Video Switcher
for Live Events

It was 2020. The world had retreated into Zoom calls, and Zoom had a feature that almost nobody talked about: automatic speaker switching. When someone began to speak, the software cut to their camera. It was a video switcher for live events that required no director — a decision engine made from voice-detection logic, executing editorial choices in real time at scale, across millions of calls, continuously.

Nobody called it Live Cinema. Nobody thought of it as filmmaking at all. But sitting in those first months of lockdown, watching the frame change every time a different voice took over, I couldn't stop thinking about the decision that had just been made. The cut had happened. Someone — or something — had chosen that camera at that moment. And the choice had changed what the conversation looked like, what it felt like, who seemed to hold authority in the room.

That is an editorial act. It carries consequences. And Zoom was making it without thinking, thousands of times a minute, for free.

I became obsessed with what it would mean to make that decision deliberately. Not by algorithm, but by hand — in real time, with intention, with aesthetic consequence.

In the Shadow It Waits — A Remote Experiment

The first time I committed to live camera switching as a practice, there was no audience in the room. There couldn't be. In the Shadow It Waits was made during the height of COVID restrictions, with actors distributed across Australia — some in Melbourne, some in Sydney, some regional — each in their own space, each on their own camera, connected only by the network and by the story we were trying to tell together.

The live cut was not optional in that context. We weren't shooting coverage to edit later; we were constructing the film in real time from the available feeds. The switching was the film. Which camera you were on, when you cut away, when you held — these weren't editorial preferences to be sorted out in post-production. They were the work, happening now, with no revision available.

What that project made clear immediately: live camera switching is not a technical skill dressed up as a creative one. The decisions are deeply compositional. When do you stay on the actor listening rather than the actor speaking? When does the silence in a face carry more than the words coming from somewhere else? These are questions of cinematic grammar, made under time pressure, with no second takes.

In the Shadow It Waits also introduced the specific anxiety of the distributed production: you cannot fully control what the cameras are giving you. Lighting conditions change. Connections drop. An actor moves out of frame without warning. The live camera director is working with the material that arrives, not the material that was planned. You adapt, you commit, and you move on. There is no going back.

Those Left Waiting — The Ethical Dimension

Those Left Waiting was a live documentary about people in indefinite immigration detention — individuals in camps across the world, connected to the performance space by satellite and streaming links. The live camera switching in this project was not simply a formal choice. It was an ethical one.

Pre-recording any portion of the film — building in safety footage, preparing cutaway coverage, shooting anything before the performance began — would have changed the film's relationship to its subjects. The people on screen were living with radical uncertainty, with no ability to control or revise their own narratives, with no mechanism for protection from the present moment. A film about that condition, made with the security net of pre-recorded material, would have been a contradiction in its own structure. The constraint was the argument.

So every cut was live. Every decision about which face to hold on, which voice to give camera time, when to pull back to the wider context and when to stay close — all of it made in the moment of performance, irreversibly, in front of witnesses.

This is when I understood that live camera switching contains a politics. The director's choices about who gets seen, for how long, in what frame — those choices are not neutral. They construct an argument about who matters in the room. In documentary contexts especially, the live cut is an act of witness: you are deciding, in the present tense, what this moment means.

Echo No Resonance — The Full Form

By the time we made Echo No Resonance, the practice had a name and a set of principles: Live Cinema. Echo was the form fully realised — a purpose-built theatrical production, multiple cameras, a live composer responding in real time to the editorial decisions as they happened, and an audience present for the entire process.

The scale changed the switching in ways I hadn't anticipated. In a distributed remote production, the camera director's choices are largely invisible to the audience — they see the result, not the decision. In a theatrical Live Cinema context, the switching is part of the performance. The audience watches you choose. They see the footage appearing on the screen and they understand, at some level, that someone is deciding right now what they are looking at.

That visibility raised the stakes considerably. Every cut in Echo was a public act. There was no covering your decisions with the edit — the edit was the performance. If you held too long, the audience felt it. If you cut too quickly, they felt that too. The room responded to the rhythm of the switching in real time, the same way a room responds to the rhythm of music.

