Record Cellar

Record Cellar is a sitcom pilot produced entirely by students under the supervision of Executive Producer Kevin S. Bright. The show was developed over the course of three months and was shot in front of a live studio audience over the course of two days. The premise of Record Cellar is that two siblings, Maggie and Miles, are being raised by their two ‘somewhat stoner-esque’ hippie, gay uncles Roy and Nash. Maggie and Miles are put in an interesting situation when they come to find out they’ll be taking over their uncles’ record store, which is a bit in the red. The shenanigans begin when they search for a way to save the Record Cellar.

I was brought onto the project a bit late in the game, but worked closely with the producers as well as the production designer, Ted Talanian. The venue for the taping of the set was a black-box style theater. The instrumentation for the show was a mix between theatrical fixtures and fixtures found on a television set. One of the challenges was striking a balance between the inventory of hard-edged fixtures and the selection of softer, more television-friendly fixtures. The largest issue we ran into was the dreaded ‘boom shadow’. As with a live taping, we needed localized audio and thus there were two Fisher boom mics on the deck. It took some time to reach a happy medium between lighting adjustments and more restricted boom movement, but in the end it all worked out. As this was a live taping of a sitcom – my team and I treated it like any other show done live. I worked closely with the director and tech team in control to find levels that worked for both the taping, and the live audience.