments later, laugh again. This continued, so I went to the stage and saw that an interpreter was signing for about a third of the audience who had been bussed in from a school for the deaf. Unfortunately, because of the obvious sound problem, we had to intervene, stopping both the signing and future invites of hearing-challenged groups.

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  5. Ken, Friday question: I've been watching the final season of Cheers and noticed that several times there were teasers filmed "outside" the bar, in front of Melville's. Were these all filmed in Boston or L.A., and were they filmed at the same time or were they separate shoots?

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  6. Did you ever get push back from the actors? They've already rehearsed and performed the scene. Did anyone oppose doing it again for the laugh track?

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  7. @JohnEWilliams found this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KbjWpzHEcbY

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  8. Wally that is very cool! Thanks!

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