VIDEO AT FEEDMAGAZINE.TV/LATEST-ISSUE
CRAZY LITTLE THING The production team set up a small, portable control room, with main connectivity through the cloud via Amazon Web Services, vMix Call live video streaming software, a Teradici cloud access client on the main MacBook and an Akai Professional APC with a MIDI connection for sound mixing. Armstrong felt that audio was going to be a major issue. It fell to presenter Monbiot to carry the show from beginning to end: if the producers lost his audio, they had nothing to fall back on, as there were no VT clips prepared beforehand. “We had two conventional Sennheiser radio mics on George, plus a boom mic,” he says. “These were mixed by the sound recordist into two iPhone- based vMix Calls with different providers. Then the B-camera operator had a Deity shotgun mic in his iPhone. Finally, George’s Apple AirPods with their ‘not-too-bad’ audio fed into his iPhone vMix Call. So, we had five audio channels. Between them, we managed to cover everything.” Producing a live environmental documentary from the Wye Valley riverbed, through camera phones and the cloud, was a huge departure for everyone involved with Rivercide . “I used to work with those OB scanners and it took overnight to set them up, with generators, miles of cable and hugely expensive cameras. Now, you just have this crazy little thing,” he says, holding up an iPhone. “It’s not only the picture and the sound; you also have a better viewfinder than on many a camera, and built-in stabilisation. “I just love this way of working now, in terms of cost and portability. But the most important change is this: traditionally, when I was directing studio or OB productions, it was a top-down operation. Whether scripted or unscripted, with everyone on talkback, I was in control. I could decide, pretty much, what to do next. “This is the other way around. Our presenter George was deciding what to do. We had an outline script, with a pretty rough idea of what was going to happen, but George was effectively directing. Rather than sitting beside me making notes, Franny said, ‘I’ll be better off on the main camera.’ So, she was out there with camera one, making decisions.
LIVE STREAM Doing a live
investigation in a remote natural location was ground-breaking. You can watch Rivercide in full in the digital edition of FEED
in together. We were live and weren’t exactly sure what would happen, technically or content-wise – particularly in the case of whether the people we were challenging would come on air. “It was very, very risky. I can’t tell you! At the outset I thought it was 50:50 as to whether it would really work. But, by bringing more people into the team and adding their experience, and building in more redundancy in terms of internet channels and audio channels – to try and make sure we could at least keep something on the air for over an hour – by some sort of miracle we managed it!” INSTEAD OF AN ORCHESTRAWITH A CONDUCTOR, THISWAS A PIECE CONDUCTED FROM THE KEYBOARD
WITH A PADDLE Live from the River Wye, with Franny Armstrong and George Monbiot
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