Picture Canning’s ‘Art School’ solution

Endemol West turned to broadcast facilities specialists Picture Canning Company for its latest series for BBC 2, ‘Art School’.
The show features tutors at Chelsea College of Art and Design putting journalist John Humphrys, TV personalities Ulrika Jonsson and Clarissa Dickson-Wright, actor Keith Allen, and Radio 1 DJ Nihal Arthanayake through their paces in an intensive two week art course.
Under the guidance of Chelsea's renowned tutors, Art School shows the students exploring all aspects of art - from the basics of drawing, to installation and performance art - culminating in an end of course exhibition.
Picture Canning’s job was to supply the solution posed by so many students and tutors working for up to 12 hours a day in a limited space, to produce 10 x 1 hour programs in two weeks. Visually, four Sony SX cameras proved to be the answer. The SX format kept stock costs down and the cameras working in ISO transmitted via microwaves to a gallery, enabling the director to choose his shots whilst following all the action in the studio.
With so many people on the arts studio floor, a soundman per camera was impossible so a solution was provided by Picture Canning’s sound department: The cast; tutors, students and technicians, were individually radio miked using a Sony wireless system: ECM88 Mics, WRT8B transmitters and MB806 receivers. The audio was then fed to a Midas console which produced a live mix of the main stream audio and fed it back to the cameras via radio link. The audio was then recorded to a Merging Technologies Pyramix hard disk system.
Each night the rushes were sent to Endemol’s Bristol facility along with a hard drive containing all the Pyramix files in BWAV format to be loaded straight into the Avid Unity system.
Commenting on why they took part, Keith Allen hopes to gain ‘a better understanding of the world I live in’ and John Humphrys said: "Art School is reality television only in the sense that people are filmed doing real things - being taught by art teachers to see what they can learn - and not being encouraged to make fools of themselves. I agreed to do it because I can't draw a straight line or paint a door and I'd love to know if someone like me can be taught the basics."
Picture Canning Director Leslie Zunz commented: “This was an interesting and challenging project which required us to find a creative solution to shooting a combination of genres – Documentary and Reality.
‘Art School’ will be to be broadcast from September 12 on BBC2
(GB)