There is a little show from Montreal that, if you are in English Canada, you may not be aware of.

It’s called Star Academie, from Productions J, TVA and Endemol. The ‘reality’ drama/game show has singing contestants sharing a house under the ever-watchful eye of video cameras during the week, and squaring off in an American Idol-like studio sing-off on Sundays. Having just wrapped season one – the closer drawing more than three million viewers on Reseau TVA – the series has spawned a number-one soundtrack album and made a star out of winning crooner Wilfred LeBouthillier.

Needless to say, it would be a real coup to be an equipment supplier for the program.

And that sentiment is shared by Andrew Lapierre, owner/HD technical director of Montreal’s MTL Video. His shop provided the cameras for the daily housebound portion of Star Academie (although not for the Sunday night performance show, which were supplied by Mobilimage).

MTL rigged the house with 22 video cameras, all remotely pan and tilt controlled. The control room was hidden away from the contestants in the basement; half the cameras were visible to the roomies and the other half hidden behind mirrors and other objects. Panasonic AW-E600 units were used, and because they had to be concealed throughout the house, they could not be standard-issue broadcast models. They had to be small enough to not be intrusive.

‘They look like security cameras, but they were actually broadcast quality,’ says Lapierre. ‘Each camera costs about $20,000. Panasonic also came up with a control system called Crestron, which is a universal remote system that you can hook up to any make of camera and their own pan-and-tilt head.’

According to Lapierre, Star Academie was one of the most challenging jobs for everyone involved, and he says the producers made no secret about the weight of the task when they approached MTL with the challenge.

‘All the cameras, rigging and installation was done by us,’ says Lapierre. ‘We also had one operator doing all of the color correcting for all the cameras at every time of the day. This is a big house facing south, with windows from the floor to the ceiling. Daylight for TV is the worst thing, but we had plenty of it, with snow. Controlling the light was a big job.’

The production team rarely had a moment’s rest, because oftentimes when several contestants were sitting in the living room doing one thing, there would be several others in the pool or elsewhere in the house doing something else. This led to the development of a routing system MTL installed that could cover as many as six cast members or locations at once.

‘It was very complex,’ says Lapierre. He adds that one of the most challenging parts of the entire process for the MTL staff was ‘hitting the switches at the beginning of the show to turn the power on.’

Once the show had started, there was even more anxiety, because, as the rules dictated, the would-be singing stars couldn’t interact with any other people under any circumstances. So, if a camera was broken, MTL couldn’t go into the house and fix it. Lapierre says they readied themselves for this situation during the six-month preproduction period leading up to the 12-week shoot.

‘We did a lot of testing,’ he says. ‘We did a rehearsal for two weeks before the show with [stand-in contestants], acting as if it were a real show. This is where we found out where the glitches were.’

As season one of Star Academie was such a phenomenal success, it is no surprise that the producers have signed MTL on for the next cycle, which goes to air February 2004.

-www.videomtl.com

-www.staracademie.ca