(Entry updated June 2013, because the video was made public on YouTube).

Sometimes video projects don’t start out as public projects. One example is Alp d’Huez, a wonderful play by John Rosenberg. In November 2012, I was asked by Jennifer Summerfield, who was one of the two leads, and her husband, photographer Kyle Cassidy, to shoot a video of the play’s last performance.  As far as we knew at the time, 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.

Techie Stuff

When I shot Curio’s Twelfth Night– blog entry here– 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.

Editing

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 full hi-def 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. (For example, an actor might cross in front of another actor one night, and the next night, cross behind them.) 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. As I’ve said, this wasn’t a job for a professional purpose or to meet a deadline. But I did send a copy of the edit to Kyle and Jennifer, and then did a round of color correction on the project. So I’ve been playing with the color correction as well.

Color Correction

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.

Making the Video Public

While I was shooting Curio’s Madville, John Rosenberg turned up in the audience. He’d missed my emails about getting a copy of the video for Alp d’Huez, so I put a  DVD image file on my Dropbox and told him how to download it. Now, this DVD image was still my first-pass edit, and it was imaged at a fairly low bit-rate, but John was extremely happy about it. We decided to have a go at recording his next play, The Gambling Room, in June.

June comes around, and while we’re discussing things, I ask him if he had any plans for these videos beyond having a record of the play. “I want to put them on Vimeo,” he replied, meaning, the entire plays. AS it turned out, Vimeo had duration and file-size limits that forced us over to YouTube. But I took a good render of Alp d’Huez, and uploaded it to John’s YouTube channel.

I still regard it as a rough draft, but for now, everyone’s happy.

This past March and April, I shot another play at Curio Theatre. The play was Madville, by Paul Kuhn, and I wanted to do something really decent for the play because Paul is one of the most decent guys I know.

The play is based around a period in Paul’s childhood, when his father decided to relocate the family to some remote area of the Canadian wilderness so he could work on his piano compositions. For the next two years, Paul’s mom had to practically (and literally) build a household from the ground up, the kids were more or less unsupervised, and havoc more or less reigned in Canada even when the Canadian Army showed up for war games. The play moves fluidly between the recollections of the children, re-enactments of the events, and their arguments over what actually happened, and their gradual realizations about things they hadn’t recognized at the time.

I’d originally hoped to shoot a  promo for the play, so I visited to shoot the rehearsals. Frankly, I couldn’t think of much for a promo. When you take bits of a play (or film) and try to assemble a trailer, or a Sample Taste, you have to impose some kind of interpretation on the thing, some overall theme or narrative or sense, and I couldn’t assemble anything that didn’t feel as though I’d missed the point of the play. About the only idea I had that might’ve been promising was to shoot close-ups of the innards of the piano Paul plays during the play. So, I took my little Pico Dolly, tried to set up my cheapo LED lighting boxes, and attempted to get some nice tight closeups of hammers striking cables. I just couldn’t get it to look very nice, and the lights and dolly kept falling off of the piano.

So I finally decided that my Good Deed to Support Paul would be to record the entire play. Unlike the other plays of the season, there was no copyright restriction on doing this. Obviously, I’d have to shoot it in the same way I’d shot _Twelfth Night_– separate performances shot from different vantage points– and this time, I’d have the advantage of a better camera and full hi-def video. It’d also give me a chance to develop a faster workflow. And it’d keep me from going nuts, as I’d been out of work for a few years and having a project to focus on was sort of psychologically necessary.

Shooting

I have a very basic camera setup. I still use my old Panasonic TM700 camcorder on occasion. It’s probably one of the best prosumer-grade camcorders (lots of manual options, can shoot hi-def at 60 fps), but last year I invested in a Panasonic GH2 for better visual quality. As I’ve written before, the GH2′s firmware’s been hacked to enable the capture of video at higher bitrates, which translates to higher video quality, and the ability to use interchangeable lenses is a big plus for my video work. So my game plan was to use the GH2 as my main camera, on a tripod in the audience, and to mount the TM700 up high to get the entire stage from above.  (I decided to not use that footage.)

