Non-Romantic Star Wars

Still editing and refining noise film. Getting rid of the extraneous stuff that slows down the story. Sale—all beauty shots must go! The hours of footage we shot in the green room might end up being edited down to five shots. No matter what I do, however, we still end up at 15 minutes.

Also still thinking about the Star Wars redux idea which I started working on nearly a year ago according to this blog. The blog has become an indicator of how slowly I do things. Noise film was an attempt to "fix" an existing film—the Matrix, via Dark City. (And I'm surprised it looks like a noir film?) Stars Wars redux is turning out to be an attempt to "fix" Star Wars by de-romanticizing it. There are two great Romantic themes in Star Wars. The first is that success in life consists of uniting Enlightenment "science" and Romantic "art"— as in turn off the targeting computer Luke and "use the force." The second is that folk societies, as represented by the Ewoks and Wookies (home planet shown above), have an ideal relationship with technology.

So my movie would have scenes in the desert and a WWII sort of feel. It would have robots like the Erector set-and-wood planetary crawler I'm designing in my mod-punk style and those crazy extrapolated aircraft. I want to use more than one actor. But I know that I'm mostly interested in how props can be used to perform—machines, objects, puppets, whatever. On a side note, I've become obsessed lately by camera technology. There's a part of me that wants to cough up for an hvx100—Panasonic's HD, 24p, multi-speed (that's right, real slow motion) camera that stores images on P2 cards. 5K is just too pricey, but really, for what you get... Then I think I want to go cheap and get a Canon XL-A1 and put a Red Rock 35 mm adaptor on it. For some beautiful footage of the Red Rock at work, take a look at their demo page.

So being non-Romantic, there would be a scene where the peaceful tribal peoples get the crap bombed out of them because they did something wrong. And the main theme of the movie would be how to tell the difference between good technologies and evil technologies which look almost the same.

More is more + an omen from the sky

This morning I heard a thud outside and saw a small puff of feathers. I then saw a large falcon fly away. Apparently it flew right into our screen porch. I took that as an omen of something. I'm now awaiting the arrival of my fake crow and real rooster's feet so I can shoot some test footage. I'm feeling like this is really going to work.

Tonight I used FCP's voice over feature to try out various voice overs for the edit. I find that the more I write, the better the film works. I originally wanted to have just a few words here and there. But I discovered that the more dialogue there is, the more anchored you feel, and the more sense it makes.

I realize most of the blog entries these days aren't too interesting. A lot of these really are production notes—notes to myself posted here so I don't lose them.

Notes on overall structure—

Intro

TOC Hey, what are these stars?
BEEP BEEP BEEP A star falls, a moon hears
BADOOM Oh no, the spinner's dead!
Requiem for a spinner

A new day
Work as usual
***Hey--what's this weird poster?
Deep in thought
The desert
TOC Hey--a green shrine
BEEP BEEP BEEP A star falls, a moon hears
BADOOM ornithine terror

Putting a puzzle together
The red room
A stiched-together tale
TOC Hrey, A tape recorder
BEEP BEEP BEEP A star falls, a moon hears
GADOOM Gas!

Denouement

Dinosaurs

I took Sean to the Discovery Science Center in Santa Ana today. It's more of a carnival than a museum—games and diversions, ala carte pricing, a giant walk-through dinosaur and Fang Yang's bubble show spectacular. Somehow I thought the bubble show was going to be Chinese acrobatics with bubbles. Actually, it was like a Las Vegas lounge act or something you used to see on the Ed Sullivan show after the plate spinners. The giant walk-in dinosaur gave me the idea that it would be nice to put one in a movie. The one at Santa Ana was exposed on the sides so you didn't feel trapped inside of it. I guess I wanted to go inside the dinosaur and find something creepy and carnivalesque like crude paper mache sculptures of the heart and other organs, or maybe caveman that the dinosaur ate. I know there's a walk-in dinosaur in Pee Wee's Big Adventure, but I feel they remain underutilized as sets!

At Turning's End—the poster

At Turning's End is a drama of the human spirit set during World War I. As such, B-movie heartthrob Kurt von Stroud, the Dutch Dreamboat, met his match and got beat out for the part by a young method actor with the shorter, more poster-fitting name, Kurt Wells. I based the design on an LP jacket for Death of a Salesman. Vanilla, Swiss modernist design. How can anyone not find this funny in the context of the movie? But it's usually only me.

Theater poster reference

Most of these are from one theater. Apparently they really liked putting on Aladdin.








I like these quite a bit.

