Jasmine Kylie Show

Jasmine Kylie Show

Coming back from our reading week, our class were set the challenge to work with the third year actors (who we had previously worked with before) to put on a meet and greet show. Obviously the actors themselves came up with the whole concept of the show, however for our class it was our task to make the show happen. 

I had immediately put myself forward to work on the camera's as I had previously worked with one but I wasn't that familiar with how they worked and often became confused with the movements of them. I also put myself forward because previously I had either been working on sound or in the gallery, when doing these jobs, I always wanted to try and operate a camera and to my luck I was assigned camera 1!

What is a camera operator?

Camera operators operate the cameras. This job includes rigging the cameras, ensuring each camera is on its mount. At the end of the day this would also include de-rigging the cameras also. Camera Operators are to follow camera cards which show them where and what position the camera should be at a certain aspect of the show. ‘Camera Operators need to listen to the script supervisor’s shot calling and the director’s instructions and sometimes to the vision mixer’s instructions” Cue and Cut

When I took on the job role of camera operator I knew what it would entail, but when on the camera one aspect I found especially hard was to actually move the camera in the right direction whilst trying to record. Once given advice by my lecturer I soon found out that I was making the job a lot harder than it actually was and soon after was moving the camera smoothly.

Here is an insert of the final cut of ‘The Jasmine Kylie Show’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vEwMcjdnl9s 

I think with working on camera 1 I had the hardest job of all of the camera operators as this was the camera that has the most movement and also had a lot of different and difficult camera angles to achieve. One that you can see in the show is when the second guest (Karl) came into my shot, I had to change from and single mid shot to a two shot and one thing that I wasn’t expecting with them was the height difference this made it a bit harder to try and position the shot.

One more movement which was a bit of a struggle was getting camera 1 to where the band was playing and back to the presenter again as it was the only dependable camera to go back and forth from each insert. For this I needed a bit of help from the floor manager and the movement had to be swift.

 I thoroughly enjoyed being in the making of the ‘Jasmine Kylie Show’ and although I suffered from a few issues, I felt like I overcame them within a professional way. On this show I learnt a lot about cameras and have a much better knowledge of how they work, meaning any pre conceptions I had have now been cleared up now for future work.