| One Life to Live's "Live" Week - Interview with Gary Tomlin | |
By Kate Walsh
More Soap Opera Digest and
Soap Opera Weekly Articles
|
|
Gary Tomlin
KW:
You put some very difficult scenes in this week: a love scene, a remote, a
fight.... Were you trying to make it difficult?
GT:
We were trying to make sure that we didn't just say "Okay, we're going to
do the show live and everybody's sitting around having coffee.
KW: Do you work
with the three camera system?
GT:
We work with...we generally work with a three camera system, but this week we'll
have eight cameras in the studio. Cameras will be moving during action in the
sets, but this studio is too small for us to move cameras too far, so basically,
the movement would be going from the sets that are opposite each other, so if
cameras 1,2 and 3, are for the two sets here, 4,5 and 6 are for the two sets
here and 7 and 8 for the two sets there, and the middle cameras will swing from
one to the other and very often we'll need four cameras in a set. For the
directors it also becomes very intricate in how you work out where the camera
are, the booms are, what actors need mikes. There's a lot, and the music is
done up here, upstairs they're watching, giving cues and sound effects too
KW: How is the
sound different during a live week?
GT:
Let's say you're in a big crowded set which we are very often and you have all
this stuff going on and this running around and making all this noise and you
cut to another set...stop...the noise has to stop immediately, because you're
coming to a very quiet scene in another set, so all the extras, everybody has to
be [quiet]...or else you're going to hear them and it may be coming one part of
the country to another or one...within the context of the show, one city to
another. Even if you have a phone call...one of the [practice] shows we did we
had a phone call that cut back and forth, and one person was in the airport and
the other person was in their bedroom, so every time we cut to the person in the
airport you have to put in all the airport sound effects, every time you cut
back it has to cut out immediately.
KW: When did this
all begin, when did you first conceive of the idea?
GT:
I've always wanted to do a week live. I wanted to do it on Sunset Beach, and
because of cost restraints and also because of impeachment news, believe it or
not, we didn't do it. I came here and I thought, the studio [is too small]...I
wanted to do it, but I couldn't figure out how, and I never said anything about
it, so I kept looking around and looking around and then we did six shows a
week, and I could see the cast here is totally game to it. I could tell that
they were absolutely capable of doing a week of shows live and then when we were
on out Christmas break last year, it sort of hit me, just bring me more
equipment instead of being hindered by what we've got I can bring in more
cameras on those days and a couple more booms and we can make it work, so we
came back in January and I talked to (ABC Daytime executives) Felicia (Minei
Behr) and Angela (Shapiro) about it, and Angela laughed and thought I was out of
my mind, but was very supportive, and then I mentioned it to the cast and crew
and everybody was just phenomenally enthusiastic about it.
KW: What did the
writers say?
GT:
Well, Chris Whitesell and I worked together on SB, so we had an
understanding, although the difference was we were in a much bigger studio on
SB, we could use more sets, it wasn't really as much as a logistical problem as
it was here. But Chris and Lorraine (Broderick) they love a challenge, they
[said] , how can we make this work. Because it was May sweeps anyway, they had
lots of good story going on, all this stuff is going to be exploding, so it
would be a really good week to go live. And if we get people sampling the show,
it's a good week to hook people in.
>Click HERE to read the exclusive interviews with OLTL cast members! >>>
|
Check out this week's cover story in |
© Copyright by Soap Opera Weekly, Katherine Thurston and About, Inc. May, 2002
