Recently, I had the fun experience of being filmed for two different fall TV series. Due to confidentiality until they air, I can’t say the names but both feature kid-related stories.
I have been interviewed for TV several times. One of the things they remind people of is not to wear black, white, bold patterns, or red. I could always understand the reasons for black, white, and patterns but no one could give me why they didn’t want red.
Well, I finally asked one of the directors last week who gave me a good answer that made sense. This is a simplified version. The color red has the longest wavelengths and when filmed, it appears with jagged edges. But since many actors on TV wear red shirts, I wondered how they were able to. The director said that first of all, they have a wardrobe person who picks specific colors for the actors to wear and certain shades of red are okay. Plus when a show is recorded on film and not on digital tape, the film can process the color red better. Even more interesting was when she said that if a person does wear red and it comes out jagged, there’s an expensive, tedious process of smoothing out the lines frame by frame. Since most production companies and news media don’t want to or can’t take the time to do that, they just give the reminder to not wear red at all.
The other thing I learned was why they record about 30 seconds of silence after taping in a room where the interview or segment was shot. Everyone sits quietly while the camera rolls. Reason? Because when they edit the footage, they have blank space where they can splice pieces together and you won’t be able to tell they did it because you’ll still hear the same background noise even if there wasn’t any noise at all. If they pieced two parts of a sentence together but didn’t have the matching room sound, you’d be able to hear the difference between the two parts. Interesting, isn’t it?
Who knew that from having my business, I’d also be getting a brief introduction and education into filmmaking? They don’t teach that in middle school or even in most regular high schools.
