Sometimes video projects aren’t exactly public. One example is Alp d’Huez, a wonderful play by John Rosenberg. I was asked to shoot video of one of the last performances by Jennifer Summerfield, who was one of the two leads, and her husband, photographer Kyle Cassidy. As far as I know, the only purpose for the video was for the play’s participants to have a good record of its performance. But that doesn’t mean that I couldn’t use it as an opportunity to hone the editing and video chops a little.

When I shot Curio’s Twelfth Night– and I ought to create a blog entry for that story– I had only one camera, and used it to shoot three different performances. I then edited those as though they were a single performance, in the manner of a three-camera sitcom. But for Alp d’Huez, we were able to use three cameras to shoot simultaneously. All three were Panasonic cameras: Kyle set up his Lumix DSLR at the left side of the stage, and I set up the GH2 at the right side. I used my TM700 camcorder as a handheld from the center audience. The GH2 got the Rode microphone and recorded the main soundtrack.

We tried to set the cameras up with similar settings. We shot at 30 fps mainly because I wasn’t sure if Kyle’s camera could do 24 fps. We set the manual focus for a point roughly in the middle of the stage, and hoped that, for the stationary cameras, a deep depth-of-field would keep things in focus. We selected the basic tungsten white balance on all three cameras though, as you’ll see, there are some differences that required some color correction. As for framing the shots, I expected to use the now-standard trick of shooting in full 1920×1080 high-def, and reframing for lower resolutions in post. Happily, all three cameras ran without  any glitches, like battery exhaustion or file-spanning foul-ups.

The Adventure in Editing was in fighting the limitations of my computer. It’s a fast system, but it’s just not fast enough for smooth, jitter-free editing of three hi-def video streams.  There is a feature in Premiere Pro that enables one to watch up to four synchronized video feeds simultaneously, and switch between them as a director might run a live TV broadcast. It’d be simple: press the 1,2,or 3 key to select th active camera, in realtime. This _would_ be terrific, but my system just isn’t fast enough to handle three streams smoothly. I thought about rendering the videos down to a lower definition, editing those, and replacing them with the higher-def stuff afterward… but the rendering’d take thirty hours for each stream. So I couldn’t use that feature.

But this job was FAR easier than Twelfth Night was. On Twelfth Night, I had to cut around variations on the staging; an actor’s position, motion, and dialogue would not have been the same from performance to performance. Also, I’d had to choose which soundtrack to use for a particular bit of dialogue: sometimes, I’d had to edit in individual _words_. But on Alp d’Huez, those decisions didn’t exist. The play’s pacing was perfect, the sound was decent, and all three cameras recorded the same action. So it was solely a matter of choosing the right moments to switch from one view to another.

This meant editing for the performances. There are moments when Jennifer is doing something really spectacular, but sometimes it seemed more right to use an angle that favored John’s reactions. This is one of those play-versus-film argument topics. In a play, the audience chooses where to look. So if the actors and directors want to direct their attention, they have to work to do it. In film, if we want to direct your attention, we can simply _point the camera at it_. Simpler, maybe less challenging in one way, maybe more in another.

Anyway, it took me about a week to do a complete first pass on the editing. I’ve sent the file off to Kyle and Jennifer– and as I’ve said, this wasn’t a job for a professional purpose or to meet a deadline. So I’ve been playing with the color correction as well.

The picture below shows all three cameras’ views: the Lumix is on the right, the center’s the TM700, and the right one is the GH2 (which used the Sanity firmware hack for higher bitrates).

The GH2 and the Lumix are roughly similar– the GH2′s a little darker, and I like its contrasts. But notice that the TM700, the camcorder in the middle, is very different from the others. The colors are boosted a little bit, and there’s an overall greenish tone that needs to be fixed.

I don’t think one can match every color perfectly, unless one has a staff of colorists and high-powered workstations. And Premiere Pro offers a lot of methods for color correction: RGB curves; adjustments to R-G-B values in the lows, high and midtones; a “fast adjuster that lets you push a slider around a color wheel; more detailed versions of the “fast” corrector; and several ways of looking at the image’s color values in various forms of histograms. And remember, adjusting just one color of adjusting just one region isn’t easy with video, where the pictures move.)

So I decided that I’d focus on certain major elements. There’s that yellow bedspread, for one thing. There are the blues in John’s shirt and the blue and green in Jennifer’s scrubs. Elsewhere, there’s a skirt Jen wears that appears black from the side cameras, but slightly brick-reddish in the middle camera. (Skin tones are usually very important in this, but generally, they remained close to each other during all the adjustments.) So I spent a few hours rebalancing colors, adjusting the saturation, redrawing the color curves…

Better, eh? I think there’s still some improvement (the scrubs are kind of vivid in the middle frame). But I’m starting to get the hang of color correction, which is a very difficult job to accomplish. I think that I’ll need to make a little checklist to use with cameras ion the field, so the images are more congruent with one another, and save myself some post-production work.

So am I going to do this to the full video? Not just yet. Y’see, I’d have to take these corrections, and generate whole new video files with new color values, and use those in place of the originals. And rendering those would take a LONG time. So, for now, I’m going to let the project sit, editing and all, until I have to make it all pretty’n'stuff.

