The shot is the performance

I keep going back to this test footage that we shot the other week. I really like it despite its problems. Yes the spinner is a little fast and wobbly. The left side light isn't flagged off. Erik is holding an ordinary non-temperature corrected garden flood light (with a couple of layers of diffusion) to get the shadow on Ben's face. The lighting on Ben's face is flat. (Siwaraya also thinks his face is too red). But as an image it comes together for me.


The final lighting test using Erik as a stand-in just didn't work as well. That got me thinking about my experience doing music. One problem you always hear about pop music is that the demo sounds better than the polished final version. That's because the demo often has an energy that is difficult to recapture. Yes, the final product has fewer mistakes and is seamless, but there is often something lost in the translation.

So that got me thinking that the performance for this video doesn't start and end with Ben; the shot is the performance. And like a performance, you can't dial in settings and expect everything to work. You can't recapture performance; performance has to happen. As Steve Buscemi playing the director in Living in Oblivion says, "we can't think about that. That moment's gone. We'll get another." You have to look and listen and see what you have in front of you. So I wonder if it's less about getting everything set up perfectly and writing down all the camera settings and expecting Ben to walk in and "act." Rather, it's knowing the craft--lighting, the camera, the acting--fluently enough to be able to look and listen while on set and make the proper adjustments such that everything comes together. The set--and its attendant technologies--is the instrument.

Should we have completed the entire scene on that day we shot test footage? Probably not. Testing out some of our other ideas has been fruitful and provides a good reason for doing tests. We were talking about putting a light in the spinner's box and I just assumed that it wouldn't look like much. Sure there would be a little ellipse of pure blown-out white coming out the top of the box but what was the big deal about that? I didn't even try it for the final (Erik) test. But after putting the light in the box later I discovered that light leaks out the sides of the box where the cover meets the bottom. It looks really great and adds to the "magic" that we were talking about.

If the shot is the performance, then we have to think of the tests not as tests so much, but as rehearsals. If you overrehearse, you lose performance value. If you underrehearse, the product looks too raw and unfinished. And directing is finding the optimum point between the two.