The Motion Factory was asked to make a DVD of an international Brazilian dance congress. A project like this offers many challenges, especially because the audience wasn't seated. How can you get a front-row view without bothering the audience? In this article we'll show you how we tackled this particular shoot.

Filming live events is a balance. On one hand you need to shoot good images. On the other hand, the show is there for the audience and if the video-guy gets in the way, you'll spoil the enjoyment of the audience. So we couldn't put our cameras in front of the audience and since there were no chairs in the room, the audience would be standing up.

Camera position 

We put the main camera behind the audience on a jib. This way we could lift the camera above the heads of the audience. Also, we could put the camera as high as we wanted. Most of the time, however, we'd keep the camera as low as possible, just looking over the heads of the audience.

Sound 

The audio was another issue that required attention. If you just use the microphone that's on the camera, the sound quality is not going to be great. And you always catch the sound of people that are chatting close to the camera, which can be particularly annoying if they're gossiping about the performers while you're recording the show.

To get the best sound quality, we needed a direct connection to the mixing desk of the venue. Since it was impractical to run long cables in this venue where people would be walking and dancing everywhere, we decided to connect to the mixing desk using a wireless link (using two wireless transmitters and receivers). That way, we could record the music at practically the same sound quality as on the original CD's.

Now one important thing was still missing from the audio: the sound of the audience. When the people are cheering or applauding, you need to hear that on the DVD, otherwise you take away a lot of the atmosphere. So we decided to put a microphone high above the audience. This way, we could record the sound of the crowd, but we wouldn't pick up conversations from individual people.

Command centre 

Behind the jib we set up a small command centre (see picture below) where we could control the camera, check the image on a monitor and process the audio using a portable mixer. During the shows, the place was crowded and we found that several people came to stand behind us to watch the show on our monitor.

"Command centre" showing the jib, audio mixer and the monitor.

Because there wasn't enough space for everybody to watch the shows in the main room, we provided a live video feed to the bar, where people could enjoy the shows on a large screen. 

The result