CASE STUDY
Streamlining PTZ production at the Royal Academy of Music
"Our stated purpose is to provide the best education that we possibly can for students wishing to come to us and study as a working musician."
David Gleeson
Grammy Award winning music producer, recording engineer and film score producer, David Gleeson is the Head of Recording at the Royal Academy of Music and is responsible for the organisation of recorded and live streamed events at the Academy’s five performance venues. Having worked on some of the most globally revered feature films such as: The Lord of the Rings, Her and Fight Club alongside roles at EMI Abbey Road Studios and George Lucas' Skywalker Ranch, David explains how he integrates specialised workflows into the Academy's recording structure.
The Royal Academy of Music uses a fleet of Panasonic PTZ cameras to orchestrate high production value livestreams that demonstrate the talents of their students to both live audiences and the wider digital landscape.
Nurturing talent
The Royal Academy of Music is Britain’s oldest conservatoire and has just celebrated its bicentenary. After its relocation over 100 years ago, it now stands on the south side of Regents Park in a purpose-built building and has been serving students ever since. A relatively small institution of 800-900 pupils per year, the Royal Academy is a primed environment for young professionals to hone their musical discipline and take part in live performance repertoires in a fully equipped, live production theatre space.
Royal Academy focuses exclusively on developing students' technical skills on their chosen instrument or musical discipline: "we don’t teach any production skills; we have ‘principle studies’ which are essentially the musical disciplines for each instrument, such as jazz, musical theatre and even an opera department."
David explained that "our stated purpose is to provide the best education that we possibly can for students wishing to come to us and study as a working musician - students can really make careers out of their music launched by their musical education here."
" Although classical music is a relatively small pond, the names we attract are the big ones"
Streaming to the world
A large part of the outward marketing communications is supported by the in house recording department: "the remit of the recording department is to generate high quality, high production value AV content highlighting our big productions each term. That might be an opera, the Academy symphony orchestra, Academy chamber orchestra or musical theatre."
David revealed that the live broadcasts are critical for outreach purposes to digitally showcase to the world through the vehicle of social media what the Royal Academy of Music does – "it has a legacy - it demonstrates to our outside audience and to prospective students primarily, who we are, who our students are, what they’re doing, and equally importantly, who we’re doing that with. As a secondary purpose, each and every student is going to need something to demonstrate their skills for pre-audition material for grants, scholarships, any number of reasons."
The institution's outstanding reputation and engaging outward marketing communications has been attracting industry professionals worldwide to help support students in their development as musicians. Names such as John Wilson, Sir Mark Elder, Semyon Beechcraft, Ed Gardner to list a few of the guest conductors, are offered to guest lecture and lend their support to students through performances – David explained that "although classical music is a relatively small pond, the names we attract are the big ones!"
Adapting to a new normal
The last 10 years have seen the Royal Academy showcase the talents of their students through livestreaming to the digital international stage. However with the arrival of COVID 19 in 2020, the Academy, alongside most educational institutions, had to quickly develop significant adaptations to its operations to compensate for the sudden change of pace worldwide.
David explained "we went from doing in 2019 about 6 big productions at a time of which maybe 2 or 3 were live streamed. But when lockdown hit we went from 6 a term of 60 a term. It was a real shock to the system to do that, as like all of our peers across the industry, we could no longer have live audiences and social distancing meant that we had to pretty much close off the tightly grouped stage area and move the performers to what was once the seating area and social distance them."
When asked about how the Royal Academy have been able to integrate workflows and systems to ensure complete accessibility to students both during and after COVID 19, David revealed: "students can book in at one of the venues for a 2 hour slot for example, they can go to a tablet at the back of the room, can log in using their Academy credentials and essentially hit a button that allows them to start and stop recording with really high quality microphones and cameras, without having to know about anything else about them. They can then log in later that night or the next day and that material is all there safely in their account."
The storytelling of a performance
Orchestrating high quality productions that are under the constraints of a tight budget and a smaller team of people, requires David and his team to work innovatively and be adaptable enough in their workflow to allow for on-the-fly adjustments mid performance. When asked what aspects of the production value are most important to the team, he replied : "there’s no single answer to that, but what we do know is that if you give audiences a static wide shot from the back of the hall, it gets stale after a while."
David recalled how using production values specific to each individual repertoire is essential in correctly communicating the mood, feeling and storytelling of a performance. "Do you want frenetic switching as the melody is carried from one section to another, to the expression on the conductor’s face? There are lots of creative decisions that go into it, it isn’t a one size fits all and you have to treat it on a production-by-production basis."
With the very nature of classical performance being so dependent on the venue, "the basics are making sure that the lighting is consistent, that the acoustic is good and the balance is appropriate to the repertoire and that the pace of switching and the choice of shots is appropriate to the repertoire." The challenge in the moment is assessing which cameras are best positioned to isolate important details.
"It isn’t a one size fits all and you have to treat it on a production-by-production basis."
Working with the space
An important point of planning a live production is considering how to work sympathetically with the space and for operators to be as discreet as possible with camera placement. As a listed building with landmark status, the team can’t "just go into those halls and drill holes and gaffer tape up bits and pieces", David explained, so being able to install cameras that don’t take away from the audience seating, are discreet and protects the buildngs historic status is paramount.
"The rule of thumb is that we’re as invisible to the productions as we possibly can be, we don’t want to get in opera directors faces or lighting designers, telling them how to do their jobs. We want to be as hands off as possible in capturing what it is they do rather than them serving the purpose of what’s going into the camera."
The setup
Recording live performances can often require operators to leave scope to make reactive decisions and quickly respond to evocative moments as they’re happening. Using Panasonic’s livestreaming ecosystem has allowed the team at the Royal Academy to develop workflows to accommodate for this. David explained that "it’s made our lives easier because we can centralise all of our infrastructure. We can centralise all of the processing in a server room. We’ve got the computers, the video switchers, the Dante AV switchers, the digital audio workstations and the Final Cut work stations all in a centralised server room that’s in a separate building. Both Blackmagic Design and Panasonic have both been incredibly supportive to us over the years. They’ve just been willing to go the extra mile always to help us out."
"We’re quite consistent in that we have about 20 Panasonic HE 130's that we’ve been using over the past eight years and gradually as they complete their lifecycle of use, we’re replacing them with the UE series of Panasonic cameras. We’re always open to looking at other brands, other ideas, but for us Panasonic has ticked all the boxes over the years. Panasonic have been really helpful in supporting us to develop working practices here, workflows, that get us from their cameras all the way through."
"It’s an example I think of how resourceful institutions like us on the budgets we have to be inventive, to come up with ways of matching what a crew of 30 can do with a crew of 4."
"They’ve just been willing to go the extra mile always to help us out."
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