A Turning's End

There are several places where I'm happy with the edit so I don't talk about them much. One place is when Ben discovers the clue that takes him out to the desert. He drops the box down on the stairs, notices something on the box, and then we cut to a shot where he's thinking in silhouette, bathed in light (above). The whole sequence works well for me. If you look closely above you may notice that the area near Ben's hand looks a little weird and retouched. That's because he was holding the clue paper and in the next shot I wanted to shoot the clue flat on the box—a continuity error. So I masked out the paper. I'm not sure how the shot will end up, but what digital technology does is give you a way to deal with those pesky continuity errors w/o reshooting.

I'm rethinking the clue that's on the box since I decided to deemphasize the perpetual motion idea. The new clue would be an advert for a film or a play called A(t) Turning's End/The End of Turns. One of the captions will read, "The Stars Shine in/Come out" followed by a list of actors including our favorite, Kurt von Stroud, the Dutch Dreamboat. The new clue emphasizes the demise of the spinner (turning's end) and the appearance of the crystalline stars (watch the stars come out) instead of perpetual motion. I think it streamlines the story and makes more sense.

I, Eddie Murphy

I know—we'll have only one character! That will make it easier to make a short film. Riiiight.

There are three things that are making the piece difficult to edit. First, there are lots of characters in the movie. The problem is, they're inanimate (no, I don't mean Ben). How do you make a character like a crystalline star perform without using traditional animation techniques? Second, I have to perform all the non-Ben parts myself, Eddie Murphy style. Third, I need to figure out how to only imply sentience and menace. The star sequence is a good example. Do I show the stars literally "communicating" with the evil Sputnik satellite orbiting around the earth as in the early versions? How do you imply communication without actually showing it? Having now thought about it, I think the solution is to go subjective as much as possible. Remember, the idea is to enable audiences to be able to interpret the conflict as actually happening OR as a product of Ben's imagination. For example, I think I'll have the stars create ringing noises. Then we see a view of the night sky. The ringing noises seem to "talk" to the beep beeps of an unseen satellite which then transforms into a malevolent radio tone. Easy to create visually (still image of night sky), an approach that relies heavily on sound design.

The bird that wouldn't die

I went on Ebay and looked at taxidermy animals. They weren't expensive but I was pretty sure they wouldn't look good as movie props. At a certain point, I'd be getting into prosthetics... which is conceptually fine, but I don't know how to do that stuff.

So I think it's back to birds... or rather, A bird. I found a realistic crow that I think will work if I replace the feet with real bird feet. Imagine it in the passenger's seat, the sky blown out, backlit in haze, in shadow so you can just barely make out feathers and a claw or two. I'm storyboarding it, but I think I can get by with one bluescreen and one roto or blend mode composite.

Help, I'm an animal attack-loving screenwriter trapped in the body of a no-budget filmmaker!

I'm going through the desert sequence now and thinking about the part where Ben gets cut by the spinner in the shrine. This was a replacement for the bird attack scene which never really worked. I'm trying to find a way to make the sequence stronger. Remember, this is supposed to be a "shot across the bow" by an evil entity. I think the problem is that the attack is weak—the spinner doesn't actually do anything. Ben simply gets cut by it. So I've been thinking about alternatives. Maybe Ben sees the shrine. Then we cut to a shot of birds circling in the desert. We then cut to something dripping from the fender of the truck. We pedestal up to see Ben walking toward his car, closer to us. He opens the door, gets in and then desperately tries to get out. From Ben's POV we see a desert fox (or other animal) covered in blood and surrounded by glass on the passenger seat. It is quivering, half alive. Well, it's no horse's head, but it's better than a malevolent cut?

The trick is to do it without going out to the desert. I think we can blue screen it and it will look fine, since we're simply matching sunlight to sunlight. The question is what would the creature look like? You can get a taxidermy animal pretty cheap on ebay and then stuff it and cover it with blood. But you know, every version of the bird sequence also seemed do-able.

The notices are in....

And they're good. Variety gave the play a great review. It also rated a Theater Pick in the LA Weekly. I'm happy for the producers/leads. I didn't get mentioned except in one of the obscure online mags (lastagescene). What are they going to write—that I did a capable job of using a computer to simulate a computer?

