Welcome to my WordPress site. This is where I showcase my video work as a supplement to my resume. Most of my online social life’s on LiveJournal and Facebook.
Introduction
By November 15th, 2011, under“The Drowning Girl” Teaser Trailer
By January 18th, 2012, underThis project was the labor of love for photographer Kyle Cassidy and fantasy writer Caitlín R. Kiernan. Kyle had read her upcoming novel The Drowning Girl in galleys, and it inspired him to develop “scenes from a movie that was never made.” He and Caitlín lined up performers, contributions from fantasy artist Michael Zulli, and decided upon creating a series of photographs and a promotional video for the book. They also set up a Kickstarter page to attract funding for the project.
The shoot was in Providence, Rhode Island on the weekend of October 15th, with a crew of actors, assistants, friends, and myself as videographer. Generally, Caitlín directed the performers while Kyle supervised and snapped stills; I tended to follow Kyle’s lead on the subjects, but I also hunted down other angles, vantage points, and whatever useful scenery would make for visual interest. The original video was shot at full hi-def at 60 fps, which not only gave us some lovely slow-motion video, but gave us considerable leeway in reframing shots for the final 1280×720 video.
I edited the nearly-three-hours’ worth of footage into rough drafts of a thirty-second “teaser” trailer, and a longer trailer running a minute and a half. Edits were run past Caitlín and Kyle via YouTube and email. Overall, our approach was to avoid telling anything of the story in the book, and create a mood of uneasiness and mystery.
As of this writing (Jan. 2012), only the teaser’s been made public, with the full trailer due to be released in late February or early March. There is a second round of shooting scheduled in late January, and I expect to have perhaps two or three versions of the full trailer ready for release. (I’m also playing with a home movie style “making of” video, using the unused footage and stray behind-the-scenes moments, but we’re not at all sure how we’ll use that.)
If you’d like to read accounts of the shooting weekend (as well as some wonderfully generous comments about the video), here are links to Kyle’s and Caitlín’s LiveJournal accounts.
From me:
http://briansiano.livejournal.com/1034581.html
http://briansiano.livejournal.com/1035118.html
From Kyle:
http://kylecassidy.livejournal.com/666562.html
http://kylecassidy.livejournal.com/670135.html
http://kylecassidy.livejournal.com/675920.html
http://kylecassidy.livejournal.com/675725.html
http://kylecassidy.livejournal.com/677301.html
From Caitlin:
http://greygirlbeast.livejournal.com/811295.html
http://greygirlbeast.livejournal.com/811774.html
http://greygirlbeast.livejournal.com/812009.html
Promo for Curio Theatre’s Accidental Death of an Anarchist
By December 11th, 2011, underSo what went into this? Last month, I did one for Eurydice that didn’t really work: I thought it’d be fun to make it look like a trailer for an old film noir, so I shot it at 24 frames a second for that “film look” and converted it to black and white. (I didn’t add scratches-and-dust because I felt it screamed “plug-in.”) It was fun to do the animated titles, but the approach didn’t work. So I decided to use the film-noir approach to Accidental Death of an Anarchist, because the whole police-interrogation thing would lend itself to looking like an old Bogart movie.
Well, that idea went away very quickly. The play’s more slapsticky. When I watched the rehearsals (taping them for reference), the set was due to be painted like cinderblock, and I figured we wouldn’t be able to set up special lighting to get effects like window blinds on the walls for that really Maltese Falcon look.
Also, I was told that this was the director’s first project, and he was sweating bullets, and when I strode up and chatted with him about it, he’d had no idea who I was and wondered if this was some horrible new complication. Okay, I thought: let’s find a nice, non-intrusive approach. So I suggested that we do the old-trailer thing, but we’ll do Screwball Comedy instead of film noir. And I assured him that I could hang back and shoot the thing from the audience seats, with no need to stage anything special for the camera.
I shot some rehearsal stuff, just trying things out, and we planned on me coming by to shoot the run-throughs where they use costumes and lighting. I also figured that I could, probably so what I’d done on Twelfth Night: shoot the whole play from two or three different angles and edit it into a continuous whole. And since the final product would be in low-def video, I wouldn’t have to zoom in and out for closeups: I could do those in post, and thus, do them more carefully.
I hit YouTube to watch as many 1930s trailers as I could. I didn’t find many that worked as models– several used announcers’ voices that I couldn’t imitate. The best were the ones for the Thin Man films, which used sprightly music and had some nifty titles. But during this time it occurred to me that the real inspiration wasn’t Screwball Comedy, precisely. If you’re doing a play about anarchy upsetting order, who better to emulate than the Marx Brothers?
