Chapter 24 — Exercises

Live and event work is a skill you can only truly learn by doing it under the one-take pressure that defines it. These exercises put you there — mostly with the two phones you already own, because a two-phone multicam rig is a real multicam rig, and everything the professionals do with five matched cameras you can practice with two. Take the starred items seriously; they build directly toward the kind of event footage that strengthens Projects 2 and 3 and, later, your reel.

Exercises are graded by effort and depth:

• ⭐ Warm-up — a few minutes; locks in a concept.
• ⭐⭐ Core — the real practice; do as many of these as you can.
• ⭐⭐⭐ Stretch — deeper or more ambitious; where the biggest gains are.

Model solutions and critiques for the starred and odd-numbered exercises are collected in Answers to Selected Exercises at the back of the book. Try each one before you read its answer — an attempt you got wrong under one-take pressure teaches more than an answer you only read. And unlike most chapters, several of these have a hard truth built in: if you botch the setup, there is no retake. That is the point.

A. Seeing live production (Eye & Ear Training)

These need no camera — just your attention on the live and multicam video you already watch. They train the anticipation that event work runs on, which is the one skill you cannot buy.

1. ⭐ Count the cameras. Watch two minutes of any live broadcast — a talk show, a sports game, an awards show, a streamed church service. Count how many distinct camera angles you can spot, and identify which one is acting as the "safety" wide. Write down the number, and write one sentence on how you knew which was the master (hint: it's the one that keeps coming back, clean and unchanged). (Answer provided.)

2. ⭐ Spot the cut point. In a live-switched show, stop noticing what you're watching and start noticing when the director cuts between cameras. Write down three specific moments where the cut happened, and in one phrase each, name what motivated it — a new speaker, a reaction, the ball moving, a punchline landing. You're learning that a live cut is motivated exactly like a camera move (Chapter 8). (Answer provided.)

3. ⭐⭐ Find the crossed line. Watch a multi-camera interview or panel show and hunt for a cut where someone seems to "flip" and face the wrong way. Good directors never let this happen, so if you can't find one, that's the real answer — instead, explain how the cameras were kept on one side of the 180° line to hold screen direction across every cut. Either way, you're seeing §24.2's rule enforced. (Answer provided.)

4. ⭐⭐ The board-feed test. Watch a conference talk or streamed panel and close your eyes for thirty seconds to listen only to the speaker's voice. Is it clean and close (a board feed or a lav), or hollow and roomy (a distant camera mic)? Write one sentence on how you can tell the difference by ear, and one sentence on what it would take to fix the roomy one. Your ear for this is what will save your first paid event.

5. ⭐⭐⭐ Anatomy of a live moment. Pick a famous once-only live moment you can find footage of — a concert climax, a game-winning play, a live-TV surprise, an awards reveal. Write a short paragraph reconstructing the coverage that made it editable: roughly how many angles, which one held the safety wide, which caught the reaction, which roamed. You are reverse-engineering an event mindset from its finished results, which is exactly how you'll learn to build your own. (Model answer provided.)

B. Reading Described Shots (Read the Sequence)

6. ⭐ Name the roles. Re-read FIGURE 24.1 (the three-camera stage coverage) in the chapter. Without looking back, list the three camera roles — master, tight, roamer — and write one sentence for each on what that camera is specifically not allowed to do. The prohibitions matter more than the permissions. (Answer provided.)

7. ⭐⭐ Diagnose the rooftop. In FIGURE 24.2 (the rooftop concert), THE CUT says the angles "interweave... because all of it was captured simultaneously." Explain, in your own words, why simultaneous capture is the only thing that makes an unrepeatable event editable — and describe precisely what you would have instead if you'd shot that rooftop on a single camera. Name what you'd be missing. (Answer provided.)

8. ⭐⭐ Rewrite the field. Take FIGURE 24.2 and rewrite THE LIGHT and THE SOUND as if the same rooftop performance were happening today, indoors, on a lit stage with a house PA and a board feed. What specifically changes about your job — and, more importantly, what stays exactly the same no matter how the conditions improve? (Answer provided.)

9. ⭐⭐⭐ Write your own. Write a full seven-field Described Shot (Frame, Move, Light, Sound, Cut, Effect, Lesson) for the master camera of a wedding ceremony — the locked wide that never moves. Here is the challenge that makes this hard: you must make a shot that "never moves and is a little boring" read as the single most important camera on the entire shoot, because it is. Make THE LESSON explain why the boring camera is the one that saves you. (Model answer provided.)

C. Multicam shoots (Shoot This)

This is the heart of the chapter. Two phones is a complete multicam rig — use it, and treat every one of these as if there were no second take.

10. ⭐⭐ Two angles, one moment. Complete the §24.5 🎬 On Set assignment if you haven't. Stage a small one-take exchange (a toast, opening a gift, a conversation, someone reacting to news), cover it with a locked master wide and a tight on faces, roll both before it starts, and clap once in view of both cameras to sync. Do not restage. Then confirm in an editor that you could cut between them. Self-review: at the key beat, was your tight camera on the right face — or did you discover you'd guessed wrong? (Model self-critique provided.)

