My First On-Camera Experience

This Sunday, I experienced on-camera work for the first time. While I wasn’t in a fancy studio or in front of blinding lights, it was still an incredibly humbling experience

Although I have been casting for several years now, I had never been in sight of the audience as I was doing it. This brought my attention to a whole new level of seemingly minuscule habits I had that were now appearing on stream. For instance, I had to watch how I was sitting and maintain proper distance from the webcam so that I would be even with my co-caster. I had to be wary of pushing up my glasses too frequently or messing with my hair.

I found myself to be incredibly nervous, despite not really doing anything different. Thankfully, the audience was of a relatively small size — about 750 people viewed the stream live, which is surprisingly low. The typical size of the audience ranges between 1.2–2k people, depending on the day and time. I also had the comfort of knowing that my co-commentator felt similar feelings, especially when he was the one in charge of our intro and outro.

This experience was definitely eye-opening to how it would be to do a cast in front of people, especially when it comes to my idea of doing a live performance for my thesis. I will have lots of chances in the future to practice more in front of a camera, and maybe in a studio as well.