🔔Tips & Tricks

Wayfinding: Taxonomy > Cinematic Theatre > Tips & Tricks

Multicam Capture: cinematically, multicam set-ups allow continuous capture of the performance from multiple angles, with the best perspectives chosen later during editing. : ‘Specifically, this technique involves the inclusion of wide-angle establishing shots of the whole stage at the beginning of scenes to lay out their spatial configuration, providing eye-line matches and matches on action in the editing that effectively camouflage cuts between shots, and by positioning the cameras in such a way that viewers can easily orient themselves within the space’.

Early live television broadcasts pioneered multicam filming in real-time, but it is valuable for theatres to : ‘Switching from camera to camera allows the television director to replicate the effect of the theatre spectator’s wandering eye …’. With multicam capture as recording, there are fewer (or no) cinematographers onstage interrupting the performance, so the full show can be seamlessly captured.

As noted earlier, cameras are so small now that you can easily hide them around the performance space to capture the action without disrupting performers or audience. For example, : ‘Cameras are hidden around the stage, and the crew grabs specific shots, like over actors’ shoulders’. In contrast, Kip Williams’ work on The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde with Sydney Theatre Company (2022) incorporated a camera crew with large cameras onstage with the in-person performers (discussed below); this was part of the show’s dramaturgy, but it does not have to be part of your dramaturgy just to get good shots.

While some Cinematic Theatre makers now are experimenting with unique camera placements, like GoPros or body cams on the actors, starting with a simpler and less intrusive approach will faithfully capture your show. Jessica Russell, a Western Australia freelance videographer and broadcast director in the performing arts scene, on tech and theatre: ‘I think if you try and become too filmic and stylised with that broadcast and capturing multicam, it loses the essence – that ephemeral quality of live theatre’. Using multicam set-ups can create basic predictable options so as a theatre maker, you can become consistent with how your work looks to a film audience. It also means that you are more likely to capture a theatrical experience as you will not disturb actors’ performances or audience reactions.

Cinematographer as Performer: as mentioned with The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, you can intentionally integrate the cinematographer like a cast member, and treat the camera as potential additional performer when capturing work that is not in a theatre building; this can give the audience a sense of immersion among the cast, somewhere between immersive theatre and traditional film. Morgan Green told me:

The DP (director of photography), Leslie Rivera was rehearsing with us, so it was almost like he was a member of the cast because he had staging, and just like the actors did. … we had a choreography that we built with him, and his instincts and his intuition about where the camera wants to be was really beautiful. And like, there's some incredible moments we were able to capture – it's a scene from a play, but at the same time you can see somebody breathing, and you can have that cinematic level of detail in the closeup. … it offered the best of both, the theatre and film.

Dramaturgically, you can also consider whether cameras are not just devices to transmit the experience to the audience, but potential hypermedial components of the mise-en-scene.

Highlight the Onstage Performers: depending on where an audience member sits in a theatre space, they will have a different view of the actors; stage acting has evolved to consider this, but many modern audiences still of ‘close-ups [that] showed raw emotions of actors that only live-stream attendees could experience, whereas the deepened effect of the sound authenticity within a theatre venue could in reverse not be experienced to its fullest by the cinema audience’. Grant Dodwell confirmed this as part of Australian Theatre Live’s translation from in-person to screen: ‘I think, being aware of the reaction shots of actors in particular, also helps tell story. … Unlike Other organizations I've seen … who also cover of the theatre, but they just cover whoever's talking, less whoever's responding’. Morgan Green offered that direct address to the camera can include filmic audiences in a way that stage audiences are also included: ‘we had Juicy, the Hamlet character, speak directly into the camera to break the fourth wall, and I think that worked pretty well and felt theatrical’.

While this direct address to the camera was theatrical, at the time, for Green, I will note that the Wilma Theater’s 2024 livestream broadcast of Fat Ham, performed onstage to an in-person audience as well, showed the performer directly addressing the in-person audience, but not staring into the camera. When it comes to filming an onstage show, you will likely need to choose which audience you break the fourth wall for. Speaking to a camera will not, for an in-person audience, likely feel like breaking the fourth wall, but it will communicate something about postdigital culture’s need to constantly broadcast our lives; in contrast, an actor talking to an in-person audience but not to a camera will demonstrate the theatricality of the moment, but it will not break the fourth wall of the screen. If, like Kip Williams’ The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, you have a film crew incorporated onstage as co-performers, you can capture a direct address to camera that then, through projection onto screens, becomes direct address to the audience filtered through a medial interface.

Keep Recordings Organised and Up to Date: Know Theatre in Cincinnati has a decades-long practice of recording their staged performances for their own archives; as with many archives, though, it was not often used as reference and had become disorganised. Andrew Hungerford, former artistic director of Know, told me their archives date back to about 2003, described his process of tidying up the company’s digital film archives, partly to find shows recorded in high enough quality to release to online streaming during the pandemic: ‘we have pretty solid recordings of, starting in 2007, our production of The Pillow Man, and from then on we've got pretty good recordings, although we do have some that are like … Somehow we missed the last two minutes of the show? And no one knew until I looked at it just now’. Consider the quality of the long-term archive as technology changes: ‘And so then, at that point, particularly with the archived stuff, it became a challenge to compete with that sort of level of multicam. Because, while some of our archival stuff is multicam, some of it was single-cam with pretty good sound. And some of it was also … well, technically high-def, because it was 1080 … it wasn't the same as stuff we’ve been capturing on our 4K camera since’. The archival question runs into a larger digital media issue of : ‘the eventuality that computer hardware, media, and file formats become obsolete before the useful life of the data that is stored on and in them ends’. It can be difficult as a consumer and as a theatre maker to keep track of the rapid pace of digital technology’s evolution, a problem discussed in more depth in Spotlight-Fast Prototyping.

Hire Outside Expertise: You might also consider hiring a film crew (like Australian Theatre Live) to help; for instance, Santa Cruz, California’s Actors’ Theatre reportedly used grant funds in 2022, during the omicron surge, to hire a professional film crew to cinematically capture the production in the event the show needed to close early, or if audiences did not feel safe attending person and on-demand streaming : ‘while the live viewing experience must wait a while longer, the enjoyment of savoring the work – the dramatic tension and comic surprise of these plays – will still be available. It’s a clever and forward-looking way of snatching theatrical victory from the mouth of defeat’. Budgeting for a film crew or for upskilling your own organisation’s talent should be an important line item for future theatre companies.

Another important way to communicate theatricality in Cinematic Theatre involves the preshow; see Spotlight-Preshow Setup for more analysis of approaches to including the distanced audience before the ‘curtain’.