Good RE-style camera design?

[konacake]

Hi, I'm working on a game with an interesting camera design. It's a bit like Resident Evil where going off screen in one part of the map will send you into another one. I'm demoing it in these two screenshots, where going down far enough sends you to the "other side of the street" (really it just changes the background right now, doesn't even touch the entities yet).

I was wondering what the best way to fully implement this would be, with consistent entity placement, and even updating entities while they're "off screen" on one of the other maps. I've got ideas, but I'm still a bit of a novice, so I don't want to screw myself over with poor planning before I dig too deep a hole for myself, and I'd like to hear how other people would tackle this. Currently, how I do maps is I have a global table for all entities (split up into other tables in that table, for tiles and actual living things). When a room loads, it destroys the global table and overwrites it with it's own list of entities. I'm guessing I'm going to need several of these tables to simulate several rooms, even if only one is rendering. Or, perhaps I should have everything on the same map, but have the "other point of views" far away from where the player is and simply teleport them all the way over there when they move between camera angles. What do you think? Is there a better way to handle this? Thanks, sorry if I sound confusing, I'm bad at explaining things.