‘The Office’ Cameramen Would Coordinate Ducking Each Other to Stay out of Shots
It wasn’t easy to make The Office look as seamless as it did. The premise was that a documentary crew was filming the staff of Dunder Mifflin. NBC actually hired professional TV cameramen, but they simulated the look of a documentary. That led to some complicated maneuvering to keep each other out of the shot.
Cinematographer Randall Einhorn was a guest on Brian Baumgartner’s Off the Beat podcast on June 22, 2021. Einhorn explained to The Office cast member how he coordinated with the other cameraman.
The reason you never saw another camera on ‘The Office’
The Office was a fake documentary but they never wanted to see the camera. The premise suggests that only one camera crew was capturing Dunder Mifflin at a time. Television necessarily requires multiple cameras, but they didn’t want it to look like a studio shoot.
“The rule that we came up with is if it could’ve possibly been done by being really skilled verite documentary cameramen we could do it,” Einhorn said on Off the Beat. “If not ,we shouldn’t do it. So we always tried to figure out another way of doing it. I think that made it cooler. It made it so much more challenging and more interesting but we had rules. We had rules that we would not break.
‘The Office’ cameramen had an understanding not to film each other
The first season of The Office was filmed in an actual office. Even when they built the soundstage sets, they still treated it like a real office. Einhorn and Matt Sohn in particular developed a strategy for avoiding each other when both were on the set.
“We would whip through each other at times but we would hope you would never use the take where we whipped through each other,” Einhorn said. “But we would also just duck. Matt would know that I have to duck down or he would duck down when I’m whipping through him. We were always hiding. We were always hiding from each other.”
The TV shots you would never see
Part of what sold the documentary feel of The Office was that they never did traditional shot, reverse shots. The most noticeable thing was letting the actors look directly into camera, but some of the more subtle cinematography sold the illusion.
“We tried to shoot The Office as truthful as possible and there were rules,” Einhorn said. “For instance, we could not show where another camera was because that would give up the lie. In other words, if a camera is standing in a doorway and another character comes to that doorway and I’m over the shoulder of that character, we would never show that character standing in that doorway because there should be another camera there. So we would never show a big wide shot of a room that is completely conventional in all television. You would see the wide and then you would see the tights. Within that wide, there should’ve been cameras.”
