Students Cover ‘The Audience’ at NST City

Students from our Media Technology and Television Production programmes were at Nuffield Southampton Theatre’s city venue today to help capture ‘The Audience’.

The comedy written by Peter Morgan and directed by Samuel Hodges speculates on what discussions may have taken place between the Queen and the thirteen Prime Ministers we’ve had over the last 65 years.

The students were tasked with building a flyaway system that was run from the scene dock to capture vision and sound for a DVD of the play. It was run like a live outside broadcast using three professional systems cameras with local operators and remote engineering. Multitrack audio was split from the theatre for a separate mix and all vision and sound feeds were recorded to disc as well as the programme output so that changes can be made post-production.

The DVD was directed and vision mixed by second year BA (Hons) Television and Video Production student Oscar with second year BSc (Hons) Sound for Film, TV and Games running sound. The cameras were operated by a mixture of first and second year students as well as some local college pupils. The production was ably supported by our Head of Television and Sound, Stuart Ray, and Technician Instructor Ian Williamson. Monty commented “it ran smoothly, our camera ops knew what they were doing and had good direction from Oscar. Blissfully simple”.

Such events provide invaluable experience for the students to become more familiar with the equipment as well as operating it and problem-solving under pressure; they also provide a great opportunity for creative, production and engineering students to combine their skills and work as a team. We’re lucky to have the NST City across the park and frequently receive opportunities through our industry links and in-house media production centre Solent Productions.