Digital Video - January 2008 - (Page 39) mix up sizes and framing. “Some reality shows just stick with medium shots,” he says, “but we’ll go wide sometimes and then other times we’ll go in real tight. I think it makes it more interesting.” He notes that he has plenty of light in the shop to always dial in ND on the cameras to alter the stop on the lens without having to change light levels. “We’ll often be all the way open to a T1.9,” he says, “but if we’re going in on a tight shot with fine detail, I’ll stop down so I can just dial in less ND and go to a stop of about a T5.6. “The biggest thing is the storytelling,” Krummel attests. “If someone is telling a good story, we don’t want to be doing [tricks] with the camera. The stories are the most important aspect of the show.” Producers monitor picture and audio in a tiny control room located in the back of High Voltage. Fill-in operator Brian Allen gets in close as Kat sketches out one of her designs. The resulting DVCPRO and HDV tapes are shipped to Original Media in New York, where a team of seven editors, assistants and turning producers collaborate to build each episode. “One very good thing about this show,” says editor John Higgins, “is that it’s multi-camera. Not all reality shows are. I worked on Kathy Griffin’s show [My Life on the D-List] and a lot of that was single-camera, and it’s harder to work with material shot that way. I think that’s why a lot of reality shows seem more ‘cutty.’ They have to cheat more — use more cutaways and put things together that don’t always feel right — because they don’t have the material to work with.” When LA Ink began, Higgins explains, “We wanted to make it different from a lot of other reality shows. The pacing would be different, which also changed the shooting style. We try not to do a lot of swish pans and quick zooming in and out. The stories of the tattoos exist on their own. We’re documenting individual stories and cutting them down to size. We’re not manipulating their stories.” The editing process begins with assistants digitizing all the material at the fairly low-resolution 15:1 compression format onto an Avid Unity server connected via fibre to the seven editing rooms and their Avid Media Composer 2.7 workstations. 39
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