There was some difficulty with the GH2. Madville‘s lighting was a little on the dim side. The lens I have is the standard-issue 14-42mm MFT lens, and while it looks really nice and offers a nice, wide field of view, it’s a very slow lens, no wider than f3.5 on the best of days.  I could have upped the ISO setting and made my camera more sensitive… but that introduced a lot of grain into the image. Kyle Cassidy came to the rescue, and allowed me to borrow a much faster lens– the Panasonic 17mm prime MFT lens, which stops down to f1.8, and made everything look terrific at the base ISO setting of 600.

The Follow-Focus Rig

I also decided to experiment with a follow-focus rig.  Most people shoot with auto-focus, but it’s really easy for the camera to suddenly refocus when an actor steps away, so I prefer to shoot plays with manual focus. But, if you’ve ever had to focus a camera lens, you know that you have to reach around the lens barrel and twist it in an awkward, ungainly manner. You can’t do this without shoving the camera around, and it’s fine for stills, but it looks awful when you shift focus in video.

The follow-focus rig is a gearing system that lets you turn a knob, and thus, not jog the camera so much.  Ideally, you’re supposed to be able to make small marks on the follow-focus rig, so you can turn the dial to the marks and be assured that you’re focused on the right objects. For example, you focus on the back of the stage and make a mark, and then you focus on the front of the stage and make a mark, and maybe you make a mark at the point where the lens is focused halfway. So you can turn the knob to those marks and be assured that your lens is focused at those points. The follow-focus rig I have is made by Fotga, made in China, and of excellent build quality.

This didn’t work out.  As it turns out, lenses that auto-focus don’t really have a true “manual mode.” You see, if a lens is made for manual focus, its mechanics are very direct: you turn the focus ring, and the lenses inside shift around in tiny spiral tracks and move into place. But an auto-focusing lens isn’t purely mechanical in the same way. Sure, you turn the ring, and the lens refocuses… but it’s as though the lens is only pretending to behave manual when it’s really engaging its motors. Or something. What this means is that I couldn’t calibrate the lens at all. I’d focus on the back of the stage, make a mark, then focus on the front and make a mark, but when I went to the back-of-the-stage mark the lens was still out of focus. In other words, the lens wouldn’t stay true to the marks.

(I tried a second experiment. When you have the GH2 in manual-focus mode,  it displays a distance line on the screen with a moving pointer. So I wrapped two thin rubber bands around the screen, at the points that corresponded to focus points at the front and back of the stage. This was not a bad idea… but the points were too close to each other to make much of a difference.)

But the lesson here is this. If I want to have proper control over focusing during shooting, I need to acquire a truly manual-focus lens. Preferably one that’d both wide and fast as well: a fast 14mm manual-focus lens would be ideal. Sadly, such things do not exist for MFT cameras. Kyle loaned me an old Nikon lens to play with, and things are promising, but it’s not wide enough to use for these projects. (There is the possibility of using an adapter with pro-grade glass, but that’s expensive. A larger monitor would also help, but only if it’s full hi-def. But those will have to wait until I get the James Cameron money.)

More Shooting

I wound up using coverage from three performances– and, as with Twelfth Night, two of those were shot from more or less the same place in the audience.  I was much closer to the action this time. Since the stage was raked from the rear of the theatre, actors didn’t obscure the ones further in the background.  Generally, coverage was good; there were moments when the camera wasn’t aimed in the right place at the right time, and the focus may not have been as precise as my follow-focus antics might’ve aimed for, but it turned out pretty good for a one-man video crew.

Sound was recorded using a Rode Videomic, which is a really good mike for a very good price. Sadly, Curio’s theatre is a breeding ground for echoes, and there’s really no way I can filter those out.  Happily, most of the sound was recorded at the same level from night to night, so there wasn’t much sound adjustment to be done.

