Cabaret Performance

This week-end I had a job to film the performance for CU Musical Theatre Society which I've been part of for the past 3 years. This year I decided not to be involved in the performance, but to film and photograph it as first of all in the past all the videos of the performances have been very poor quality so I wanted to have a nice one, and second I adds to my portfolio and experience. And indeed it has.

The performance tool place in the club Jumping Jaks at Skydome. The lights and sound there are not great as the venue is suited for nights out, not performances. Still it fitted with the theme of the performance.

The stage is very wide and the acts are very varied therefore I decided to have three cameras, from three different angles to help me cover the whole performance space. I chose to use the Sony Z5s as it has good sound as well. I made a recording plan and script for each of the three cameras, so my camera operators know what to film. When you film a performance I think you need to know it very well, always know what happens next, this is why I watched their rehearsals in the past two weeks and all the run throughs, and I got my other two camera operators to watch it at least once before. Still I made quite a detailed script for each camera.

I also took pictures of the performance using two Canon5D, one with the normal wide lens, and the other with the 50mm. It was very tricky because the stage lights were in 4 different colours that couldn't be moved, so when I had a wide shot of everyone some parts of the group are overexposed, and some underexposed, and some under a very saturated red.


I did edit them as much as I could in Lightroom and reduced saturation on all of them but didn't want to do it too much as it would have lost the 'feel'.

All the pre-production was going well for the filming until I noticed that the MLS forgot to give me batteries for the Z5! Instead of giving me 6 batteries, 2 for each camera, they only gave me 2. I should have checked all the equipment before taking it out, but because I had so much of it I didn't think about it. Definitely a lesson learnt there.

Luckly I had the two 5Ds so I used one of the Z5s and the two 5Ds. Quality will most likely be different but I'll try make it look the same...somehow..

I was also very worried about sound, because only the soloist had radio mics, the ensemble wasn't micd at all, plus the main centre camera was placed right next to the band! Because of the setting of the venue, and the size of the stage that was the only place where we could have it to fit the whole stage in.

Looking back at the footage today sound is not as bad as I expected it to be, I am actually quite pleased with it. The 5D is renowned for having bad sound, but it was good. I will only use the sound from the Z5 though, as that camera recorded the whole show, the 5Ds were there for close ups and different angles.

In the end it was a good learning experience, in therm of pre production, dealing with issues on the spot and now post production.