Television Style

CHAPTER 3 Television Style The ventures of dreamland are thine for a day. —Silas Weir Mitchell (“Dreamland”) INTRODUCTION When we watch television, we seldom think about how it is produced, yet it is television style created by production techniques that allows us to enjoy the programs we watch. When we watch the reality show Survivor, we see a group of 16 men and women who appear to be stranded on an island that is miles from camp, coping with little or no convenient resources and dangerous elements. Yet, there are as many as 20 camera people, directors, producers, and others there with them. If the 16 people who play the survivor game were really alone on the island, there would be no television show about them. Because they are the invisible entities behind the show, the production professionals are not noticed by the viewers at all. As a television critic, you do not have to know the technical requirements of producing a television show, but it is useful to remember that what we see on the screen is the product of many talented people who work in the television industry. Knowing something about production techniques may help the critic talk about what is seen and heard and how it came about. The following discussion of television style was written for this book in collaboration with Paul Monaco, film and television producer, director, editor, writer, and professor of cinema and video. He writes from an experience of professional academic and media production of 25 years. LENGTH OF SHOT AND FRAMING Motion picture production developed distinctive stylistic approaches during the 50 years of making movies prior to the advent of broadcast television immediately after the Second World War. Often spoken of as “film language,” the stylistic choices for directors and editors may be sum- marized briefly. The first 30 years of filmmaking consisted of silent movies, produced without synchronous sound, so the fundamental film aesthetic developed with a strong emphasis on 51 52 PART II FORMAL ASPECTS OF TELEVISION visual communication. As such, there are several elements of film language that were estab- lished very early in the 20th century. Visually, all shots that appear on the screen, for both movies and television, may be described as long, medium, or close. A long shot includes an entire human figure from the bottom of the feet to the top of the head, creating a full picture. A medium shot is framed on a human figure at or near the waist, so that the torso and head fill the picture, while the legs and feet are below the lower frame line and out of the picture. A close-up shot shows only the head. There are a variety of shots that are gradients between these long, medium, and close shots that use intermediate framing, such as the medium long shot, the medium close shot, or the extreme close-up. What we see on television can always be thought of and described as being a long shot, a medium shot, or a close-up shot, with variants of distance from camera to subject. All types of material seen on television, and all genres of TV production, use these shots. Compared to motion picture production, strong tendencies exist in television toward medium shots. Medium shots are prominently used for news commentators, for interview- ers, for talk shows, and for sports commentators when they are on air. Most live and live- on-tape production in these genres favors the medium shot. Medium shots, moreover, are favored in the production of fictional dramas and comedies produced for television. The medium shot lends itself to what is considered the most natural framing for conversation. The heart of a great deal of writing for television drama and comedy is talk. As more viewers watch television on smaller screens, it is recommended that production should shift toward closer coverage. Viewing on a computer screen or other digital devices demands more close-ups and the elimination of wider visual coverage. The newer forms of viewing are thought to be geared to a more intimate relationship of the viewer to the picture. Photo 3.1 A medium shot on House. CHAPTER 3 Television Style 53 The genres of news, talk, information programming, and commentary in particular remind us that, although television production derives in part from the traditions of motion pictures, television also derives—and some would argue more strongly—from the traditions of broadcast radio. Talk is very important on television. Television is every bit as much an audio medium as it is a visual medium. Eventually, the audio component of a production may prove more definitive of the aesthetic of the emerging media than the picture that is receding in size. Over time, the typical style of television production developed a reliance on a medium shot that is actually framed tighter than one that is described as cutting a figure at the waist. That standard framing of a shot for television is best described as an “elbows” shot. TV directors and camera operators commonly use the term “elbows.” Any reference to elbows frames a shot of a figure so that the lower edge of the screen is at roughly the middle point of his or her arms. A great deal of television production uses this framing. Dramas, situation comedies, and soap operas nearly always do, but the commonality of this framing to production for television spreads more widely as well. To say that any particular shot or a frame line is standard or dominant in television production still must be understood to mean that other shots are used as well. Long shots are not as common in television production as they are in motion pictures, but they exist in all genres of television. They often serve to draw the viewer’s engagement out of a comedy or a drama emotionally. Hence, they are frequently used for transitions into and out of scenes. In sports programming, by contrast, long shots are absolutely vital to portraying the action of the game, which can only be shown with a long, wide-angle shot. MULTI-CAMERA PRODUCTION Live and live-on-tape television is normally multi-camera production, meaning several cameras are in use simultaneously. Four-camera production schemes have been common in television historically for the production of both dramatic and comedy programming. Such multi-camera production schemes allow for a good deal of coverage and have been particularly useful in the confined interior settings common in much of dramatic and comedy production for television. Multi-camera production in these circumstances has been considered especially amenable to episodic programming. Traditionally, television favored such production as economical and effective; however, budgetary considerations have created a trend toward single-camera production. REACTION SHOTS Early in the development of motion picture production, filmmakers discovered the power of the reaction shot, in which a facial expression or the gesture of a person who is not talking in a scene is revealed. This capacity to fill the screen with the reaction of a figure in a scene to another character’s action became more sophisticated in feature film production after the coming of synchronous sound to the movies in 1927. Production for main- stream Hollywood feature films standardized the reverse angle shot, so that an editor 54 PART II FORMAL ASPECTS OF TELEVISION could choose to show a single shot on either the speaker or the listener in a conversation. This ability, to cut to a reaction shot, is definitive of one of the primary aesthetic devices available to any filmmaker. Television has made coverage of reactions even more pro- nounced and prominent than in the movies. Part of this is because production for television usually is more intimate than the visual coverage provided in movies made for exhibition in theaters on the big screen. Live coverage in specific television genres—such as the talk show, quiz show, public affairs programming featuring experts with differing opinions, and sports broadcasting—lends itself so well to revealing the reactions of people being interviewed, pondering a question, arguing, or responding to a play in a game. In television comedy and drama, reaction shots have taken on increasing importance as production styles have evolved over the half century since the 1950s. Situation comedies are models of using reaction shots to emphasize the humor of a line. Because successful television is episodic, regular viewers are familiar with the characters and their relationships in a particular show. This familiarity facilitates the viewer’s understanding and appreciation of these sorts of reactions. The same is true for episodic drama, and nowhere is this more evident than in the daily daytime television soap operas. Prime-time drama relies heavily on reaction shots to convey realization, discovery, and a character’s coming to terms with troubling or devastating feelings or events. Mad Men, Grey’s Anatomy, House, Parenthood, and NCIS are typical of exceptionally popular dramatic programs in which coverage on shots of a character’s reaction to other characters and the episode’s story line is vital to the style. Multi-camera production of live talk shows, quiz shows, and sporting events, of course, lends itself to the coverage of reactions. This is true for comedy and dramatic production as well, but television production with a single camera also utilizes reaction shots. Although several directors guide the making of different episodes of Mad Men, for example, every episode is heavy on reaction shots, and their importance to the development of the story line and the revealing of a character’s feelings is vital.

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