I have to mention one wonderful moment that occurred on the last night’s performance. I’d shot three performances,  but I attended the closing night without the camera, just to have a chance to really watch the play instead of watching it on a tiny camera screen. Turns out that, on Closing Night, Paul Kuhn’s brothers, sister, and mother travelled from their Canadian homes to see this play together– a play about their lives. Kyle Cassidy sprang into action and took a wonderful panorama shot of the cast standing alongside of their real-life counterparts.

Editing and Post-Production

Since I used the same camera and the same settings on each night, I didn’t have to do much in the way of color correction. One night’s shooting was done with a wider aperture, so I had to adjust the brightness down a tad.

As I said, I edited together three different performances. And while the actors did pretty much the same things from night to night, one could detect subtle changes in line readings, pauses that ran longer or shorter, and  stuff like that. How do you edit this stuff so that the performances are more or less preserved?

Well, it’s tricky. There are moments where I’d match the dialogue from one night to the video of another. Being able to see the waveform of the sound makes this relatively easy. I also found that, if I had to cut from one soundtrack to another, it was best to a) line up the waveforms so the dialogue matched, and then b) adjust the visual cut around that.  Thus, the rhythm of the performance was preserved, the soundtrack didn’t have much in the way of telltale blips or fallouts, and generally, the cuts looked smooth. (I also found a neat trick. Let’s say Person A is speaking to Person B, and Person B replies. If I cut from Person A to Person B, I found that it felt smoothest if I cut the video when Person A is speaking the last one or two words of the sentence. )

There’s also some difficulty when an actor’s physical business is noticeably different from night to night. One night he might recite his monologue with arms folded, and looking right: the next, hands on his hips and looking left. One can try to disguise that stuff, but it’s never going to be perfect. But because I have to work with this, I’ve become very acute at noticing such blips and mismatches on professional-level shows– even ones as meticulous as Mad Men or Breaking Bad.  So I didn’t sweat those moments as much.

The Pros and Cons of Hi-Def

At the very least, shooting in hi-def means that this thing will still look good if I put this on a Blu-Ray. But there are advantages and disadvantages to hi def that bear some discussion.

The one big disadvantage is that full hi-def files require a VERY fast computer. And even though I have a fairly fast AMD processor, lots of memory, and an NVIDIA card with a heap of CUDA cores that should make things run like warm butter, the AMD chip’s just not fast enough. I’d have to upgrade to a high-speed i7 chip and mobo for real ease of use.

I devised a workaround to get past this problem. So, when I got my video files ready, I rendered out two video streams for each performance.  The first stream was the full, 1920×1080 hi-def version. The second was at 1280×720, the “low hi-def” format that still looks OK on a big screen. I used these second streams to edit with: they played just fine, and editing was a breeze.  (The tradeoff here was time. If I let the machine do its rendering overnight, I lost maybe a day of editing; if I’d had to have my machine chug along on hi-def files, the editing’d take at least three extra weeks.)

So now I had an edit, in mid-hi def format. That could render out very quickly to a file I could play on my TiVo, and it’d be perfectly fine for a YouTube release if that was going to happen. I also rendered off a DVD, however, and gave it to Paul Kuhn and Gay Carducci-Kuhn at Curio. (I’ll be copying DVDs for the rest of the cast and the director, Rosemary Fox.)

There is another advantage to shooting in hi-def that I haven’t exploited just yet. If my original video is 1920×1080, and my final product is smaller than that, I can actually re-frame shots in post-production without losing any image quality. And if my final product is MUCH smaller than that– like a DVD, which runs at 720×480 resolution– I have even more leeway in reframing the shots. The three pictures to the left illustrate this. The first is the full hi-def frame. The second is reframed at 1280×720, and the third is at DVD resolution. So you can see the advantages. The only downside is that it requires using the full-hi-def files, and the computer chugs, so it’s a lot of work even if the actual editing’s done. I haven’t done this to Madville yet, and I’m sort of hoping that I won’t have to.