Most of _their_ trailers wouldn’t work, but the opening of Monkey Business (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VTQififsFc8) offered a long stretch of wonderfully sprightly music, which also had an Italianate “Funiculi, Funicula” quality. PERFECT.
The music wasn’t long, and although I picked a few dialogue exchanges to use, I decided that I couldn’t make them work as interruptions in the music. Which meant that the visuals all had to be very _active_, and it was only a matter of time before I worked out that sequence of people hitting each other.
Okay, a word about those titles. I wrote out several that I didn’t use. One was “The FUNNIEST police interrogations since SACCO and VANZETTI.” But I’d design the final title, and then I’d separate each element into a separate card, and have them appear in sequence with a lot of complicated wipes, flips, fades, and blurs. Those took most of the work. The series of “FO times the ” was an early idea, and it was such a dumb joke that I had to fit it in.
There’s only one thing I’d change: the opening title card. I wish I could make it look more like the Paramount logo, and I should’ve had it fade out before fading in to the opening shot. But, it’s fine.
Faces of Philadelphia Science Videos
By November 18th, 2011, underScience writer Mark Wolverton (author of A Life in Twilight: The Final Years of J. Robert Oppenheimer) suggested that I get involved with the Philadelphia-Area Science Writers Association (or PASWA) because they wanted to do a video project for the first ever Philadelphia Science Fair in 2011. So I went to the discussions as a kind of video advisor; and kibitz over the feasibility of the ideas being developed.
One of the writers at the meetings noted a survey– I’m sorry, but I don’t have sources– that showed that a lot of people simply don’t know any scientists; even in a scientist-rich environment such as Philadelphia, many people don’t realize that many fo their neighbors do this mystical mumbo-jumbo called science. So PaSWA decided on a project called “Faces of Philadelphia Science,” which would showcase two-minute videos with local scientists as they spoke about their work and their communities. The videos would be shot by the various writers of PaSWA, or by people they recruited.
We quickly developed a format to follow, with specific graphics to use and the kinds of questions to be asked. I shot the first two interviews, which served as examples and templates for the others to follow, and a third later on. They’re embedded below. The full collection of “Faces of Philadelphia Science” can be seen at http://www.youtube.com/user/PhillyScienceWriters#grid/user/4E0D5FD4B8702476
The thing is, I’m not at all sure what was done with these videos after they were assembled. Last I’d heard, PaSWA never heard back from the Science Fair on a few crucial things.
EDO at the Clark Park Festival, Sept. 2010
By November 18th, 2011, underThese videos were a real seat-of-the-pants affair. A few days before the festival Eliot Duhan, EDO’s frontman, put out a call to anyone who had a video camera to come on out and shoot footage of the band. I charged up both of my cameras– the Panasonic and my old low-def Sony– and headed out. Eliot had recruited exactly one other person, so we gave him my Sony and said, “Walk around and shoot whatever you want.” I also spent too much time shooting the nearby festival and flea market that day, because I wound up not having enough battery life to get all of EDO’s set on the hi-def camera. Absolutely no planning at all, y’see. We had no idea what we’d do with the video.
While we were shooting this, I kept wondering what I’d do to make this work. Shooting a performer with one camera doesn’t offer a lot of interest, especially if you’re not aiming at the most interesting bit of the performance. Cutting between a hi-def and a low-def camera wouldn’t work well, either. Maybe throwing in some inserts from the other events might work, but that’d get kind of tedious as well. I decided that one thing I could do was mix in some stuff I’d shot at the park during _other_ festivals, and mix it in as though it had happened at _this_ festival. That stuff was low-def, and which still left me with the whole mixed-resolution problem.
It finally occurred to me that Michael Wadleigh’s film of _Woodstock_ had a solution: using a heap’o'splitscreens. Now, Wadleigh had a good reason for this approach; he and his crew had shot an _immense_ amount of footage of a mammoth event, and the only way to fit so much of it into a two-hour movie was to use splitscreens. But, my problem was not having _enough_ footage– and by reducing the high-def footage to half the size, it might ease the contrast a bit. Cribbing the _Woodstock_ approach helped a lot. It gave me some chances to do something more than a home movie, it made mixing the footage easier, and it worked as a nice joke/parody/tribute among West Philly’s aging hippie population.
Eliot liked it, too. Thing is, Eliot even liked the (many) instances where I did something really cheesy, like the occasional shaped-wipe. And the band really liked the kaleidoscopic things I threw into the “Upper Darby” song– they even stripped it from the YouTube upload to play it on screens before live shows. (Which reminds me; I should make a couple of DVDs of _just that_ so they can use them at gigs.)