Voice over, the solution to all dramatic problems

Since I'm thinking that the perpetual motion idea is confusing, I got rid of the Rube Goldberg perpetual motion intro. In the current version of the voice over, Ben calls the machine an "over-unity device," which is the same thing as a perpetual motion machine, but not as distracting. One of the problems I was grappling with last night was how to deal with the "stars!" scene and the finding-the-spinner-broken scene. They are discrete events, yet conceptually and dramatically linked. My current solution is to mention the stars in the voice over with the broken spinner, connecting the two. Something like—

two events maybe unrelated
last night i discover a crstalline substance falling from the over-unity device contacts
today, I find the spinner plate broken into 3 pieces

I'm now going through the "new day" sequence. The way I originally wrote it, the sequence stops the narrative dead in its tracks. In my original conception of the story, that was OK. That would just be "real," and represent a reasonable character's thinking and action. I didn't want to have Ben getting paranoid. That would drive the story forward, but is so dumb in terms of character. Trying to bridge the two approaches I now have a short voice over during the sequence when Ben is eating and brushing his teeth—

Day 1027
The over-unity device has been broken for almost a month.
A distant memory....
That rises to haunt me now and then....

Here, the voice over becomes vaguely omniscient and pushes the story ahead at least a little. Plus I've been playing around with using a metronomic drum pulse to create a sense of tension. When in doubt, add voice overs and scary music.

I'm trying to resist the tendency to be too obscure. One of the things I learned by working on my last theater project was that you can be painfully blunt without it hurting your project. In that play, not only do you have dramatic monologues, but a psychiatrist character for externalization. I might go so far as to add (in the desert scene)...

it feels like there are two forces at work
one calling out to me. The other threatening, warning me.

Snip / cut

Working with noise film after being away from it for seven months has been good. I'm finally able to stand back a bit and get some distance on the project. As I snip and cut I'm wondering how important it is to include the perpetual motion idea. I'm thinking that it's maybe too confusing and detracts from the story which, when you think about it, is not about perpetual motion at all. Ben just has to be inventing something—anything. So I'm inclined to excise the perpetual motion stuff. Still, I need to reread my original drafts. A lot of the time, I take things out only to realize later that they had an important reason to be there in the first place.

Psycho

I was reading a book called Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho, so I took a peek at some sections of the film. Talk about my two nemeses: final exposition and psychology. The ending exposition is really funny to me... the psychologist's grimly serious, psycho-babble-filled monologue about Norman. And exactly how do you know all this? Even more bizarre is the Vince Vaughn-starring Psycho (1998). I only watched bits and pieces (free on Netflix instant) but the bits I saw were in fact a shot-by-shot copy of the original as I had heard. When Vince Vaughn first shows up in a wig, it looks like something out of a fraternity prank. Kind of funny. A really odd film. I love the story in the Hitchcock book where it talks about his technical virtuosity. He tells his DP to pop on a 50 mm lens, put the subject about 10 feet away and he should get a nice medium shot (or something like that).

Non-psychological, non-sculptural, non-arcing character

I think the general aim of our project is to articulate an approach to film that tries to excise modernist from existentialist thought (acknowledging that some would say they're one and the same). First, I realize that I've been trying to rid myself of Freud nee Stanislavsky and the lot of it. Therefore, no psychology, no backstory and no primal emotion. I think there is an emotional quality in our film, but for me, emotion is something that is contained and implied; it remains in the background. That's one thing that I didn't like about Network. There was all this emotional, theatrical, corporate maneuvering—all this yelling. That's what made the Godfather 1 and 2 work so well. Neither Brando nor de Niro yell. They simply act. That was one of the problems of Godfather 3. In that film, Pacino gets all reflective.

I'm also resisting the Bauhaus tendency to formalize and objectify characters as moving sculpture. What happens in many artist's films is the treatment of an actor formally as a figure followed by a corresponding attempt to reinvest that figure with character and personality. The result is the Mirror Mask/Heaven's Gate problem—a dissonance and disrepect for performance.

What I'm left with is performance in action. Here, the character simply performs. Emotion is implied but is visually indiscernible. Further, there is no real character arc. The Ben character doesn't have a need or a flaw. Instead, at the end, he simply reaches an uneasy state of equilibrium.

Chariots of Fire, Network, Open Water

I was at the library the other day and saw Chariots of Fire so I picked it up. If you recall, one of the ideas for the war story I'm working on was that it would be about a faraway conflict in which you only saw the results of the war, never the war itself. And here and there you'd see injured people like at the beginning of Chariots of Fire. I always thought there were several injured war veterans in COF. Actually there are only two who you see over and over. I still don't know why they're in there. The guy on the right says, "that's why we fought—so [rich] people like that could get an education." But the theme of class injustice never gets picked up again as far as I remember.

