On The Air

One of the cool things about blogging going mainstream is that people with other jobs, people who aren’t just reporters or technology folks, are getting into blogging, and it opens up whole new insights into how their particular craft works. Like TV bloggers. Sure, there are tons and tons and tons of blogs by critics and viewers, but increasingly there are also blogs out there by people in the business. People who don’t just watch TV but who make it too, and for the first time ever they’re able to share their secrets with us on a weekly, or even daily, basis.

Like Jane Espenson, who is a working TV screenwriter but who also keeps up a blog giving tips to aspiring writers. Or Ken Levine, a writer/prodcuer/director whose career goes back to MASH.

And the reason I’m writing this piece is Greg Beeman, who is a producer and sometime-director on the show Heroes. Like he isn’t busy enough working on one of the biggest new hits of the season, he also sits down every week to write up his thoughts on each week’s episode. And this is real behind-the-scenes stuff, not just talking about characters and the story, but talking about the actual work of making a TV show and all the things he has to keep straight. Like on the episode that aired earlier this week, he was the director. So he talks for a bit about some of the camera choices he made while filming.

In the first scene with HRG and Isaac, HRG is in control of the scene. So in that one I used cranes and dollys and let the shots sweep and push in. Trying to visually mimic the emotion of the scene – pressure. The pressure HRG is putting on Isaac. After that, there’s a scene on the roof with Claude and Milo, where Claude beats the hell out of Peter with a Bo Stick. In this almost every shot is handheld and the camera trades off from character to character a lot. This technique adds a sense of chaos and unbalance - and whenever I cut wide to show the special relationships (important to do so your audience doesn’t get completely disoriented) I used big sweeping wide shots done from a crane, which are always passing over foreground objects. Moving past close foreground on full figure shots adds both a sense of speed and a sense of pressure.

These are the kind of decisions that directors and cinemtographers have to make every day, but it’s so rare that we, the audience, get to poke inside their heads. But now, because these guys are able to blog (Greg doesn’t even post the blog himself - he admits he has his assistant do it), we can get a small hint.