11. ⭐⭐ Match your cameras. Before a two-camera shoot, deliberately match both cameras: same frame rate, same shutter, same manual white balance, same exposure. Shoot 20 seconds of a moving subject and cut between the angles. Now shoot it again with white balance and exposure mismatched on purpose. Cut that together too, and watch the two versions back to back. Write down exactly what the mismatch does to the cut, and why a viewer would notice even if they couldn't name it. (Answer provided.)

12. ⭐⭐ The safety that saves you. Shoot a two-person moment where camera B (the tight) deliberately fails at the wrong time — let it hunt focus, reframe late, get the wrong face. Then prove to yourself that camera A (the locked master) still has the whole moment, clean and usable. Write one sentence on why the master earns the name "safety," and one on why it must never be allowed to reframe.

13. ⭐⭐⭐ Three-camera coverage. If you can beg, borrow, or improvise a third camera, cover a real small event — a rehearsal, a game, a recital, a class presentation, a birthday. Assign a master wide, a tight, and a roamer, keep all three on one side of the line, roll all three before it starts, clap to sync, and take audio from the best available source with a backup. Do not restage anything. In the edit, build a two-minute cut that lands on the real beats. This is a portfolio-grade exercise; treat it like a paid job. (Guidance provided.)

14. ⭐⭐⭐ The unrepeatable rehearsal. Find a genuinely one-take event you're allowed to film — a friend's gig, a community meeting, a sports practice, a rehearsal dinner — and cover it multicam, treating it exactly as if there were no second chance, because there isn't. Afterward, write down every moment you almost missed and what saved you (a second camera? rolling early?) or what didn't. This honest list is the closest thing to a real event you can practice on, and it's how professionals build their instincts. (Model reflection provided.)

D. Switching and the edit (Cut This)

15. ⭐⭐ Sync by clap. Take any two-angle footage you shot (from Exercise 10 or 13), drag both angles into an editor, and sync them using the clap (or by matching the audio waveforms). Confirm the lips match the voice on both angles, not just one. Write one sentence on why that single clap turned syncing into a thirty-second filing job instead of an hour of frame-by-frame archaeology. (Answer provided.)

16. ⭐⭐ Cut the moment three ways. From your synced two-angle footage, make three different cuts of the same 30-second moment: (a) staying too long on the wide the whole time; (b) cutting frantically between angles every second; (c) cutting on the emotion — wide for context, tight on the reaction, held long enough to feel it. Watch all three back to back. Which serves the moment, and why do the other two fail in opposite directions? (Answer provided.)

17. ⭐⭐ Build a multicam clip. In whatever editor you have, learn to make a synced multicam / multi-angle clip (in DaVinci Resolve, select the angles and create a multicam clip synced by audio — see Appendix E). Then cut a one-minute sequence live-style by switching angles as it plays. Write down what "cutting live at your desk" feels like compared to trimming one clip at a time — and why it's the safest way to get the immediacy of a live switch.

18. ⭐⭐⭐ Rescue the missed cut. Deliberately create a "live switching mistake": from your multi-angle footage, pretend you cut to the wrong camera at the key beat (say, you were on the wide when the reaction was on the tight). Now fix it in post using the ISO angles you recorded. Write a short note on why recording every ISO angle is precisely what made the rescue possible — and describe what you would have had if you'd kept only the live program feed. (Answer provided.)

E. Thinking like an event producer (Fix the Shot & Settings Drill)

19. ⭐ Fix the single-camera wedding. A friend says: "I'm filming my cousin's wedding ceremony. I'll just move around with my one camera and get the best angle for each moment." List the three specific moments this plan will lose, explain why one camera cannot cover them, and give the minimum fix. Be concrete about which moment is unrecoverable. (Answer provided.)

20. ⭐⭐ Fix the streaming plan. A described plan: "We'll stream the conference over the venue Wi-Fi at the highest bitrate our camera can output, straight to the platform, and we won't bother recording locally — why record when it's already going out live?" Name every problem in that plan and the specific fix for each, in the order you'd address them. There are at least four. (Answer provided.)

21. ⭐⭐ Fix the audio plan. A described event: a videographer shows up to a gala with two beautiful cameras and a plan to capture the speeches "with the on-camera shotgun mic from the back of the room." Diagnose the core audio problem, then prescribe the fix in priority order — best option first, fallback second, and the backup you keep no matter what. (Answer provided.)

22. ⭐⭐ Settings drill: match the rig. You're setting two cameras for an indoor conference under mixed LED and daylight. Write the specific matched settings you'd dial into both cameras — frame rate, shutter, white balance approach, exposure reference — and say in one phrase why each one must be identical across the cameras. Mark which two settings are the absolute non-negotiables. (Model answer provided.)

23. ⭐⭐⭐ The run-of-show. For a real or imagined event (a wedding, a conference session, a recital, a graduation), write a one-page run-of-show: the order of moments, the rough time of each, the two or three must-get shots clearly marked, and which camera owns each key moment. Mark the single moment everything bends around. This is the document that wins the event before it starts (Chapter 18). (Model provided.)

