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Posted in: ABC, TV | Tagged: abbott elementary
Abbott Elementary Team Talk Taking "Big Swing" with Phillies Episode
Turns out, a good mixture of timing, great acting, and some luck all went into filming the Phillies episode of ABC's Abbott Elementary.
Article Summary
- Abbott Elementary’s Phillies episode “Ball Game” pulled off the rare feat of filming key scenes during a real MLB game.
- The team shot nearly half the Abbott Elementary episode early, using staged crowd scenes to control sound and timing.
- Director Randall Einhorn said shifting light from shade to night helped sell time passing better than any on-screen clock.
- Abbott Elementary also got lucky with cast reactions and Kyle Schwarber nailing his scenes in just four takes.
One of the most talked-about episodes of Abbott Elementary last season was "Ball Game," in which the cast all headed out for an evening at the ballpark, as the Philadelphia Phillies faced the Atlanta Braves at Citizens Bank Park last October. The show featured a good chunk of what happens during an actual baseball game, a feat you rarely see in any sport on any TV series, since filming a live game with characters from a show is a task and a half. But they pulled it off, and in a recent piece on Variety, they explained how it was done.
Take Me Out To The Ball Game: Abbott Elementary Pulls a Homerun Feat
One of the keys to the episode was that they filmed about half of it before the actual game, taking a day to shoot scenes with extras using silk meshes all around to improve sound quality. The move was a blessing in disguise, according to director and executive producer Randall Einhorn, saying, "I needed to show passage of time, so they start off in the shade, they go into full sunlight, and then they go back into full into shade. Then, it's the nighttime. I mean, that sold passage of time better than a clock could. […] I shot 14 pages the day before the ball game, and basically, we had all these connected pieces. […] So, I'm shooting a scene with some with our cast. Something is supposed to happen on the ball field, and then I go back to my cast, who are commenting on what happened on the ball field. The next day, I had all these pans to the ball field that I needed to do the pan off and the back."
They also had great luck with the actors hitting their cues when needed, as the cast is pretty aware of what each would do in certain situations and how they'd react in real time. They also had luck with Phillies player Kyle Schwarber, who managed to get all of his stuff done in four takes. It's a fun read that's worth your time to check out, but don't count on Einhorn ever doing an episode like this again, as it was clearly a massive challenge trying to pull off the Mockumentary style in the middle of an IRL situation.
"I think I'd probably just be a little bit slower to say, 'This is impossible,' because the initial reaction is like, 'How?' […] It was really challenging. I really looked at it and thought, 'This can go wrong in so many ways.' I think what it has done is it's made me even more of a planner. It was a big swing."
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