Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Entertainment/2010 October 15

= October 15 =

What's the difference in type of filming used
Last night the NBC program 30 Rock was "Live" and the picture quality was different from the regular show. Was it the frame rate, progressive vs. interleaved, video in one and film in the other, or what? 20.137.18.50 (talk) 13:13, 15 October 2010 (UTC)


 * I didn't see it, but presumably you got the right answer on the last guess: it's about the difference between film and video. 30 Rock is regularly shot on 35mm film. If you're watching a live broadcast you're not seeing film, of course, since film has to be developed, printed, etc. So the "live" show was broadcast live or previously taped on video, which looks very different from film. Video looks more "harsh" or "live" to most of us, so it's usually a bit jarring to see a switch from film to video. You'll see this occasionally on filmed shows, such as when they switch to video to show the viewpoint of a camcorder or surveillance camera; this was done several times on The Wire, for example. —Kevin Myers 14:20, 15 October 2010 (UTC)


 * There's also potentially a difference in setup, e.g. single-camera setup vs. multiple-camera setup. (30-Rock is listed in List of single-camera situation comedies). With their usual single-camera setup, when you have a back-and-forth conversation (camera goes from Jack to Liz to Jack to Liz, etc.), each "half" of the conversation is filmed separately, with the lighting and camera positions being readjusted, tweaked, and optimized in between. With a live show or multiple-camera setup, you don't have that, so instead they use a "flat" lighting and "decent" camera locations which work best for using all the cameras simultaneously, which gives it a slightly "rougher" look. -- 140.142.20.229 (talk) 17:15, 15 October 2010 (UTC)


 * Btw, they did both live East Coast [http:// bit.ly/ cDOSa h] and live West Coast [http:// bit.ly/ blN2X Q] versions. Links can't get past the Wikipedia spam filter, so join up sections. Pepso2 (talk) 17:34, 15 October 2010 (UTC)


 * Also, live video won't go through post-production color balancing and cleanup, so it won't look at clean. -- k a i n a w &trade; 18:08, 15 October 2010 (UTC)


 * Where it gets interesting is when they use both in the same program. For one thing, British TV programs have often used film for exteriors and videotape for interiors. The "Larry Sanders Show" on HBO took a slightly different approach. The entire thing was filmed, except for the parts where the TV viewer is "looking through the camera" at the show-within-the-show. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 20:01, 15 October 2010 (UTC)


 * Along those same lines, but slightly off topic, I'm sometimes amused at the flexibility of TV shows, particularly older ones, when it came to interiors and exteriors. In M*A*S*H, sometimes the exteriors were really filmed outside, sometimes in a studio. The same army camp "feels" very different depending on which approach was used, but the audience doesn't notice or care. The crazy part is when the overall scene was filmed outdoors, but the closeups were clearly filmed in the studio. Funny when you notice it. Many old films did this too, of course—old Westerns often shifted to the studio for scenes aroud the campfire, for example—but people don't usually notice. —Kevin Myers 02:00, 16 October 2010 (UTC)


 * I don't think it's too off-topic, as it's about filmmaking techniques. In the old days, the movie was more about the story than about the trappings. Using the same set of back-lot brownstone stoops in countless movies was a cost-savings, but as audiences became more sophisticated they started to notice, and the studios went for more expensive one-use location shooting and stopped using backlots and stock footage. Then there's John Ford, with his many films that put Monument Valley on display. I'm not so sure people didn't notice, they just accepted it because they knew "it was only a movie". You can get totally immersed in a movie's story and still know it's not "real". Movie "nitpicking" strikes me as being funny for itself. Of course there will continuity mistakes. A movie is an artificial reality, so it's going to have inconsistencies and oddities. Reality or "real life" is consistent, i.e. it's "real". That's part of why people react so differently to the countless "deaths" in movies vs. a real death that happens to be captured in film or photograph. I know what you mean about MASH, but it didn't really matter, as the story was the important thing. Star Trek, for example, was almost totally studio-bound, and when they would go outside in the bright sunlight, which casts harsher shadows (as with the episode where Kirk had to battle a biped lizard of some kind), the contrast is striking. And by the way, thanks to George Lucas we have another major difference, which is digital moviemaking. Maybe audiences can't tell when they've got the CGI going, but I certainly can. It may be sophisticated, but it still looks fake. P.S. They had campfires burning inside the building? Yikes. Presumably they had guys with fire extinguishers standing nearby, just in case. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 09:35, 16 October 2010 (UTC)
 * My favorite example of what Bugs is talking about is The Sting. The film is set in Chicago, but in long outdoor shots (especially the scene where the Waitress Loretta is shot), it is so obvious that its a backlot in California because of the large, chaparall-covered hills in the background.  -- Jayron  32  03:29, 17 October 2010 (UTC)

Spitting Image TV Show - Music
An item in the UK TV puppet series "Spitting Image" featured a puppet fly buzzing around various piles of rubbish/excrement. I'd like to know the name of the track used as background music, played on something like a kazoo to give a buzzing fly kind of effect.

Thanks, as ever, for your help Wikipedians!

BadmanMonkey (talk) 20:49, 15 October 2010 (UTC)


 * I haven't seen it, but generally The Flight of the Bumblebee is quite common for this sort of thing. 109.155.37.180 (talk) 23:27, 15 October 2010 (UTC)


 * That's not it I'm afraid. There are some similarities but the piece I'm after has a much lighter, sillier, tone. I seem to remember now that it might feature somewhere in the film Shaun if the Dead, possibly towards the end. I'll see where that avenue leads. Thanks.

BadmanMonkey (talk) 13:04, 16 October 2010 (UTC)


 * Managed to find it via the Shaun of the Dead route; it's "The Gonk" by The Noveltones, in cas anyone else is interested - a masterpiece of cheesiness!

BadmanMonkey (talk) 14:06, 16 October 2010 (UTC)