Conclusion

As I said, I gave a DVD of the first edit to the Kuhns. I don’t  know  if they’ll have any use for it beyond as a preserved record of the play; I don’t know if it has any commercial value, or if it can be used to  cultivate funds or donations. But, I’m proud of the work I did; I think it shows that I’m getting much, much better at this video stuff, and for a single-person video shoot, I think it turned out pretty good.

Madville

Directed by Rosemary Fox
Set Design by Paul Kuhn
Costume Design by Aetna Gallagher
Lighting Design by Tim Martin
Production Photography by Kyle Cassidy
Featuring:
Paul Kuhn as Art
Jennifer Summerfield as Joanna
Steve Carpenter as Joshua
Harry Slack as Sol
Josh Hitchens as Daniel
Rachel Gluck as Alice
Eric Scotolati as Pete

Over the past few weeks, we’ve been prepping a video for the Kickstarter project that– crowdsourcing gods be praised–  will attracting funding for Chris to spend the next few months getting the manuscript into final shape, and to hire and editor to help the process along. I’ll post a link to the video when that’s done and ready for public review. I’m also going to do some work on setting up a website that’ll function as a resource for soldiers and concerned citizens, as well as a repository for the stuff that got cut out of the actual book.

I also took a whirl at designing a book cover.

There is no guarantee that the design will be used. For one thing, one of the things Chris is offering through her Kickstarter is a special cover designed by someone else. For another, the press that is publishing Chris’s book may not want to use it.

But I wanted to give a design a try. For every Chip Kidd out there, designing great covers, there are hundreds of people whose work wouldn’t pass muster as free templates. (Right now, both Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz have books out about the current economic crisis. Both have covers consisting of white backgrounds, black type, and not much else.)

Academic presses get especially lazy with their designs. Sure, maybe they publish one or two glamorous books with a little pizzazz. But a lot of presses don’t do a very good job. I had a look at some examples; lots of tall, thin, sans-serifed fonts, a few rectangles in pastel colors, maybe a black and white photo that’s been tinted or Zipatoned to look as though the art director wasn’t completely asleep at his or her job. The tendency’s even worse when the books are radical political and history texts, because then you have uninspired art directors trying to look like other small-press radical histories… and that can hurt sales.

The design I came up with may not be exciting, but it does look like an Important Work of History from a major press. The use of a finely-serifed font like Garamond may be old hat, but it does signal a dignity we associate with a book by David McCullough or Robert Caro. That is how good Chris’s book is.

My first draft (upper picture) used some stray graphics we’d assembled for the Kickstarter video. The strength of this layout is that Chris’s book discussed soldiers’ dissent throughout American history; we tend to associate the subject with the Vietnam War, but a collage of photos, illustrations and documents helps convey that this is a grander history than we usually expect. (Also, using the photo of Lewis Douglass on the spine was too perfect to ignore.) But my second draft (lower picture) had another virtue; Sure, the photo is of a Vietnam-era protest. But, by wrapping it around the entire cover, the picture takes on an epic aspect, as though the story is too big to be contained solely on the front cover. It also draws the reader around the back to read what, I hope, will be laudatory blurbs from well-known reviewers.

The Tony Auth cartoon on the inside book flap probably won’t make the final design, but it does sum up Chris’s book very, very nicely.

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.

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.

Emily and I made another suggestion. “Steampunk” is a design style that adapts and revives motifs of a romanticized Victorian age, ranging from 19th-century costuming styles to the design of machines and equipment using materials of the period, i.e., brass, wood, cast iron, etc. Why not provide a newspaper, probably the finest example of a classic technology being rendered obsolete in our era? It would make for a wonderful keepsake of the event. And if people are walking around dressed in waistcoats, top hats, bustles and corsets, wouldn’t it be more visually fitting to watch them consult newspapers instead of Xeroxed sheets?

