Single Camera Techniques

This essay is about single camera techniques this is when a media product is filmed with only one camera and I will also be covering multi camera techniques. 

You can tell when a media product is only filmed with one camera because the camera will be moving around a lot more Eg. doing 360 shots and pan shots, to get us more involved in the action. They can do this because they don't have to worry about over cameras getting in to the shot. A example of this is a scene from The Matrix of a character dodging bullets. You can't do shots like this with multiple cameras because you would get the other cameras in shot.



You can do more with the lighting when using one camera because you can do the lighting for each shot and do some cool stuff with the lighting but when using multiple cameras you have to light the whole scene this means that you have to make sure that the lighting looks good from all the cameras perspective and that you can't do as much with the lighting as you could do with a single camera.


Sound in single camera shots are normal filmed with some overlay time so that you can have a little earlier and a bit behind the shot to avoid jumpy and awkward transitions. A good example of this is when Darth Vader is choking someone and the audio of him talking goes over many shots. With multiple cameras you can put microphones on each of cameras and then have them set up around the room.


It can take ages to find the footage because it's all shot on one camera, when editing a single camera product you just have to put clips together and overlap them to make the edit look smoother these are called L and J cuts.

You can normal tell if a media product is filmed with a single camera or filmed with multiple cameras because of the shots they use. Most films use a single camera because you can play around a lot more with shots because you don't have to worry about getting over cameras in the shot. A example of this a Star Wars their fight scenes won't be nearly has interesting if they filmed it with multiple cameras because they would be Limited to what angles they could use with out getting the other cameras in the shot.


Soaps are filmed with Multiple cameras because of they don't have much time to do them so if the more cameras filming they won't have to act the scene more than once unless they got it wrong E.g EastEnders. When it comes to editing it's easy because all cameras would have been rolling at the same time, so all you have to do is do some L and J cuts to make it look smooth and it's done, this is one of the reasons soaps use multiple cameras because they need to be fast because they bring them out so offered.