I also borrowed Network. I like Sidney Lumet's book on film and there was Network on the library DVD shelf. Network comes from a different era of film—what I think of as the mid-70's "Rated M for Mature" film. Those films were meant for adults and had aspirations to be important and sophisticated. Plus, they all had a topless scene. The Godfather is probably the most well-known of these. Midnight Cowboy is another example. Nowadays, an R rating just means a kid's film with added violence and swearing. With Lumet's reputation I watched the acting but nothing really stood out except for the bad drunk acting at the beginning. Most of the film is people talking and arguing, like a play. I forget how much I dislike Paddy Chayefsky. I really didn't like Marty (my post on it). Network just seemed too self-conscious s if it was trying to be as prophetic as Peter Finch's Howard Beale character. Plus it's hard to take any movie seriously when it contains the phrase "the space-time continuum."

Network also failed my chapter test. If I jump chapters and I find myself at the same set/location, I tend to give up on a film. Peter Jackon's King Kong also fails this test. Next chapter. Jungle. Next chapter. Jungle. Next chapter. Jungle. Open Water, which recently I skimmed through, also failed this test. Next chapter. Two divers in the water. Next chapter. Two divers in the water. Next chapter. Two divers in the water. So much for sophisticated systems of critique.

Perfect storms

What unforseen problem isn't a perfect storm of events?

After the technical problems last night I today experienced emotions I had never felt before. On the one hand I was disappointed because I felt like I let a lot of people down. It was like being on a football team and making a big fumble. There was also a sense of dread and feeling like I wanted everything to just go away. On the other hand, the rational part of me saw this event in terms of intersecting interests and goals. It was like one of those "making the decision to go to war in Vietnam/Iraq" stories: a collision of interests, experience levels and personalities causes decisions to be made that have unforseen consequences.

For example, I signed on naively thinking I was doing some straightforward projections. But then I find out I have 50 cues. So following the advice of one of the designers, we decide to use Qlab. Then because we want to make it easier on the show runner, we also put the sound cues in Qlab. So now things are getting complicated. I'm unable to change the software I use when Qlab proves flaky for projections because then we'd have to use a CD player for the sound. And that would require having another person in the booth. And in the end, I'm not just designing projections, I'm also responsible for technically managing both audio and video in a system that I've never used before. I also ended up making judgments that were reasonable, but proved to be wrong. After further compression, I got the problematic video section down to 7 MB. That's almost absurdly small. The computer we're using has almost 250 MB of video RAM + 1 GB of system RAM. Theoretically it should all work easily. Of course, things never work theoretically so we did test the system. But despite having worked four times the day before, the system failed.

I think that's why the entire experience was extremely disappointing and discouraging but not crushing. Artistically, everything I did turned out well. I got my cues right, done on time and down to a reasonable size. The problem was a technical one tempered by inexperience. It occurred because I allowed myself to get sucked into functioning as a technical director/manager in spite of myself—a position I would never knowingly put myself in. Bringing in the computer upset the normal ecology of the group. I knew that I was supposed to manage my part of the show. But because of my inexperience, I didn't know how to manage my interaction with others. Knowing what I do now, I would have run only video on the computer until we were sure the system was stable. That would have given us more options for changing software if required. I now understand why segments in the industry function as they do. You are being judged by one thing so it has to work. It makes sense that if you're a DP you'd be very worried if you had to depend on someone in post to define your project's "look." It also makes sense why certain attitudes can be necessary. As Tina Fey says, "bitches get things done." I think in this case, we were given a show that was technically more difficult than we thought. We needed someone to manage the entire backstage system, someone who could say "if this doesn't work, we need to bring in one other person to run audio"—someone experienced enough to understand that we were dealing with economic and management concerns as well as technical and artistic ones.

I'll never work in this town again

Well, opening night didn't go well. The video stopped working toward the end of the show. Today I tried to fix it by preloading all the animations. Still, it's frustrating since everything ran fine during the second tech run-through and Preview. That's the way it goes. Sometimes you get another chance but most of the time you don't.

Final corrections

Final corrections... riiiight. You thought you saw the last of these kind of pictures. Picture one shows what the actual footage looks like. Dark. Picture two shows a primary correction and picture three shows a secondary correction using a mask to brighten up Ben. The third one looks a bit washed out but in context it looks good. FCP on the macbook is a champ... real time color correction and basic effects on HD footage. It's amazing to think about how traditional DP's did this kind of thing in camera without a digital net.

