Trip to The London Studios

Over the Christmas break I was lucky enough to visit the London studios, one of Europe's largest television studio complexes. My trip revolved around the rehearsal and subsequent recording of a channel four production 'Balls of Steel'. The production itself was actually Balls of S***...but that's not the focus of this post.

The London Studios are situated on the Southbank of the River Thames next door to the National Theatre. The facility comprises of several studios, (The three main ones being underground) and a tower where the administrative duties of the seperate departments and network bosses nest.

During my visit, I was under the watchful eye of Steve Crabtree, an experienced technical operator in the VTR (Video Tape Recording) department, who's job it was to prepare and playback VT's for 'Balls of Steel' using an EVS machine. (more on that later)

The studio (Number 2) has a gallery and sound booth connected to it out of the audiences view, this benefits the production as it enables the gallery staff to get to the studio quickly if needs be. This differed from the 'Deal or no Deal' set as they're gallery was in a completely seperate building on the site, all credit to their floor manager who must have been the producer's eyes, ears and hands.

'Balls of Steel' is an hour long show that revolves around people doing stupid and sometimes completely tasteless things. Channel four had hired the studios for four days to record 6 one hour episodes. I found this quite surprising, it seemed like a lot of material for four days work.

The set comprised of a main staging area with a large LCD screen built into the back wall. Material was played onto this so that the presenter, guests and audience could see the additional content of the show filmed off site. The show was still rehearsing three hours before recording, however, remembering back to 'Deal or no Deal', it seemed understandable. All they really needed to shoot in the studio was the artist's chats with the presenter and the audience reactions. Hearing the talkback from the gallery, Steve commented on the experience of the producers, Steve has worked in the industry for many years and found it obvious and frustrating when an inexperienced producer worked on a show, he commented on they're lack of expertise resulting in time wasting and therefore the production company potentially needing to fork out more for the facilities.

I counted four cameras, a camera on a ped with an auto-cue for the presenter. A camera mounted on a tripod but sometimes taken off and used as hand-held, another camera on a ped capturing stage left and finally a Jib or 'Jimmy Jib'. A jib is an arm that allows the camera to be elevated much higher or lower than a ped could achieve. Its arm-like structure fixed to a tripod allows the jib to rotate the camera 360 degrees around the tripod and some jibs allow the camera to rotate at the end of the arm. The jib basically is an aid to the cinematography of a production allowing much more interesting and hard to achieve angles.
(Wikipedia)

Now, onto the EVS (Electronic Video System). I kind of found this thing a bit hard to grasp so I'm going to let the above link do all the talking so to speak. Basically an EVS machine allows you to record, playback, dub and edit live footage instantaneously.
(EVS Website)

The EVS has 6 ports which can be configured in a number of ways. The set up for 'Balls of Steel' was four outputs playing material into the studio and the other two recording into the EVS. Because the material coming into the machine is digital, it can be treated in a non-linear fashion. For example...at one point, Steve was playing a VT into the studio, recording footage from the studio and editing a piece of footage he'd recorded seconds earlier all at the same time. The system was originally developed for sports productions which explains how seconds after a goal is scored in a football match, a slow-motion replay is shown, the plungers shown in the above picture can be programmed to speedup or reduce the rate at which the footage is played.

I asked Steve about the monitor listing the material stored in the EVS as it was in DOS format. He said the main reason for this were due to the system being used for a long time and trusted and also for visual clarity.

I asked what it was like to work in a technical position in television. He said that television was changing and that the introduction of machines like EVS and large server based technologies were making the work easier, I asked whether he thought they were a threat to jobs and he replied by telling me that there will always be work for someone that is skilled in the trade. I also asked him whether he felt that programs like Final Cut and Soundtrack Pro were making everyday people capable of doing jobs that three of four years ago would have taken years of training and practice. He said 'A mechanic has his tools in the garage.'

What I wise man...