Echo also crystallised the relationship between the live camera director and the other practitioners in the room. The composer was not scoring to a finished cut — he was responding to decisions I was making as I made them, and I was making decisions in response to where his music was going. The switching became a conversation between disciplines, conducted at performance tempo, with neither party knowing what the other was about to do.

This is the specific texture of live camera work at scale: you are not executing a plan. You are improvising within a structure, in dialogue with other improvisers, in public, in real time. The video switcher for live events is not running a pre-determined programme. He or she is composing.

Magdalen, Turn Around, St Kilda — What Complexity Teaches

The most recent productions have pushed the switching practice in different directions simultaneously. Magdalen introduced a higher density of camera positions and a more complex spatial environment — more feeds to manage, more decisions per minute, a greater demand on the director's spatial awareness of where everything is in the room at any given moment.

Turn Around — a Live Cinema commission for the Frankston Arts Centre — posed a different challenge: the switching was being taught and performed simultaneously. Fifteen high school students formed the crew. The live camera director's role here was not just to make cuts but to make cuts that the crew could learn from in real time — to demonstrate the grammar of the switching as it happened, so that the people operating cameras could begin to understand what made a cut work or fail.

Teaching live camera switching in the context of a live performance is a peculiar discipline. You cannot stop to explain. Every choice is both an editorial act and a pedagogical one, and the student on camera two has to deduce the lesson from the cut that just happened while also responding to whatever is developing in front of their lens.

The St Kilda Film Festival's Live Film Creative Lab brought a further dimension: an audience of practitioners and industry professionals watching not just the film but the process. The switching became — explicitly — the subject of the event. People were there to understand how live camera decisions get made, what the live director is attending to, what the cognitive load looks like from the outside.

Across all three productions, the same insight keeps returning: the quality of live camera switching is determined less by technical facility than by a specific kind of attention. You have to be tracking multiple things simultaneously — the cut you just made, the camera positions available to you, the narrative or emotional logic of what is developing in the room, the rhythm of the whole, the beat that is about to arrive. You are holding a great deal in mind, under time pressure, in public. There is no correct answer to make in advance. There is only the quality of your attention in the moment of the cut.

What Live Camera Switching Actually Is

I've been describing a technical practice. But I want to be precise about what it is technically doing — because "live camera switching" is a phrase that covers an enormous range of activities, and most of them are not what I'm talking about here.

Broadcast television uses video switchers for live events as operational tools: cut to the penalty, cut to the crowd, cut to the presenter. The switching is responsive — driven by the event, not composing it. The goal is coverage, not expression. The cut serves the event; it does not make it.

What Live Cinema demands is something categorically different. The live cut here is not responding to an event that exists independently of it. The cut is constitutive of the event. The film is made by the switching decisions, not recorded through them. Change the cuts and you change the film — not the footage, the film. Every editorial choice is a compositional act that shapes what the work means, not just what it shows.

This distinction maps directly onto Principle I of the Live Cinema Dogma: Real-Time Execution. Every cut, camera move, and compositional decision is made and executed in the present moment of the performance. There is no deferred action. The edit happens now. The live camera director is not doing post-production work in real time — they are doing something that has no equivalent in post-production, because it is constituted by its own irreversibility. You cannot undo the cut. The audience watched you make it. It is already part of the film.

That irreversibility is not a constraint. It is the source of the form's force. The work carries the pressure of its own making. An audience can feel whether a cut was made under stakes or without them. They may not know why a particular moment lands with weight — but the weight is there because the decision was real, unrepeatable, made with consequences that could not be undone.

Zoom's algorithm taught me that real-time camera switching could happen at industrial scale with no thought behind it at all. The practice I've been building since then is the opposite proposition: that the same action, made with full intentionality, in the room, in public, carries an aesthetic and ethical charge that no amount of post-production can replicate.

Five productions on, I'm still learning what that charge demands of the person making the cut. But the direction is clear. The live camera director is not a technical operator running a board. They are composing — in the most literal sense — in front of an audience that can see them work.