So do _I_ like it? Sure– as long as I remind myself that I’m not Martin Scorsese shooting The Band in _The Last Waltz_. (He had a lot of control over that event, including installing those chandeliers over the audience.) I’m not happy about the “Open Heart Surgery” song because at that point, well, I’d run out of ideas and interesting footage. But I’m really happy with the domino-effects in “Charles Cohen,” and I think things really came together in the “Hot Wiggly Dog” segment; the segue over Todd’s keyboard opening worked wonderfully, and the slo-motion dog stuff was one of those surprises you just _live_ for when you’re doing stuff like this. (I’m also happy I had the camera on Rocco Sacco when he was dancing.)
Today’s book trawl
By November 15th, 2011, underFirst up is the Alien Vault, which is sort of an expanded, decades-after-the-fact version of _The Book of Alien_. It’s a very nicely produced compendium about how Ridley Scott made a science-fiction horror film that really hasn’t dated at all, and if you like that film, I can’t recommend it enough.
But the interesting pick is Michel Choquettes’s _The Someday Funnies_. Back in 1970s or so, Choquette– at that point, a performing comedian who’d started to contribute articles and writer friends to the _National Lampoon_– had planned a massive anthology of comic to examine the previous decade. With the backing of the Lampoon and _Rolling Stone_, he acquired art, text, and commitments from nearly _everybody_, from William Burroughs to Jack Kirby, from Frank Zappa to Federico Fellini, from Spain Rodriguez to Harlan Ellison. And for some reason or another, the project stayed in storage for nearly forty years.
Well, it’s finally out, and it’s wonderful. Even its low points are wonderful, because they have that authentic underground-comics vibe that you only find in old Comix Anthologies of the period.
Promo: Curio’s Oleanna
By November 15th, 2011, underThis was the first promo I did for Curio. The coverage of Twelfth Night had worked out pretty well, considering what a seat-of-the-pants thing it was, and doing this promo was the first workout I had with the new Panasonic hi-def camera. Oleanna is a very intense play, and it practically begs people to discuss issues of power, feminism and male-female relationships. And by casting Paul Kuhn and Erika Hicks, race is now in the mix as well. But we’re here to promote the play, not annotate it or tell people what to think about it, so a lot of the material we shot about those things was placed to one side. My main interest here was to make it look clean and professional. Techie note. My camera shoots full hi-def, with is 1920 by 1080 pixels. But this was never going to be shown as a hi-def thing: so, I built the project into a smaller area, which let me cut to close-ups of the actors without losing image quality or needing a second camera.
Promo: Curio’s Iliad
By November 15th, 2011, underThis wasn’t as much of a quickie as the other promos. Y’see, this adaptation of the Iliad is a play that Curio actually owns, so this promo’s intended to sell the play to high schools and other parties that might want to stage it, or bring the Curio people in to perform it.
If I recall, Paul Kuhn set up the stage and piked out the sections we’d be recording. We had perhaps an hour before Aetna or Jennifer had do leave and, since I did want to capture most of this from several angles, we really had to rush on this. The shoot had one happy and one unhappy accident each. The happy accident is that the theater’s stained glass windows made for some visual interest. The unhappy accident is that one of the actresses flubbed a line during that slow zoom-out from the balcony… and I didn’t notice it until I was editing the thing.
Promo: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead
By November 15th, 2011, underThe story on this one is… well, it was one of those situations where we just grabbed the actors before they rehearsed, sat’em down, interrogated them, and distilled down stuff that we hope is amusing. At this stage, the rehearsals had just started, the costumes were still being made, and the sets existed in mostly in Paul Kuhn’s brain.
An unused promo for Curio’s Eurydice
By November 15th, 2011, underI worked this up as a quick draft, to promote Curio Theatre’s production of Sarah Ruhl’s play Eurydice. The idea was one of those first-but-not-the-best thoughts one gets from time to time. The play used old swing music, and C.J. Keller’s character wore a splendid Alan Ladd-ish fedora, so that first thought was 1940s Movie Trailer. So I put together a quick draft, mainly to see if I could approximate the era’s use of title cards and odd wipes.
Techies and pedants may be interested that I shot this at 24fps and cropped to the pre-1950s aspect ratio.
Why didn’t we use this? It was a cute idea, but it didn’t covey what Eurydice was like at all. I took the rehearsal stuff I’d shot, and worked up a simpler, but more accurate approach
But we’ll be using this style for the company’s next play, Dario Fo’s An Accidental Death of an Anarchist. Seems better suited for that play.