Someone’s In The Kitchen With Lucy!
Someone’s In The Kitchen With Lucy!
Ethyl and Lucy rehearse for a scene in the kitchen. In front of the sound boom, Director of Photography Karl Freund is making adjustments with the crew. The show goes before the motion picture cameras in much the same way it would as a live show in a television studio. As Freund pointed out, the almost continuous camera-on-dolly technique employed is adapted from standard TV camera operations for live shows.
The show is photographed on 35mm film with three Mitchell BNC cameras mounted on dollies, as shown in the photos. All three cameras shoot the action simultaneously. The camera in the center makes all the long shots with a 40mm wide-angle lens. The cameras at either side record the action in close-ups, using 3-inch and 4-inch lenses. In the beginning, the company used a cue-track method, which permitted remote control operation of the cameras individually for long shot, medium shot, and close-up, as the script demanded. This system was soon abandoned, however, in favor of regular film production methods, with the tacks from the three cameras edited on the Moviola, etc. The result is greater speed in the photography of scenes and better results in the final editing.
Cueing of camera operators, grips operating the dollies, and of the gaffer handling the light dimmers is still a major function in the production of the weekly films. When the show is being photographed, the script girl in a booth overlooking the stage is in direct contact with the key technicians at all times via two-way intercom phones. Although each man previously is briefed on the operation and in many cases has floor marks to guide him, the script girl insures against any possibility of error by her timely cues. Impressive is the speed with which the crews move on to the next setup and start shooting again. A special check made of this operation showed that elapsed time between camera setups averaged a minute-and-a-half.
A major factor making such speed possible is the lighting arrangement worked out for the production. Since invariably the players are in action over almost the entire set, the light intensity must be uniform over the entire area at all times. There are no light changes, other than those made by dimming. All set illumination, therefore, is from overhead. there are no floor lamps and the only illumination from a lower level comes from the portable fill lights, which are mounted just above the matt box on each camera.
got a little confused by that ‘cue track’ explanation. Can you elaborate? I assume ‘remote control’ doesn’t mean the pan/tilt function which, I believe, was always done with a human camera operator.
This is from the first episode filmed. It was shot with 4 cameras and shot as if it were being done as a theater production (the episode was shot in 30 minutes). In this shot Lucy is actually wearing 4-5 layers of clothing. The production didn’t work and it was revamped by the time the next shoot took place a week later. Cameras were cut down to 3 and they took breaks to change film, costume changes, and set changes. NOTE that I Love Lucy was not the first show shot with three film cameras in front of a live audience. Ralph Edwards “Truth of Consequences” was already doing this. So was “You Bet Your Life” (which used 8 cameras). What made Lucy different is that the cameras could move. The other series used cameras that were stationary. The biggest innovation from “Lucy” was the flat lighting design Fruend created. It is still in use today is both large and tiny studios.