Radio and Television Production
Techniques and Borrowings
It is useful to view all of the media together, ranging from the individual performer appearing in the flesh before his audience to the complex presentations of the electronic and allied media.
They may be compared in terms of the relationship of the performer to his audience as shown in Table 1. The media also vary in the kind of performance on which they can draw, either derivatively or creatively, as shown in Table 2.
The tables make clear the extent to which the various media borrow from each other.
Just as the Greek drama drew on ancient myths and legends and the Renaissance drama on classical and contemporary material alike, so the voracious demands of the new 20th-century media have driven producers and scriptwriters to acquire the rights to existent material in other media, particularly the novel and the drama.
Radio and television have overlapped increasingly with journalism, many journalists becoming broadcasters and commentators. But much of the borrowing has been mechanical and technical rather than artistic in nature. Radio broadcasting exploited the phonograph record as a means of preserving sound; in a similar way, television drew upon the film.
The invention of magnetic tape for recording both sound and video signals has now linked together all of the mechanized media, phonograph, telephone, radio, sound film, and television, and made available a virtually complete record of the sights, sounds, arts, and culture of modern society.
Preservation by recording is in itself not a creative art but a service to art created elsewhere. A principal function of radio and television broadcasting has been the dissemination of works of art created for other media. This is particularly true of radio; in television these works are more often transformed to meet the requirements of the medium and become different art forms.
When an opera is performed in a television studio in a way that meets the potentialities of the electronic cameras, the result is television opera, a different form from stage opera. When an opera is commissioned and composed specifically for television ( as was Benjamin Britten's Owen Wingrave ), then television may be considered an artistic medium in its own right.
Source: Britannica On Line
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