Jeff liked the idea, so we went to work. Most of the illustrations used are from 19th century issues of Scientific American, and from Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Guide to the 1876 Philadelphia Exposition, both of which seemed appropriate for a World’s Fair. The captions were written by myself.

The 2011 edition of the Program Guide could be a little more extravagant: the first Steampunk World’s Fair had done very well, and the production budget was a little larger. And since we now had sixteen pages to fill, we could also throw in some humorous articles to fill some space. These articles are the “Penny Dreadfuls” sections (three pastiches of Victorian/Edwardian adventure fiction) and the “Greetings from Grover Scrofulus” notice.

Clicking on the images should get you hi-resolution PDFs of the program books. If those links don’t work, here they are as text:

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/15765025/Steampunk%20WF%202010%20hi-res.pdf
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/15765025/Steampunk%20WF%202011%2C%20hi-res.pdf

2009 Philcon Program Book

Philcon 2009 Pocket Program

The Philcon 2009 Program Book and Pocket Program were high points for me. I really enjoyed doing them, and I like to think that I set a high point for such things. But I have to say up front that, to explain my enthusiasm, I have so say some unflattering things about Philcon.

Philcon, like many old-style science fiction conventions, has seen better days. It used to be part of a general travelling circuit or SF and fantasy writers, as it was only one city away from the Nebula Awards in New York City, and since several SF magazines were edited in Philadelphia, this was a semi-Mecca for the trade. But one needn’t travel to network when the Internet’s available, and “geek culture” has penetrated pretty much everything else in the world– so you don’t need to seek out the occasional Gathering of Fans to get your fix. And the convention circuit’s had a major change, in that we now have large, corporate-influenced Mega-Cons like WizardWorld and DragonCon showcasing most of the major-media action. So this has left a lot of conventions like Philcon relying on an aging demographic of old-style fans of print SF.

But Philcon has persevered since the late 1930s, run entirely by volunteers. I’d done a share of work in years previous to 2009: two years running the Registration system, several years doing layouts for the Program Book and Pocket Program, and I was thinking that maybe 2009 would be my last. And since there wasn’t a lot of supervisory structure within Philcon (i.e., they usually let me do what I wanted as long as I wasn’t blowing budgets), I decided that 2009′s publications were going to be very special.

Philcon’s Two Publications and the Workflow

Philcon has two main publications. The Pocket Program is a handy, hand-held guide to the events schedule. This has always been a difficult project for the con; for one thing, the Philcon scheduling people never got their work done by their deadlines, and frequently, they’d get the Final Schedule done about a week before the con. This usually meant paying printers exorbitant amounts to rush the job.  Also, others who’ve typeset the Pocket Program wouldn’t do much to make it easy to work with. Apparently others are fond of scheduling grids– not a bad thing, but when you shoehorn the paragraph-long descriptions of the events into those grids, the layouts wind up unreadable.

Pocket Program sample page

So when I started doing the Pocket Program, I decided to do the job right. I decided that it would be no more than four inches wide, so as to fit into a (gasp) pocket. If there were grids, they’d hold titles only. The layouts would avoid having important information broken over pages. I also introduced the use of colored tabs at the edges of the page to mark the individual days of the con.

When I began doing the Pocket Program, the con was moving to an online scheduling system. So I requested that that they build in a feature so I could download the schedule (event title, date, time, room, speakers, description) in a delimited format. I could then use this data to perform a mail-merge,  so the titles, dates, times, etc. were formatted properly within a few minutes. So when the Philcon people “finalized” the schedule, I’d do my mail merge, and I would have a finished Pocket Program ready for the printers within two or three hours.

In addition to this, I was also able to take the merge data, reformat it, and upload it into Google Calendar. This way, con participants could access the schedule with their computers, iPhones, and whatever else they used. In other words, I was able to implement online scheduling for Philcon with perhaps five minutes’ worth of work. I’m very proud that I was able to do this.