Intra-frame, inter-frame mode changes

I've been using the term "mode-change" to describe a change in performance strategy. You have some actors. Then a mode change—now the film is being carried by a prop. Another mode change. Now, puppets. That would be an inter-frame mode change. But what about intra-frame mode changes and their consequences. Some examples would be those late 90's Disney movies. Beauty and the Beast dance in a computer-generated ballroom. Or Lion King—2D animation lions in front of a computer-generated stampede. There is naturally a dis-integrative look to these shots. But what specifically are the performance consequences to having both modes performing in different ways in a single shot? Speculations welcome.

Structure

Now that I've had time to think about ideas like objectives and obstruction, I've begun to think about how they apply to noise film. First, we didn't fall into The Rescuers trap. In The Rescuers, everything works until the gem is found. Then there is no longer conflict. The girl wants to go home to the orphanage. Mme. Medusa has her gem. What's the problem? The movie is basically over at this point. So they do the "hide the gem in the teddy bear" thing. In noise film, the objective of the two protagonists is directly opposed. Ben wants to discover a secret. The 'mysterious entity' wants the secret kept. Ben's reasons for discovering the secret could be stronger—curiosity is not a strong motivation. The entity's reasons for wanting to keep the secret are sound. The ending makes sense but is not obvious. I'd say that the overall structure is OK except for the weakness of Ben's motivation. The desert scene also seems a little complex. I need to bring some clarity to that. From the research scene on, I think we're OK. Essentially abstract. Lose the audience. That's OK. But until then, they have to know what's happening.

Editing noise film

I've been looking at the last cut of noise film. I think I need to make some adjustments to the beginning of the film. The first sequence is really complex, too many ideas going on. It needs to be simpler—Ben comes in, sees stars generated and then thinks about it. Go to black. I'm thinking that the "dead spinner" moment may not be that important. It seems like the important thing is not "oh no, it stopped!" but "I guess it wasn't really a perpetual motion machine, let's move on." Maybe there needs to be a "let's put childish things away" voice over and do the discovery, fixing, and covering in hindsight. Cut out the ramp-up shot. Right now I think Ben is too credulous. He needs to be more incredulous about the perpetual motion idea.

I may need to extend the "thrill of ordinary life" scene. Maybe Ben playing with baby Sara on the grass. No—that would be a montage. No montages. OK, maybe that replaces Ben eating. We'll see. Need to edit in lots of shots of the minutae of the print shop. Extend it. Then, bam! Moment. I think my greatest fear is that everything is moving too fast, that I'm trying to do too much in 15 minutes.

Acting!

It's been fun and fascinating watching the actors at work. If you saw the female lead on the street, she probably wouldn't jump out at you but when she starts acting she immediately becomes very attractive. How does that work? How do you act your way into looking different? It reminded me of that Star Trek episode Mudd's Women. You know, the one with the Venus drug that makes ugly women beautiful... and when they're ugly, the way they show it is by having messy hair and being lethargic.

I was noticing the actress was doing some interesting things during a scene.... some simple scolding of her husband. It occurred to me that she was bringing a different objective to the scene and then watching her objective being changed and thwarted. Coincidentally, my Acting Without Agony book came today and it opened to the page about objectives and how they can be changed and thwarted. It makes sense. One of the things that makes a scene dead is everyone performing the scene by reading lines or pushing the scene along. It's interesting to think of people coming into a scene with different objectives and then having them disappointed or met. I think I first read about this general idea in Michael Caine's book. He said that even a simple line like "would you like some tea?" can be animated by having something in mind ahead of time—like you really wanted coffee so the tea was a disappointment. It's more of that thwarting idea, I guess. I like the sense that performers are being carried along by a force larger than themselves.

The bad and the ugly

Went to the run through today. Took a break in the morning to get out of the varnish smell. I was standing on Vine street looking at the Hollywood sign and thinking, "I can't believe I'm here..." not in the Naomi Watts-in-Mulholland Drive way, but in the "What exactly am I doing here?" kind of way. I then got some tacos from a Thai-run Mexican restaurant.

The run-through was very discouraging because Qlab kept being unpredictable with some video cues not working. I recompressed everything to half the size so the videos are extremely tiny now, about 400k. To test the show the stage manager and I did the dialogue as we went through the cues. You can imagine our monotone voices saying, "No don't go!.... I won't!"

Short films / Anamorph

I've always been a sprinter, never a marathoner, at least in my work. It's amazing to me that people can direct a 100-minute movie or memorize a 60 page script. It seems like sheer drudgery. Noise, at 15 minutes, is a good length. I've been thinking that short film has the potential to be genetically different from features. From my post-production-as-performance scheme, there are various ways to carry a film without characters for 5-10 minutes. Here is my students' favorite film, Anamorph. It works because it's short. Attempts to create work like this in longer formats results in pieces like Belief's 004: Embryo, which I found really offensive.

