ABSTRACT

The decision to stage a program on a studio set or on location is in equal parts economic, technological, and aesthetic. In-studio shooting is more economically efficient because the production resources are centralized. Equipment, actors, and technicians are all conveniently close at hand. For programs such as game shows and sitcoms that incorporate a studio audience, it would obviously be impractical to bus the entire group to a distant location. Technologically speaking, it is certainly possible to set up cameras in a remote location (sports programs do it every day), but the equipment cannot be as easily controlled and manipulated when it is out of the studio. This leads to slower production time and increased costs. Aesthetic convention also encourages indoor, studio-based set design for some genres. Soap operas, for example, tend to tell “indoor” stories. Their aesthetic emphasis on tales of emotion necessitates indoor scenes: hospital rooms, restaurants, bedrooms, and so on. And even when soap-opera narratives do go outdoors, such as the exterior scenes at Miller’s Falls in All My Children, they are still mostly shot on studio sets-as is also true of sitcoms (see That 70’s Show, Figures 9.33 and 9.34). In contrast, the aesthetics of crime dramas and other action genres demand exterior shooting to facilitate the fast-paced movement of people and cars around city streets. Moreover, location shooting adds a certain patina of “realism” to these programs, which is another aesthetic concern.