The Program Book is a larger publication, and more of a keepsake. It’s the size of a small magazine, and its contents usually include a Message from the Chair, sets of rules for conduct during such events as the Art Show, Auction, and Masquerade, a gallery of art from the Artist Guest of Honor, and a list of short biographies of convention participants (called “panelists”).  Most of the art in the Program Book is drawn from a collection of sci-fi clip-art that Philcon had accumulated over the years. The Artist Guest of Honor would usually provide digital copies of his work, to showcase in a gallery and on the cover.

I did Program Books for a few years, and streamlined the process as well.  A lot of the material repeated from year to year (the rules, mostly) and required only a little tweaking and updating.  The Participant Lists required editing by one of the con people, and I made sure that I gave him the materials he needed to work with for a fast turnaround. For the most part, the job consisted of devising a new layout that was readable and attractive, and keeping in touch with contributors so I got the materials on time. Again, generally, things would go pretty smoothly.

Making the Job More Entertaining

2004 Philcon Pocket Program Back Cover

2004 Philcon Pocket Program Front Cover

From the beginning, I had to throw some things into the project to have some fun with things. For example, in 2004, the guest of honor as Joe DeVito, who’s done a lot of paperback book covers. A lot of the artwork he provided had some relatively “dead space” in the upper third of the painting, which enables the title to really pop against the background. I could have simply cropped that area out of his artwork. But it occurred to me that, since the Pocket Program was about four inches wide… why not use DeVito’s artwork to make it resemble a paperback book cover? I got Mr. DeVito’s permission first (I wouldn’t want anyone to think that he was parodying his own bread and butter), and made a front and back cover that poked fun at incomprehensible fantasy-novel plots. I got some compliments, no complaints, and one person thought we’d sold advertising space on our covers.

So I got into the habit of throwing these little jokes into the Philcon publications. In one Program Book, I inserted  some Karl Kofoed artwork as a comic strip running along the bottom of the page. In others, I’d make mock ads, parodying fantasy and SF novels, and I’d include a fake Panelist Profile for a nonexistent writer named “Jogberd Linkandon.” I have no idea if anyone noticed these things (without my telling them where to look, that is), but they made the job a lot more fun.

2009 and an Unused Idea

Ad parody, starring hack author “Jogberd Linkandon”

I’d had a few ideas to play with for the 2009 Philcon. My friend Emily and I talked about a steampunk look– maybe even using old engravings as the basis of a comic story, like Fuzz Against Bunk or Max Ernst’s collages.  Another idea was for an Art Deco streamline-moderne look.  But we decided to wait until a Guest of Honor was selected, because sometimes, a guest can be associated with a distinctive art style. Bruce Sterling had been promoting a “Viridian” green-design movement; Cory Doctorow was known for his cyberculture interests; a writer of vampire erotica might prompt us to load the book with wrought-iron, roses, blood drops, and batwing motifs; and military SF design would be severe and constrained. (So much so that, if they went with a military SF guy, I would’ve begged off.)

The Con Chair, Rock Robertson, had a theme for the con already: “The Future is Better than it Used to Be.” He’d worked up a flyer or two to illustrate this. On the left side of the flyer, there’d be something out of old-time SF, like a Star Trek Communicator. And on the right, the modern-day thing that actually came true, like an iPhone.  Or a clunky tin-can “robot” costume from 1950 up against a modern-day Asimo robot. I wasn’t a huge fan of the design, but the theme was something I could work with.

The Whole Philcon Catalog.

Rock wanted to reflect an enthusiasm for the future.  Emily and I decided against the stuff I listed above. None of it was particularly forward-looking, except for Deco. But the computer game Bioshock was  out that year, and when you marry that style to the Future it can remind people of Italian Futurism (i.e., fascism) or Stalin-era  Communist posters. So we talked about postwar design  styles that looked to the future.