The Rescuers

I rented The Rescuers for Sean last week. The art was just beautiful—again, that xerographic 60's/70's Disney pencilled line sizzling with energy. I liked the dead simple plot but the ending was forced. I realized that when you have a macguffin, you have to have both sides going after the macguffin for reasons that make sense. In The Rescuers, a girl is held captive to hunt for a spectacular diamond. When she does find the diamond, the screenwriter forces conflict by having the villainness hide the diamond in the girl's prized teddy bear. So of course they both fight for the bear. Geez, what a contrivance.

More on the space story

I'm still thinking about the space story—you know, the one where the characters are at war but you never see the war and it's something far away. I like the idea a lot but there are some tough problems to solve. First, how do you make it not come across as a comment on Iraq? Second, I've been thinking about integrating my gangs-need-society idea, but it doesn't make as much sense when you approach it from the society's POV. The gangs-need-society idea is the notion that what makes gangs possible is an inability to think in terms of long-term consequences. All you have is a continuous present. And this is frustrating for them, so what gang members are trying to do is engage in short-term activities with long-term consequences. So you do bad things and then get caught and put in jail. And finally you feel the ontological weight of tradition. And that is exactly what you've been longing for.

I've been thinking that the falling satellite is something like a key to the 'truth' of the war. The kids are fed propaganda images at school and the satellite provides raw data, but to an extent, they both are equally perplexing. In a hypothetical ending, the kid is leaving for the war and his mother asks him why he is going. He says, "because they need us." That's the gang idea right there. But somehow, it works better when you say it from the gang's POV—"why do we fight? Because we need them."

Good after effects tutorials

Find them at www.videocopilot.net/

Imitating a computer screen

Yesterday I rebuilt the animations for the show—the "build it twice" technique. Not only was I able to make the requested changes to the cues, I was able to solve a host of technical problems. First, I had done everything at video resolution using non-square pixels. I forgot... we're using a projector, not a DVD player. Duh. Square pixels. Then I fixed the scrolling text animation. The first time I did it I just screen captured myself scrolling through a Word document. But I needed more control for the final version so I created a long Photoshop file with the text in it and keyframed it. Keyframing enabled me to solve a bunch of problems including the fact that the line spacing wasn't consistent in the text file— I had made the double lines of text tight for legibility's sake. I used hold keyframes for the animation, the first time I've done that. A hold keyframe doesn't interpolate so in this case, the text just jumped from one line to the next. It looks very realistic. So that's how you simulate scrolling text in After Effects.

One way that John (set designer) has influenced me is that I now put an arc into everything I do. John's sets were always growing or shrinking or changing. So I have a text color arc thing going. The text starts dark and then gets brighter at the end. It's at maximum brightness when it's conveying important information in a climactic scene in Act 2. I'm not sure it makes much difference, but it sounds theatrical.

Looking at—and making text—is not particularly visually exciting. But even with something as minimal as this, I did have to make a number of artistic decisions. So there's a reason why I had to actually read the play! There are Buddhist references here and there and the director used the idea thematically calling for a set that looked like shoji screens and sound design that included taiko drums and flutes. I suggested simplifying the chat room design to better match the zen aesthetic (the original design was more literal). My concern about the ability of the text to perform in Act 2 was warranted. The sound designer remarked that it was difficult to pay attention to it when the actors were talking. I might email the director tonight and see if he's happy enough with the slightly brighter and bigger text in that scene.

All in all I did about 46 cues. I think that's a lot of video cues, especially considering I did only four last show. There were about 24 sound cues and 70 light cues. I estimate that it took about 30-40 hours including designing, attending run throughs and fixing.

Unintentional comedy

There are so many things that can go wrong in a theater production that I realized a huge part of rehearsal and teching the show is making sure that nothing unintentionally funny happens. You know, like ring, ring. "Hello? Who is this?" Ring.

A long day

I spent seven hours today teching the show. I remember we teched Shim Ch'ong in a week, but for this, it was one day. Teching means figuring out all the lighting, sound, video and other cues... making sure sound comes in at the right level, making sure everyone has cues straight, practicing transitions, that sort of thing. It's a lot like editing with real live people. Sometimes, scenes go practically in slow motion and then you repeat things over and over. It makes things automatic and then become backgrounded. Maybe the transparency of the machine style aesthetic stems from backgrounded derived through perfect repetition.

It was fun watching our director at work. It reminded me of Sam Raimi's comment about directing Spiderman. He said that one of the hardest parts was keeping track of everything—a shot here and a shot there and how they would all fit together. A lot of what the director does is keep track of what's happening and whether it makes sense. Much of it is just maintaining logical connections between events—for example, does a character know such and such already, or where do the characters go next?

