I’m going to try and make this reflection as honest as possible.

Taking into consideration all the different aspects to this project, I think we went okay. As all good live studio productions, there were the technical difficulties. I like to think that this made for a more authentic experience… But let me expand. In one instance, I found it difficult as I hadn’t seen our particular show before. I watched a couple of clips, but it wasn’t enough for me to really understand how the comedy was portrayed in a technical sense. Next time I would definitely educate myself a little better. I find, as probably do most people, the way a shot is framed, or edited (in a sense of how shots are transitioned in live tv) plays a huge role in the comedic factor. Obviously for every sit-com it’s different. Shows like The Office find peak comedy in their breaking of the fourth wall. If I had understood the comedic style of Apartment 23 better, I think I could have used the cameras that we had available to our advantage.

Besides this, I guess it’s also important to reflect on the whole ‘doing’ part of the assessment. My role was to be the switcher. Pretty much, I switched between cameras during the live takes. Because it was a very simple setup, with only three cameras, which were all stationary, I think I probably had the easiest job of everyone in my group. The technical side of it was extremely easy to understand, which is encouraging going into later assessments, as when we get to bigger sets, with more cameras, I feel confident that I will be able to learn and grow in this area. My main problem though was communication with our director. Dale clearly had a vision of how he wanted the scene to play out, however when communicating shot changes to me, he seemed quite frantic. He 100% knew what he was doing, but due to maybe rushed planning, a few times he would tell me to switch to a camera, and once I had done that, realised he had mistakenly fed me the wrong camera number.

I also want to add a quick note about my thoughts on the audience, and being apart of it. Throughout the semester, we have discussed a lot about live studio audiences. It was interesting that we took the time to set up our live audience, but no groups (including my own) took advantage of that. At the time, I didn’t think twice about it, but watching the recorded clips and reflecting back, I’ve realised that we didn’t use our audience to it’s full advantage. A huge part of having that live studio audience, is to get the live reactions, and more specifically, the laughs from the audience. Seeing as we weren’t going to be editing these clips and adding in laugh tracks, it could have been beneficial to have someone signalling the audience to laugh, or just giving them the opportunity to laugh when they felt it was appropriate. Without the audience participation, in a way there was no point for it to be recorded live. As it mentions in the week 3 reading ‘sounding live’, Gina Giotta discusses the role that laughter plays, not only in the delivery of a comedic piece, but also in the audience response. Performers are encouraged by laughter, and in the end, it leads to a more polished, and confident piece of work.

With something as short and as planned as this, I absolutely think our communication should have been stronger. Technically as a team, we were very under control, it was our communication that really let us down. I think that we all understand where we went wrong, and how we can improve for the next assessment, which gives me a lot of confidence. I’m looking forward to exploring different roles, but also to grow in the role that i’ve already had a go at.