F. Streaming the signal chain (Settings Drill & Shoot This)

24. ⭐ Test your upload. Find your actual internet upload speed — a speed test reports it separately from download, and it's usually much smaller. Write it down. Then, using the §24.4 🔬 The Tech guidance, decide the highest bitrate you could reliably stream at, leaving real headroom for the connection to dip. Note whether your upload would survive a 1080p stream at all. (Answer provided.)

25. ⭐⭐ Go live, safely. Using a free tool (OBS Studio is the standard free path) or a phone streaming app, do a short private or unlisted test stream — even to an audience of just yourself. Confirm two things and write them down: that the stream actually reached the platform, and that you were also recording locally to disk at the same time. Note which link in the chain gave you the most trouble, because that's the one that'll bite you on the real day.

26. ⭐⭐ Diagram your chain. Draw your own version of FIGURE 24.4 for a real streaming setup you could assemble — your cameras → your switcher/software → your encoder → your connection → your platform, with the local-backup-record branch. Circle the single link most likely to fail on the day, and write the specific backup you'd carry for it. (Model provided.)

27. ⭐⭐⭐ Two-angle stream. Stretch: run a real two-camera live switch (two phones into a phone app, or two sources into OBS) and stream it privately, switching between a wide and a tight as something happens — someone talking, a pet, a window view. Record the program locally too, and if you can, record each camera's ISO. Even a five-minute test teaches you more about live directing — and about how easy it is to miss a cut — than an hour of reading. (Guidance provided.)

G. Recreate It and Five Ways

28. ⭐⭐ Recreate the sitcom setup. After reading Case Study 1, recreate the three-camera live-audience method at tiny scale: sit one person on a "stage," place a wide master and two tighter angles all from the same side of the line, bring one or two people to be a genuine audience, and have the performer do a 30-second bit once. Cut it together from the three simultaneous angles. Write down what the multicam captured that a single re-shot camera never could have. (Model provided.)

29. ⭐⭐⭐ Five ways to cover one speech. Take one 60-second speech (real or performed) and plan five different coverage approaches: (a) one locked camera; (b) two cameras (wide + tight); (c) three cameras (add a roamer); (d) a live switch to a program feed; (e) a streamed version. For each, write the single biggest risk and what it would cost to mitigate it. Then say which you'd actually choose for a paying client, and defend the choice in one sentence. (Model answer provided.)

H. Interleaved (mixing prior chapters)

These deliberately mix Chapter 24 with earlier skills, because on a real event everything you've ever learned arrives at once and at full speed.

30. ⭐⭐ Movement meets multicam (Ch.8). Your roamer camera (CAM C) wants to add energy with movement. Using Chapter 8, decide: handheld or gimbal for a wedding roamer, and why? Then name the one move you should not make with the roamer during the vows, and say what the master and tight are doing instead while the roamer behaves. (Answer provided.)

31. ⭐⭐ The event as a shoot to run (Ch.18). Take the crew roles from Chapter 18 and assign them for a three-camera gala with a live stream: who owns each camera, who owns sound and the board feed, who owns the switcher, the stream, and the local backup? Then collapse the whole thing to a two-person crew and reassign — what does each of the two people own, and what becomes set-and-forget? (Model provided.)

32. ⭐⭐ Expose the stage (Ch.5). A conference stage is lit brightly while the audience sits in the dark. Using Chapter 5, explain what you'd expose your cameras for — the speaker's face or the room — and how the waveform helps you match exposure across all three cameras so the angles cut together without a brightness jump. (Answer provided.)

33. ⭐⭐⭐ The interview that becomes multicam (Ch.19). You're shooting a Project 2 interview (Chapter 19) and decide to add a second camera for a tighter angle. Explain how the two-camera interview is really a multicam problem: how you'd offset the second angle to respect both the 180° line and the 30-degree rule (Chapter 9), how you'd match the two cameras, and how you'd sync them. Then name two things the second angle lets you do in the edit that a single camera never could. (Model answer provided.)

I. Synthesis

34. ⭐⭐⭐ Teach the one-take mindset. In about 200 words, explain to a beginner why "there is no second take" changes everything about how you prepare for an event — using the three pillars (run-of-show, redundancy, roll early/stop late) and one concrete example they'd feel. Teaching a concept clearly is the strongest test that you own it. (Model answer provided.)

35. ⭐⭐⭐ The event post-mortem. After any real or staged event you cover for this chapter, write a one-page honest post-mortem: what you got, what you missed, which pillar of the event mindset would have saved the miss, and the single change you'll make next time. Keep it in a running file. Every professional event shooter has a private list exactly like this — the misses they never repeated — and it is, more than any gear, how they got good.

When you've done these — especially the two-camera shoots — you have practiced the one discipline in this book with no undo button. That is the skill that lets people trust you with a wedding, a keynote, or a once-in-a-lifetime moment they will never be able to stage again. Move on to Chapter 25, where we add the perspectives reality doesn't usually offer: the air, the action, and the manipulation of time itself.