My first attempt at recording a performance was, in retrospect, hilariously bad.
It was a small corporate event in Linz — maybe thirty people, an after-dinner entertainment slot at a team-building retreat. I wanted video to review afterward, so I propped my phone against a water bottle on a side table near the back of the room, pressed record, and hoped for the best.
What I got was twenty-two minutes of mostly ceiling. The phone had slipped backward during the first few minutes, gradually tilting until it was pointing about forty-five degrees above the performance area. The audio was distant and echoey. The lighting was terrible — the room had those harsh fluorescent overheads that make everyone look slightly ill, and the auto-exposure on the phone kept adjusting, creating a strobing brightness effect that was more disorienting than the performance itself.
But worse than any of that was the fact that several audience members had noticed the phone. I could tell from the footage — the portion that actually captured the audience, before the phone tilted skyward — that at least two people were looking at my propped-up phone with visible curiosity. One woman kept glancing at it throughout the performance. Another person actually leaned over to read the screen, presumably trying to figure out if it was recording.
An audience that knows it is being recorded behaves differently. They become self-conscious. They moderate their reactions. They laugh slightly less freely, react slightly less genuinely, and maintain a level of social awareness that does not exist when they believe they are simply watching a show. The very thing I was trying to capture — authentic audience behavior — was being distorted by the tool I was using to capture it.
Ken Weber addresses this directly in “Maximum Entertainment.” His advice is blunt: tape your show unobtrusively. The word “unobtrusively” is doing heavy lifting in that sentence. It means the audience should not know the camera is there. Not “should not mind” — should not know.
That phone propped against a water bottle was about as unobtrusive as a spotlight.
The Evolution of My Setup
Over the following months, I went through several iterations of recording equipment and placement, each one a significant improvement over the last. Here is what I learned.
The first upgrade was simply using a smaller camera. I retired the phone — too large, too visible, too associated in people’s minds with filming and social media — and bought a small action camera. These devices are compact enough to sit on a surface without drawing attention, and many of them have wide-angle lenses that capture a much broader field of view than a phone camera.
The wide angle was a revelation. My phone had been capturing a narrow slice of the room — either me or the audience, but never both in the same frame. The action camera’s wide lens captured the performance area and a significant portion of the audience simultaneously. For the first time, I could see myself performing and see the audience reacting in the same recording. This dual perspective was enormously more useful for review than footage that showed only one or the other.
But the action camera had its own problems. The wide-angle lens introduced barrel distortion — the image bulged in the center and stretched at the edges, making everything look slightly fish-eyed. The auto-focus struggled in low light. And the audio, while better than the phone’s distant recording, still picked up mostly ambient sound rather than clear speech.
The second upgrade was adding an external audio recorder. I started placing a small digital voice recorder near my performance area — on my props table, clipped to the underside of a music stand, or tucked behind a centerpiece on a nearby table. This gave me clean, close audio of my voice and any audience comments that were loud enough to carry. During review, I would sync the audio recorder with the video, giving me both visual and audio quality that was actually useful for analysis.
The third upgrade was switching from an action camera to a dedicated small camcorder with a flat base and optical zoom. This eliminated the barrel distortion, gave me much better low-light performance, and allowed me to set the zoom to frame the shot exactly as I wanted it before the show started. The flat base was important — it sat stable on any surface without needing a tripod, which would have been conspicuous.
The fourth and current iteration of my setup uses two cameras. One is positioned to capture the performance area — me, my props, and the immediate surroundings. The other is positioned to capture the audience from the side, showing their faces and reactions. The two recordings together give me a comprehensive picture of the entire performance: what I did and how the audience responded to it.
Placement Principles
Through trial and error, I developed a set of placement principles that work across most venue types.
The first principle is height. A camera at table height captures an unflattering angle — up the performer’s nose, dominated by the props table, with the audience visible only as a row of heads. A camera at eye level or slightly above captures the most useful perspective. I look for shelves, window ledges, equipment racks, or elevated surfaces at the back or side of the room where a small camera can sit without being noticed.
The second principle is distance. Too close and the camera captures only a portion of the performance area. Too far and the details become too small to be useful during review. The sweet spot, in my experience, is roughly the distance of the third or fourth row of audience seating. This is close enough to see facial expressions and hand details, but far enough back to capture the full performance area and some of the audience in the frame.
The third principle is placement before the audience arrives. This is critical. If you set up a camera while people are already seated, someone will see you do it. They will tell the person next to them. Within minutes, half the room will know there is a camera, and their behavior will change. I always place and test my cameras during the setup phase, when the room is empty or occupied only by venue staff. By the time the audience arrives, the camera is already part of the room’s furniture — another anonymous object on a shelf that nobody has any reason to look at twice.
The fourth principle is blending with the environment. A camera sitting alone on an empty shelf is conspicuous. A camera sitting on a shelf next to a stack of books, a vase, or a sound system component is invisible. Context matters. I often arrange a few objects around the camera to make it look like part of the decor rather than a piece of recording equipment. In corporate settings, a small camera next to a phone charger and a water bottle on a side table reads as someone’s personal belongings, not as a surveillance device.
The fifth principle is indicator lights. Most cameras have small LED indicator lights that show when they are recording — usually a red or green dot. In a dimly lit room, these lights are visible and attract attention. I cover them with a small piece of dark tape before every event. This is a tiny detail that makes a significant difference.