There were two possibilities. The first postwar style was Googie, that swooping, space-age style that turned up in gas stations, diners, and airports all throughout the 1950s. But the second one was really tantalizing: the Whole Earth Catalog. This was before Steve Jobs died, so his famous commencement address citing the Catalog as “the Internet before the Internet” hadn’t gotten as much circulation as it has now. But I have several editions, and I have a lot of nostalgia for that blend of hippie-era utopianism and hands-on hard work (hey, I’ve even met Buckminster Fuller).

So I’d considered working up a program book that would resemble the old Whole Earth Catalog. My hope was to ask people to contribute to it, by writing a paragraph about Something They Liked, and typesetting it in the WEC style. This rapidly became the main reason why we didn’t use this idea; getting people to contribute to the Program Book was like recruiting for a patrol in Kandahar.  And it’d require gathering a lot of artwork as well.

And sadly, I had the suspicion that nobody would get the reference.

We went with another idea.

The 1964 World’s Fair

Program book for the 1964 World’s Fair

My earliest memory was from the 1964 World’s Fair, of running away from my parents to see the Sinclair Oil Dinosaur exhibit.  I still had a few materials from this event, including a thick program book. The more I thought about it, the more than the Fair seemed like the last gasp of a particular kind of future– gleaming, technology-oriented, designed by the likes of GE and Monsanto, and pretty much tossed aside by the era of the Whole Earth Catalog. The design styles of the era were getting a revival thanks to Mad Men, and since the Guest of Honor turned out to be Cory Doctorow, the style was utterly perfect.

So I started assembling graphics to use (thanks to a site called Modern Mechanix– surprisingly run by a friend of Doctorow’s), and tried to use fonts and layouts from the era. (The artwork was stunning, but magazines had boring layouts back then.)  I found a lot of advertising artwork that fit the usual departments of the Con– some of which I altered, and some of which I ran verbatim. I also acquired some more old World’s Fair materials and used those as well. And since my workflow for these projects was pretty streamlined already, I had a lot of the thing done weeks before the deadline. I even used the mail-merge schedule system to create large-format posters that would be placed outside of the rooms, displaying the schedule of events there.

2009 Philcon Room Poster

But, since this was my last time on the project, I decided to make this really special. Remember that list of things that usually appeared in the Program Book? Well, sometimes, we’d ask a guest to contribute something else: an appreciation of another guest, an excerpt from an upcoming work, etc. This time, I decided to run as much material as was financially feasible. I contacted the guests for material, and acquired reprint permissions for a lot of stuff: song lyrics by guest Katherine Asaro, a lengthy interview with L.A. Banks, a photo spread of writers’ offices by Kyle Cassidy, and more. In other words, this was going to be a real publication, and not just a quick assembly of stuff we had laying around.

(Did we go over budget? Actually no: I found a local printer who was able to price the job below the previous year’s price. There was some unpleasantness when the Philcon people demanded that Emily and I assemble at least three bids for the printing job.  My local printer was the lowest by far… and then Emily was told by the Philcon people to “find someone 10% cheaper.”  So I sent out a letter explaining that, if we were to go on this snipe hunt, I’d be prepared to publish a bare-bones Program Book with no graphics, no additional material beyond the usual, and no binding beyond a staple in the corner.  So Philcon agreed to the full version… which was under budget to begin with.)

The Pocket Program deserves a small mention. I designed the cover to resemble the cover for the World’s Fair pocket program. This was also where I placed many of the parody ads I’d worked up over the previous year or so.

Parody ad, riffing on the famous Volkswagen “Think Small” ad

Anyway, the con begins, and I’m waiting for the printers to deliver the stuff.  They ran late, sad to say, and since I’d been giving people the “it’ll be spectacular. You’re going to flip over what I put together for you” sales pitch, a lot of Philcon people were taking the opportunity to express Severe Disappointment in me and my hype. This didn’t bother me very much for two reasons. The first reason was that I’d seen how deadline-conscious they were, and the long history of last-minute reprints, revisions, and huge rush-job bills they’d had to pay when they were running things. The second reason was that I knew what was coming.