When I first got there we made the last minute decision to put the audio cues in Qlab: it makes the show-runner's job much easier. The problem: I know practically nothing about Qlab. It was sort of fun having the pressure to make the system work. No one outside of the booth is going to care about your technical problems—they just want things to perform. A performance mentality permeates everything at a theater. The show must go on and such.

As a designer, I realize that I have to attend at least two things: the designer's run-through and teching the show. I also learned that going cue-to-cue means literally that. Somehow I thought it meant going from beginning to end. It actually means you jump from one cue to the next (a lighting cue to a sound cue, for example). God, I just don't know anything. I do know that designers number or letter their cues. Normally your cues might go A, B, C, D... or 10, 20, 30, 40.... Then if you have to change things you add numbers as needed—A1, or A2, for example. But since I did my cues on the computer I just named them. It seems like it's easier to run the show when you see "Hi there Bubba" instead of cue A. But on a bigger show when you have the stage manager calling the cues I guess they need to be numbered.

I also realized that I should put a few more things in my bag next time. I was alert enough to bring audio connections and my script. The script is everything. Duh. I should also bring a flashlight. Theaters are dark and it's hard to see projector controls on the ceiling. Duh. Also, pray. The God of children, beasts and the ignorant looked upon with me with favor. There was an unsecured wireless connection at the theater so it was easy to install my tablet driver and Qlab onto the show computer. I could have done the install without it I think, but it made it much much faster and easier.

Pipeline

The theater project will involve a lot of last-minute changes so I've been working on the pipeline. I'm screen capturing typing in Word to simulate the chat room. It creates a more organic quality than using a type-on effect. Using my own terminology, it's a gestural, rather than mechanical approach to animation. I type in the opposite colors of what I want and then I import into AE and invert to get a black background in the correct colors.

Mr. Demille, I'm ready for my close-up now....

One thing I like about doing theater is being put in a situation where I have no idea what's going on. It helps me empathize with my students. Monday I attended the "designer's run." It seems obvious now, but I didn't know that this was an early run-through of the play for all the designers on the show (lighting, costume, etc.). It was rough, but really interesting. This version made so much more sense to me than the movie which is odd because the movie was directed by the playwright. The movie plays against type and comes off more as a mystery. It's very cold and surface-y. This play goes with type and just makes more sense to me. The lead—Robert—isn't mysterious as much as he's weak but suprising. It also reminded me of working on our film. I've talked a lot about making moments. It seems like plays are about setting up dramatic moments here and there.

I've also been thinking about how the performance idea helps with working on projects like this. First, there's a section where the type needs to really perform at the end. I'm not sure how I'm going to do it but at least I feel aware of a potentially difficult segment. Second, I'm realizing that what performers really want to do is perform. In his book-that-I-used-to-hate-but-now-I-love Mike Figgis says that actors want to act. I think that's what a lot of designers want to do too. They want to play the lead once in a while. I think that what comes across as ego is often a longing to carry the show just once. Maybe it's less about vanity and more about an actor wanting to act, a performer wanting to take on a challenge. I can imagine that if I did this sort of work for awhile I would really want to see projections used more substantively. But then, that's what the film is for isn't it?

Finally, I'm realizing that expectations are really different when working in these smaller venues. When I did the project at the Getty, I would just tell the house techs what I needed. Even at school I don't move or adjust projectors. Here, I found that I'm supposed to do everything myself. It's not that I mind doing it. I'm just concerned that I can't do it. Someone used a machine to ratchet the projector onto the ceiling and I can't budge the thing. Plus, I have to get on a ladder 10 feet in the air. So if you see me in a cast next week you'll know why.

Similo

Similo is an oddball short film shot with a hardware system that enables you to use 35mm lenses with video cameras. The film (shot on a dvx100) seems to be primarily about one thing—how shallow can you make your depth of field? Here, depth of field is virtually used to create a character—an orange figure on the road that looms ominously.

Lighting ratios

I was telling David today that what I need to do a better job of watching my lighting ratios. I was so concerned about avoiding clipping that my images got compressed on the left side of the histogram. Within a particular range I did a good job of creating workable lighting ratios. Next time, I need to manage the ratios better so that they start further to the right. In other words, light the main figures brighter so that there is not such a big drop off from the 90/100 IRE areas.

The ragged edge and videography

With a histogram like this, you'd think I was shooting outer space.