When we shot the trailer for Caitlin R. Kiernan’s novel “The Drowning Girl,” we accumulated about two and a half hours’ worth of footage. A lot of it looked gorgeous. There were a few moments when we caught some of the activity behind the scenes– not very much if that, since we were conserving our data storage for the trailer video. And most of the footage had very poor sound. The trailer was going to use music, so we concentrated on getting good visuals.

But we had all this footage, and for a few weeks following the trailer’s premiere in March 2012, I toyed with making a DVD that could be given out to the project’s participants and supporters. So I assembled this half-hour “Making Of” segment out of the odds and ends. Eventually, this video (or portions of it) was screened at the ReaderCon 2012 convention by Kyle Cassidy and Caitlin Kiernan, to illustrate how easy it is to make a really striking book trailer. With their permission, I made the full video public on YouTube.

“The Making of ‘The Drowning Girl’” is still very rough, but I’m going to leave it as is. I had a lot of fun on that weekend, and it’s great to have some home movies.

Let’s get one thing settled: I am not a conservative nor a Republican. Many of the opinions presented in the following videos do not reflect my own.

I volunteered for this project mainly because it seemed like a good, provocative idea– to offset the generally liberal-left theater community with plays written from a conservative point of view.  The plays were to be directed and performed straight, without any kind of sarcasm or snarkiness or jokey winking at the audience. The authors would have a decent chance to reach an audience and, maybe, promote a little across-the-proverbial-aisle understanding. I liked that approach, probably because any attempt to make fun would strike me as very lazy humor. So I volunteered to do some video work on the project.

The first job was to make a better Kickstarter appeal video. So I met festival founder Cara Blouin down at the Plays and Players theater, and shot the following:

I’m especially fond of that prominent, but ambiguous “One Way” sign at the upper left.

A few days later, I visited one of the rehearsal spaces, where one of the authors stopped by while taking his kid for a walk. We started the interview with the kid in a nearby stroller, but his cry for attention was too charming to _not_ work into the final product.

That same day, I also shot a promo where three of the actresses involved offered some of their insights on the project. I could only use one camera, so this video is of a much lower resolution. Also, because the room wasn’t terribly bright, signal-boosting created some digital noise, so I experimented with some noise reduction techniques.

More promos were made by attending a few rehearsals, and using footage from those along with interviews and other sources. The following video, about a playlet titled “501(c) Me,” was shot in the Plays and Players 3rd floor bar, where the light was very, very dim. We decided that a muddy-but-visible video was acceptable, as long as we could circulate some kind of promo video.

While I shot the “501(c) Me” rehearsal, photographer Kyle Cassidy shot the rehearsals for one of the festival’s more notable plays, “Battle Hymn.” We decided that this play required a good promo for several reasons. It was one of the more emotional, and less satiric, plays in the festival, and it was the only one to deal with religious matters. Also, the author lived in the Midwest, and we wanted to show her that we were treating her work with respect.

I did a rough edit, but decided that an interview with director Cara Blouin was needed for a good final draft. (I’m very happy with that interview footage, where we had the opportunity to use good lighting and choose an interesting background.)

During the actual run, I shot some rough coverage of the entire festival from the back of the room. I hope to build a DVD package, which can be given to the participants as a record of the event. That’ll be part of my work during November-January; editing the actual footage, and developing the DVD package of menus, extras, etc.

The final trailer for Caitlin Kiernan’s The Drowning Girl went live on March 3rd, 2012.  Thanks to the promotions office at Penguin Books and some encouraging word-of-mouth from other fantasy writers, the trailer’s been accumulating an audience (and, we hope, spurring people to buy her book). Continue Reading

I hadn’t planned to do a promo for the play. But the book’s been a favorite for years. Anyway, I was looking at Kyle Cassidy’s photography for the play (http://kylecassidy.livejournal.com/691978.html), and I really liked the blood spatters on the play’s title. I thought about the book’s opening line, and it wasn’t long before I got the idea of showing it in nonsequential bits to echo Billy Pilgrim’s progress.

And best of all, it wouldn’t require videotaping a performance. Most of the work could be done on the desktop.

So how’d I do it? I typed up the sentence, using Kyle’s font (Futura Bold, a fave of Kubrick’s, too). I cropped it to a few letters, and then rolled the crops horizontally so I had a clip where the words were shown across the screen, like this mechanical speed-reading things we had in my middle school. I took this clip, and then sliced it into bits and scrambled them around.

I ran the draft past Curio, who liked it, and I said I’d like to do a soundtrack of the actors reciting lines from the play– some major, some innocuous, some mysterious. I had this idea of having the sound build like the crescendo in “A Day in the Life,” but we didn’t have licensed sound effects. Each actor also recited Vonnegut’s signature line, “So it goes,” so that had to be used at some point.

I’d originally wanted the words “Slaughterhouse-Five” appear with no sound, or maybe that bird tweeting. But Ken Opdenaker’s line about knowing your address was a great choice, and here, it seemed as though “Slaughterhouse-Five” was the address of the whole twentieth century.

This 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

So 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.

Science 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.

These 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.)

This 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.