Film and TV Technician (1957)

72 FILM & TV TECHNICIAN May 1957 Win Min Than had never seen television until she came to England to co-star with Gregory Peck in 'The Purple Plain'. "We do not have television in Burma " she says, "hut then we are a naturally happy people!" We have invited QUENTIN LAWRENCE, of A.C.T.T.'s Television Producer-Directors' Section, to <•( ntribute occasional articles on various technical aspects of television production. He opens in this issue with a subject of never-ending controversy. Film or 'Live9? SINCE this journal is read by film and television technicians alike, perhaps it would not be inappropriate to devote a few lines to a topic on which controversy rages unceasingly, and on which I suppose the last word will never be said; I refer to the general question of "live" versus "film" studio production technique. Perhaps the word " versus " is out of place; the two techniques are not of course competitive. If one has to make a film, one makes it in a film studio; if one has to do a live production, one does it live. However, the end-product is the same — a story told in pictures on a screen with accompanying sound — and sidelong glances, sometimes envious, sometimes derisive, are often being cast from one camp to the other. And whichever one is engaged in one cannot — or at any rate should not banish from one's mind the question of how the other medium would tackle the same problem. It has been my good fortune to divide my time pretty well equally in the last twelve months between active direction in both media, and immediately prior to that I received my grounding as a director in the much-discussed High-Definition venture, a true hybrid if ever there was one. Any conclusions which I may by now have come to are therefore based on fairly comprehensive practical experience. In point of fact they are few, but interesting to me because they are so diametrically opposed to what I expected at the outset. By the same rules The raison d'etre of the HighDefinition project was the applicability of Television production methods to film making. I now find myself implacably dedicated to the exact complementary idea, which is the applicability of the basics of film production to live Television. It never ceases to astonish me that this approach is not more widely canvassed in the grounding of training of Television directors. To have once mastered the technique of directing a film is to be provided with the means of solving, by the same rules as one learned in the film studio, nearly every problem that presents itself in the planning of a Television production. Ninety per cent of the television director's technical problems (except, of course, those concerned with writing and acting, which must come first) are concerned with where to place the camera, with what lens, and; when and how to cut from one shot to the next. Now if one is capable of participating in these decisions on the studio floor and in the cuttingroom, one can just as easily — very often more easily — make them under TV production conditions. Many film technicians get very bewildered and baffled by conditions in a TV production control room, which often seems to resemble the bridge of a destroyer under fire during a naval battle. The important thing to remember about this is, that once a director climbs into the " gallery" his work