Live Television Show!

Chris Cooke · May 23, 2006

I'm the lighting director for an international Christian television station called The Miracle Channel based out of Canada. My crew and I have been setting up for this show for the past week. It's always interesting doing live TV because everything has to be set up before hand and there can be no mistakes. We will be airing and streaming live every day from 5-10pm mtn and rebroadcast the next day from 1-5pm mtn. I felt that this should go in the In Production Sub-Forum because it's literally in production as you watch. Why does this belong on a Cinematography forum? Because I find that I use a lot of the same techniques when doing live tv as when I'm DPing a dramatic story. It's just a lot harder to get the perfect setup when doing tv with 4 different sets on the same show and only 5 cameras to cover the action. I have to light everything from above and keep the floor clean of all cables. For this show, I only have 36 channels of dimming so I'm using 26 of them for music and 10 of them for the main living room set. Everything else is plugged into 20amp breaker circuits. I'm running with about 100 lights. 40 of them being silver PAR64's and the rest are mainly 2K Fresnels, 1K Broads, 1K open face Varibeams, 750w Fresnels, pinspots and a blinder. I have 2 Martin Hazers for music and unfortunately no intelligent fixtures for this show. My main colors for the band are steel blue, light relief yellow and white. Over the main set, I have flags, 3x3 diffusion frames and foam core hanging all over the place. All of my key lights on talking sets are white and I have #02 Bastard Amber on the fill lights and back lights. Background colors are often straw tint or special lavender (doubled or tripled up). I'm lit to an f4.0 @ 500 ASA.

Take a look at this link... http://miraclechannel.ca/ (click Watch us Online) and watch us live from 5:00-10:00pm mtn Tuesday (May 23rd) ? Saturday (May 28th). Usually we go to music at the bottom of the hour after we come back from a break.

Chris Cooke · May 25, 2006

Well, we just finished our second day of production. So far it's been going decent but we've had a few interesting moments. The hazers decided to quit working a couple times during the show which meant no beams of light during music. We got it figured out now. One of the console operators hasn't been on the ball the past two nights (forgets to bring up the smoke, makes lighting changes at random times in the song and once she actually hit the blackout button) so I'm getting a new guy for the rest of the week (I can't operate the lights because I'm needed all night as a camera operator). I had an interesting conversation with our head sound tech today. He's complaining that my flags are causing the audio from his main speaker for one of the sets to be muddy. I told him that it doesn't affect the sound on air and my flags affect the look on air so they're gonna stay. He obviously wasn't too happy with my reply. That's ok, I think that I'll get our rigging gaffer to move the speaker for him tomorow to a better location.

Near the end of the night, one of our shoulder cameras went down and I don't think we'll be able to use it for the rest of the week. I think it's the triax connector.

I'll snap some pics of the lighting tomorow and post them at the end of the day.

BTW, the rebroadcasts are from 10:00pm - 12:00pm mtn and 11:00am - 5:00pm mtn. We're airing this stuff 13 hours per day so I'm sure that you guys can catch a bit of one of the shows.

Again, the link is http://miraclechannel.ca/ (click Watch us Online). You don't have to sign up for anything just click the button and you're good to go.

We're also available in Canada on Star Choice: channel 357, Bell ExpressVu: channel 652 and many cable systems. In the states, Intelsat Americas 5 (Free-to-air) and on digital cable in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Chris Cooke · May 26, 2006

I just remembered at the end of the day that I was gonna snap a picture. We had already turned all the lights off and flipped on the fluorescent work lights but you can kinda see how I have one of the sets lit. I used lots of 2K's, flags, black wrap, diffusion frames and bounce boards to get the soft but controlled light.

(Sorry the picture is so big, I don't have a picture editor at the moment)