I love my studio classes because of the opportunities I get to learn practical skills and apply them to real projects and this class is no exception. The half hour that we spent putting together a one minute script brought to life all the concepts we’d been learning about in class and helped them sink in in a way simply reviewing my notes never could.

The idea of people only being comfortable laughing when there’s others there, prompting the need for a live studio audience, became very clear when I saw that once one person broke and started laughing, everyone was likely to follow suit, but if that first person didn’t chuckle, no one else did as well. We didn’t get to experience the pressure of true liveness, at least not yet, but I started thinking about it whenever anything went wrong. My group was the first up and as floor manager i needed a comms set, but there were technical difficulties getting it set up. In a live setting that may have severely impacted the schedule, or at least put us on a tighter time limit and under more pressure. That, and every time we made a mistake with cameras or performers, made me think about the pressure of liveness, that ‘gamble’ we discussed in our early readings, where anything can go wrong, and unlike this time, you dont get a chance to reset and try again.

As for the actual filming and the roles we took on, I was nervous going into the floor manager position, it being one ive never undertaken before and had no idea what to do. I looked up online the duties of all the roles involved and became a little confused when there seemed to be overlap between floor manager and directors assistant, but being on set helped me understand, faced with the physical space and the distance between our two positions. While I cant comment for sure on what Katyas perspective on the exercise was as DA, I know being on the floor I was able to see problems as they happened or before they occurred and try and correct them, and physically step in to implement any of the directors wishes, as well as being point of contact for our actors and making sure someone was telling them what was happening and when.

The whole thing was so different to any other set ive been on. While we werent really live, we did have a live audience, plus cameras that we were switching between during filming, which meant it was a lot more pressure on a set than I’m used to. Everything felt opposite to what I have normally done, the filming itself felt rushed and hectic, whereas in between we had to slow down for the relay between the control room and the set, whereas on other sets ive worked on for web series or short videos, the filming is done calmly step by step and as soon as the camera is off theres instant communication between everyone involved.

There were mistakes made, we were a bit slow switching between cameras, our audio had issues and I think camera twos focus was off, but these are all products of our inexperience, and for every mistake we made, we learnt how to work around and fix many others.