The Audience Camera
The second camera — the one focused on the audience — took me longer to figure out. The challenge is that it needs to capture faces and reactions, which means it needs to be positioned somewhere that faces the audience directly. But any camera that faces the audience directly is also visible to the audience.
My solution was to look for positions at the sides of the room rather than the back. A camera placed at the side of the room, slightly behind the first row of seating and angled across the audience, captures a profile or three-quarter view of multiple rows of faces without being in anyone’s direct line of sight. People look forward, toward the performer. A camera at their side is in their peripheral vision at best, and in a social setting where their attention is focused forward, peripheral objects are effectively invisible.
This side-angle audience footage is less visually dramatic than a straight-on shot of faces, but it is more than adequate for review purposes. I can see when people lean forward (engagement), lean back (relaxation or boredom), turn to each other (sharing a reaction), cover their mouths (surprise or laughter), and shift in their seats (restlessness). These are the behavioral cues I need to evaluate how the audience is responding to each moment of the performance.
Venue-Specific Challenges
Different venue types present different challenges. Over the past few years, I have performed in hotel ballrooms, conference rooms, restaurant dining rooms, outdoor terraces, private homes, and converted warehouse spaces. Each one required a different approach to camera placement.
Hotel ballrooms are actually the easiest. They are typically large rooms with elevated surfaces along the walls — AV equipment shelves, decorative ledges, bar counters — that provide excellent camera positions at the right height and distance. The rooms are often dimly lit during performances, which makes small cameras even less visible.
Conference rooms are more challenging because they tend to be smaller, more brightly lit, and have fewer elevated surfaces. In these settings, I often place the camera on a shelf or equipment rack at the back of the room, using the zoom to frame the shot appropriately. The bright lighting actually helps with video quality, even if it makes the camera slightly more visible.
Restaurant and dining environments are the most difficult. The audience is seated at tables rather than in rows, the lighting is unpredictable, and there are limited surfaces for camera placement. For restaurant performances, I sometimes compromise on video quality and use just the audio recorder, placed on my close-up mat or tucked into my props case. The audio alone — capturing my words, the audience’s reactions, and the timing of both — provides enough material for productive review.
Private homes require the most creativity. Every home is different, and the performance area is usually determined by the layout of the room rather than by any professional consideration. I scout the space when I arrive — looking for bookshelves, mantels, side tables, or any other surface that gives me an angle on the performance area. Sometimes the best I can find is a shelf in a hallway that looks into the living room through a doorway. It is not ideal, but it works.
Outdoor events are unpredictable. Wind, changing light, and the absence of walls and surfaces make camera placement a constant improvisation. For outdoor performances, I have learned to arrive early enough to identify at least one viable camera position, even if it is just a folding chair with the camera sitting on the seat, partially concealed by a jacket draped over the chair back.
What Good Footage Requires
After dozens of recordings across all these venue types, I have settled on what I consider the minimum requirements for footage that is actually useful for review.
First, the performance area must be clearly visible. You need to be able to see your hands, your face, and your props. If the footage is so dark or so distant that you cannot distinguish what your hands are doing, the recording has limited value for the detailed kind of review I described in the previous post.
Second, at least some audience faces need to be visible. Even if the audience camera angle is not perfect, you need to be able to see reactions. Without audience reactions in the frame, you are reviewing your performance in a vacuum — you can see what you did, but you cannot see how it landed.
Third, the audio must be clear enough to understand your speech. This is non-negotiable for speech-channel review. If you cannot hear your own words clearly, you cannot evaluate your pacing, volume, hesitation words, or vocal variety. The external audio recorder, placed close to the performance area, solves this problem reliably.
Fourth, the recording must be stable. A camera that vibrates, shifts, or gets bumped during the performance produces footage that is difficult to watch and impossible to analyze at the detail level required for productive review. A stable surface and a camera with a flat base solve this. I avoid tripods not because they produce bad footage but because they are too conspicuous.
Fifth — and this is the one most people overlook — the recording must be long enough. Start recording before the audience arrives and stop recording after the last person leaves. The moments before and after the performance are full of useful information: how you interact with people as they settle in, how you handle the transition from social chitchat to performance mode, how people react and talk to each other after the show ends. These peripheral moments are where some of the most honest feedback lives.
The Psychological Shift
I want to close with something less technical and more personal. When I first started recording my performances, there was a psychological barrier I had to overcome. Recording felt like surveillance. It felt like setting a trap for myself — creating evidence of my own inadequacies that I would then have to confront.
That feeling has completely reversed. Now, a performance that I do not record feels incomplete. The recording is not evidence of failure. It is the raw material for improvement. It is the data that feeds the analytical process. Without it, I am guessing about what worked and what did not. With it, I know.
The audience never needs to know the camera is there. That is important — both for the quality of the footage and for the naturalness of the performance environment. But you need to know it is there. You need to know that after the applause fades and the audience goes home, you will have a complete, honest, unflinching record of what actually happened.
That record is the foundation of everything else in this series. Without it, video review is impossible. With it, every performance becomes a learning opportunity — not just the vague “I think that went well” kind of learning, but the specific, time-stamped, multi-channel, analytically rigorous kind of learning that actually produces measurable improvement.
The phone propped against the water bottle in Linz was the wrong tool used in the wrong way for the wrong reasons. But it was the beginning. And every iteration since then — every upgrade in equipment, every refinement in placement, every lesson learned about angle and audio and indicator lights — has brought me closer to the goal: invisible recording that produces visible improvement.