In preparation for color correcting I've been looking at our footage on various scopes. The outdoor stuff is fine but the indoor stuff is really underlit. I didn't realize it until now but I lit the interiors film noir style. There are only two colors—light and dark. It's actually shocking on a vector scope—most of the footage is down near 0-20 IRE (7 IRE is video black). I consciously took the left-leaning histogram approach (see prolost.blogspot.com for a good overview of the left- vs. right-leaning histogram debate) but I probably went too far! It's interesting because I started comparing my footage with commercial DVDs and realized how brightly lit they are. I've always thought of Moulin Rouge, for example, as being somewhat moody and shadowy but compared to our footage the thing looks like a sitcom. Anyway, in true putting-your-head-in-the-sand fashion, I started using the RGB parade scope because the levels look much better than what I see on the vector scope. (BTW, my sole training using a vectorscope occurred when I worked at the cable TV station years ago. One day the engineer hooked a vectorscope to my graphics computer and said "make sure your whites don't go above this line!")

Actually I'm not too concerned. I'm sure I'm going to lose some quality when I push up the levels but I realize that I've been Marlon-Brando-ing my way through everything anyway. One of the reasons why I've been so enamored with the idea of obstruction is that it's what I generally do even with technical things. I get into trouble and then try to fight my way out. To me it gives things a kind of rough edge that I like. When I say rough edge, I don't mean compression artifacts or such. I actually hate poor picture quality. I mean that my projects tend to have the look of someone struggling to make things work. I'm sure the final movie will have an unprofessional unevenness with some things out of focus, some things struggling to stay within the scope, some things a bit grainy. To me, that is part of the performance that keeps things alive.

Digital Negative

You all know I love Stu Maschwitz's DV Rebel's Guide, but here's an alternative perspective on his idea of digital negative. Digital negative means thinking of shooting not as a WYSIWYG process but as the process of capturing digital information. In this case, the scope is as important as the viewfinder—you capture as rich a set of data as you can without clipping and then color in post. So what you see in the viewfinder may look washed out and dreary, but in the long run, you have a nice set of data to manipulate.

Certainly this is technically valid but I wonder how much this approach affects the performance value of shooting? In other words, as someone running the camera, and as someone who's considering the performative value of lighting, effects and everything else, I need to gauge the performances simultaneously. It's something like monitoring for audio. If you give your singer a dry signal, they'll sing one way. If you give them a wet signal, they'll sing another.

You can say I'm a remarkably poor visualizer or that I'm concerned with a certain kind of performance. Either way, I want to see how the shadow is affecting an actor's face, or how the color is setting a mood. The performance, as I've said before, isn't something that only actors do. For me, film is an ensemble performance that needs to be directed (to a certain extent) simultaneously.

The ragged edge

I stumbled upon the website (abwag.com) devoted to the teachings of Don Richardson, a 60's TV actor who was also an acting instructor. What struck me was his concept called the ragged edge. Key ideas:

>Don't prepare yourself to do something
>Don't smooth out things
>Don't do mental acting
>Allow the body to do what it knows
>Always find the unexpected
>Actors have to throw in difficulties

I'm not sure if this is what he meant by "actors have to throw in difficulties" but the idea immediately got me thinking about Brando in Streetcar Named Desire. Earlier I was writing about how in that film, Brando kept throwing up obstructions (eating, putting on clothes, etc.) and tried to perform through the obstructions. This would be like the complement to withholding.

In withholding, you try to withhold an emotion or idea that seeps out anyway. In obstructing, you create obstructions and then perform through them. Both concepts are essentially about obstruction. The difference is in the positioning of the actor's consciousness. In withholding, the actor obstructs. In obstruction, the actor propels through the obstruction.

Now, I have to get busy working on a film called The Five Withholdings.

Another theater project

I'm now working on another play. This project is more technically interesting than visually interesting. There's some complex syncing with the live cast so it looks like we're going to use Qlab to run the show. I'm simulating a chat room. I'm still not sure how I'm going to do it. I may just do it as still frames to speed projection. Or I may actually create a program in Dreamcard to simulate the chat and then screen capture it.

Frames

I finally purchased Frames from redgiantsoftware.com. Good thing I waited. Now that they split it from their Coloring application, it costs $100 academic. This is the software that deinterlaces, deartifacts and converts to 24fps. I'm still trying to figure out exactly how it works. They have the worst documentation. The deartifacting looks great... almost too sharp. It shows off how out-of-focus some of the scenes are. Apparently what Frames (e.g., not Frames +) does is convert footage to 24p and then do a pulldown back to 30i. So you just have to trust it's working.