Interview: Creator, Star of Sons & Daughters Fred Goss - Page 3

The beauty of what we're doing is that we get a lot of choices. If somebody says something funny and we love it, we don't make them do it six more times. We're like, "Well, we got that. Try something else. All right, now try something else." When we get into post-production, what we have is a puzzle where the pieces change depending on who puts it together. It's like a totally subjective thing. There's no one right way to edit the show. There are several right ways, several very good ways that different people would edit the same content. There's a lot more bad ways I think you wanna watch out for but it's a really fun process. It makes the actors seem more real and it makes the camera work more interesting.

We shoot with three cameras because we don't do coverage much. People are improvising and it's hard to turn around on someone and ask them to make up all that stuff they just made up. We move very fast because we're not turning around on things. We set things up to where we can get it all on one shot. The cameramen don't know who's going to talk next exactly so it looks like a documentary. In a way, that's kind of what's going on and it gives it this kind of "fly-on-the-wall" feel like you're spying on people's real lives.

SF: It's interesting that you said that it was three cameras because I've seen the commercials and it really looks like a single-camera show [A show where one camera is used at a time to film instead of three].

FG: We try to edit it that way. Our objective is to edit it in a way that if you didn't know it was improvised, you wouldn't guess that it was improvised. We want people who are gonna be like "Wow, this writing is interesting! How would anyone think to write this?" It's not joke-driven in a traditional sense in that you have three jokes per page. The humor comes out of your ability to attach yourself emotionally or on a relatability level to the characters. If you're committed to the person and you care about what's going on with them in the story, it's easier to laugh when they're in a situation that you recognize. We ratchet up the size of the elephant in the room and hopefully the viewer will be like "Oh my God, that's exactly like my mother!" and they find it funny for that reason and not because it's a joke and they're supposed to laugh.

Article Author: Sterfish

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