On my days off I often enjoy watching large amounts of various TV shows. Over the years, I feel like I have developed a good understanding of many different shows through behind the scenes features on DVDs and from videos and articles on the internet. Recently, I watched a behind the scenes feature that really caught my eye and that I think applies to what we're doing in our DVP class.
Seinfeld was a fantastic sitcom that ran from 1989 to 1998. Over the years, the show has been run and re-run over and over on multiple channels. And every time it's on, I sit down and watch it. However, one very cool thing out of all of the episodes I've seen has come to my attention. Seinfeld RESHOT scenes for syndication-IN DIFFERENT YEARS. There are episodes I've seen with one actor that were redone with another in later runs. For example, George Costanza's father's actor changed after his first appearance the year before, and those shots were redone with Jerry Stiller. But despite the year difference, the scenes looked PERFECT. Each shot matched exactly, the room seemed untouched, and the lighting was spot on. This fascinated me. How the hell were the production designers able to recreate these scenes after so much time???
Further reading led me to find out that all of the lighting in the studio was planned out and diagramed, so recording ANYTHING for the show would be a piece of cake. All of the replacement shots Seinfeld shot over the years were perfect. And now that we're doing lighting and set design ourselves, I just want to point out how taking pictures and diagramming things out will help us greatly during the reshoots that Alex said WILL eventually happen.
You know, it's just an interesting and important thing I wanted to throw out there...SO PLAN EVERYTHING!!!
Quite a fun piece to read. Since my second project, I have discovered that even if you have everything planned out that you wanted to do, and even if you know exactly how you want the video to come out, some things may change. I thought my second film was fine how I imagined it, but while we were shooting, I found out that I preferred a different method with some different angles. The final product actually came out better than I had originally anticipated. While planning is always important and should always be done, you shouldn't be open to new ideas or trying something different, you never quite know how it will turn out.
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