Björn Falkevik
Streaming – camera set-up
So, how should you think about how many cameras, camera angles and ... what a good shoot is. It depends. It’s actually ... kind of a hard question to give an answer to. I feel it’s about rhythm to start with. If it’s a very intense performance ... then you might want to cut a lot. It’s about the tempo. It’s like the drum or the bass. It gives you the baseline of what kind of melody your are doing. So, if you are doing something very sad or very dark or very slow and low key then you might not want to cut that often. You might just want to do it very slow and ... suggestive. And you might even have a live camera, and with a live camera I mean a living camera that you zoom in, you zoom out. You might just work with one camera. Or if you do something that’s very intense with lots of stuff happening then you might want to cut, cut, cut, cut, cut, cut. You might cut every one or two seconds. You might not even let the viewer see what’s happening you are just giving them flashes because you are working so hard. Like a rock video or something very dramatic. So, the tempo is one part. What kind of tempo does the story you want to tell have. And in the other part – what kind of camera angles and what a good shot is, that is very subjective. I mean, what kind of aesthetics are we working with. What kind of scenography do we have. What is happening in the back of the shot and in the front, do we need a wide angle or should we work more narrow. It’s just like what lens are we using. What lenses do we have on the camera. Do we work with lots of wide angle ... or do we have telephoto lenses so we are very zoomed in. Those kind of things are aesthetical. Then how many cameras, for example, once I did one thing for ... I worked a  couple of years with the Dramaten& here in Stockholm – the Royal Dramatic Theatre stage. Their experimental stuff. We actually did a show where we had one camera standing on stage, live streamed and we had ... together with the director, we changed the performance so it worked towards the camera. So, the camera was fixed we didn’t do anything with it we just had it standing there centre stage, looking into the back of the stage. Then we put markings on the floor ... so the performers knew where to stand when they did their part of the show. It was kind of an interesting experiment because then we took ... we scaled away as much as possible of the dynamics of the technical part of the camera or the stream. And then we instead moved the artists around, the performers. Which was kind of cool. It took a lot of logistics but it also gave a lot of opportunities because we had blind angles. So we could move the artists around the front and having them come in and out of shots in different ways. And if they walked around the camera, they suddenly could come into shot from the other side. Which was super nice because we could ... do stuff with the storytelling that we couldn’t do in a traditional sense. Because then he audience would see everything we did. So, we could use scenography in that sense. We pushed it in like in a ... almost like a puppet theater. But we did it on the main stage at the Royal Dramatic Theatre so we had all the stuff but we could also work with ups and downs and on the floor. But as for how to do it ... the map is actually not drawn yet. Because we don’t really know, I mean, there isn’t any decided standards ... This is how a live stream performance should be. We can actually experiment quite a lot and get away with it.