Nathan Paoletta
About your camera-operating curiosities:
The yellow one is the hard-cam, the fixed one. The blue ones are the mobile cams.
The red line is the “180° line”. Basically, you must always point your camera toward the 180° area in front of the hard-cam. That’s a common rule for cinema, comics and television (that’s the basis of the shot-reverse-shot technique) but if you check every WWE match they always do like this. It works like this because if you start to fuck up the directions the spectator doesn’t understand where he’s looking at. If every camera is pointed in that direction, what’s left is always left, what’s right is always right. So, for instance, in a WWE show you always have the entrance on the left side; if you point the camera in the other side of the 180° degrees line you get the entrance on the right side of the screen. It gives a sense of being lost to the spectator (also, in cinema they usually purposely break the 180° line when they actually want the spectator to feel lost. Check the car chases in 007: a car goes right, then left, it exits from the right side of the screen and then comes back from the same side, and so on for some minutes. And you think “woah, they are so fast you can’t even understand what the heck is going on”).
This being said, with a squared ring it’s easy to do it. One MC operator stands on the left side of the ring, the other stands on the right side. I refer to a situation in which you only have two camera operators because it’s the standard here in Italy. I suppose that indie feds in USA can find many more operators… Anyway, these MC operators don’t have turnbackles in front of them, they just move along the side of the ring.
In an hexagonal ring, there are more turnbackles, and as you see in the second image there are some situations in which you have to move around them to avoid them, because otherwise you can find yourself aiming the camera directly toward the turnbackle. Also, the two turnbackles nearest to the HC can limit the view of the camera, if it isn’t fixed in a sufficiently high position. Part of the fun of this job is to place the HC.
That being said, I prefer the hexagonal ring anyway. It’s so much more… different. I like TNA also because of that. Thinkin’ about it, I think to remind that in my fed they chose it because it suggests some similarities with MMAs rings, which often are hexagonal or octagonal.
