Below is what I wrote for our presentation on Thursday. I added more as I spoke, and also skipped over some bits, but this writing formed to basis of my part of the presentation. At the bottom of this post, I have written about our presentation.

Multicam sitcoms are filmed with multiple cameras and are often accompanied by a live studio audience, and/or a laugh track. Multicam comedies are often easier to film as they can be shot much quicker than a single cam comedy. This also makes them cheaper to film.

Examples of multicam comedies include classics such as Seinfeld, I Love Lucy, Friends and Cheers. However, in recent years, multicam comedies have gone out of style. Try to name a decent multicam comedy that is currently airing. The Big Bang Theory and Two Broke Girls don’t count. The lack of ‘good’ multicam comedies had raised a ‘chicken or egg’ type debate. While some critics believe that the format of shooting is responsible for the lack of quality, others believe that the lack of quality has led to a lack of multicam comedies being produced.

Traditional multi camera shows were shot in front of live studio audiences, and thus had few changes of set. Shows like Cheers feature almost exclusively one set, or at least one location with a few sets. More recently, multicam shows have begun to merge aspects of single cam and multicam styles of shooting. How I met Your Mother, for example, is filmed on multiple cameras. The show features a laugh track and relatively few location changes. However, it was not shot in front of a studio audience, and features flashbacks, and some location changes, and narration that are generally stereotypical of single cam comedies.

While I’ve already mentioned that multicam sitcoms are cheaper to produce, the format adds to shows in other ways. For some actors, performing in front of a live studio audience allows them to perform at their best. In the recently aired and axed multicam show Mulaney, comedian Martin Short played an exaggerated version of himself. For an actor like Martin Short, a live studio audience allows them to figure out what works and what doesn’t, and gives them the room to perform that rigid single cam comedies are missing.

Throughout the rest of the semester, we would like to explore how multicam comedies are written and shot, and how the stereotypes and rules of shooting a multicam comedy can be broken. We’ve already begun by reading scripts from multicam shows, such as Seinfeld, to get an idea of how best to write our own. We have begun writing scripts, using shows such as Friends as a starting point. We’ve also watched and researched multicam shows to get the best idea of how they are produced.

I feel that our presentation went well. Despite being one group member down, we were able to articulate the research that we have done, as well as where we are at in the process of actually creating things for our project.

Throughout the process of putting together this presentation, our group talked about where we were at with research and work, and we were able to work together to throw around ideas and come up with more concrete plans. Actually meeting in person meant we were able to more fully discuss what we had discovered in our research and what we thought this meant for our project.

Even though each of us focused on different aspects for the presentation, it was a collaborative effort. We edited each others work and listened to the presentations read aloud, helping to cull any unimportant information and focus on the important stuff.