A trick we learned

The subject of audience response has come up a lot lately.  Here's something else along those lines.

I’ve talked about how we shot multi-camera shows in front of studio audiences. At times we pre-shot scenes for one reason or another. The scene took place outside, we had a guest star only available for one day, kids or animals in the scene, tricky special effects, they were in cars, etc.

What happens is those scenes are usually filmed the day before the audience filming. The editor would hastily put together a cut and during the audience filming they would be shown on monitors at the appropriate place in the story. The audience laughter would be recorded and eventually married to those finished scenes.

But when David Isaacs and I were showrunning we had a trick.

We noticed that the laughs were never as good when the audience was just watching the scenes on monitors. So we tried an experiment. Instead of showing the scenes we tried to recreate them live.  We didn't film them.  Only the audience audio was recorded.

Now this was not always possible, but when it was we felt it was worth a try.

A good example was car scenes. If they were filmed on the stage you would pre-shoot them with either blue screen to add scenery out the windows in post production. Or, for night scenes there is a process with whirling lights that simulate headlights and traffic.

But for the audience, here’s what we did. We set two chairs on the stage (like an improv show) and just told the audience what we were doing. Imagine they’re in a car. Same if a character was at a gas station. We’d say “pretend he’s holding a pump.” They did and we were rewarded with laughter.

We found we got much bigger and better laughs even with two actors sitting on chairs. The lesson learned here:  You just can’t beat the immediacy of a live performance.

from By Ken Levine