The printers arrived at 9 p.m. a few hours late, and unloaded the boxes at the registration table. And a horde of fans immediately clamored around the table and saved me the trouble of opening the boxes by reaching out and ripping them open to get at the tasty schedule books inside. That was the moment for me… because they picked up the program books, with their color Popular Mechanics parody covers, and gave out whooshes of “What the Hell?” and “Wow!” and “Oh my God” and, best of all, fannish giggles at the  mock-copy on the cover.  I spent the rest of the weekend being bathed in compliments and praise.

The Dorian’s gig came about because of a conversation with Gil Cnaan, who is one of the more wonderfully improbably creatures to stomp the streets of Philadelphia. He stands about six-foot-eleventy-five, has long frizzy fair and a beard and a wild glint in his eyes that Gene Wilder would envy, and when he wears his Mad Hatter-style top hat he could be a circus ringmaster drawn by Dr. Seuss. (When he wears white robes, he looks more like Jesus of Nazareth, which makes for some high blasphemy in his friends’  Tumblr accounts.) Gil had been holding these Steampunk events at the Doubletree Inn on a semi-regular basis (monthly, bimonthly, quarterly), depending on budgets and the success of the previous event. Somehow, we got into an agreement for me to come by with my video camera and shoot the performances.

My main reason for doing this was completely, wholly mercenary: I needed a social life, and a lot of the Dorian’s crowd overlapped with people I knew from the local science fiction community. I’m also a bit socially anxious at parties, and I cope by finding Something Valuable to Do at parties. (One party, I spent an evening doing the dishes.) I can be entertaining in conversation, but getting there takes work on my part.

And Dorian’s Parlor is very, very, very geared– literally, geared, it’s steampunk– towards the personal spectacle of costume and fashion. Many of the attendees have not only worked up costumes, but whole steampunk personas. Outside of the actual events, there’s a series of vendor stalls for people who make steampunk- and Victorian-flavored jewelry, clothing, corsets, propers, faux-weapons, fetish gear, books, and more. And I would be showing up in the closest thing I’d have to such nightclub wear, namely, black jeans and a black shirt. If I was parked behind a camera, I wouldn’t feel completely out of place, and maybe others wouldn’t see me as being so out of place.

Techie stuff

Not much techie stuff to spill here. My camera was my Panasonic TM700, and I used a Rode Videomic most nights. There wasn’t much to report on the camera work, either, because all I did was set the camera up on a tripod, aim and balance its settings for the stage, and start it when an act began. This was when I was still learning a lot about covering events, so there are points on the early videos when the camera might auto-focus, re-color-balance, and even recalibrate its exposure during a shot.

The exception to this method came during the parlors’ Fashion Shows. This was when I would, occasionally, go hand-held, and try to follow the models as they did their runway walks in what I hoped was a fluid, dignified, and entertaining manner. Sometimes I simply used a small tripod as a pistol-grip, and others, I would use a small cheapo “stabilizer” that kept the camera balanced, but difficult to calibrate and aim properly.

In between events, I would take the camera off the tripod, and go around obtaining hand-held shots of the attendees. This was because Gil had suggested making a “commercial” for the event, and we wanted some nice, atmospheric shots of the costumes and events and vendors.  Eventually, this commercial was made by artist/photographer Jason Watt, who also designed the striking title card for the performance videos.

The Videos

Dorian ‘s YouTube channel has most of what I’d shot, and you can browse them individually there. I’ve created playlists for specific Parlors that may be helpful.

November 2011

Performers included opera singer Katie Kat, dancer Luna Rosa, belly dancers Eye of Isis, writer Dianne Salerni, and the band Ego Likeness. Fashion show by the Delicious Boutique.

December 2011

Performers included musical comedians the Slomsky Brothers, author Robert Romano, yoga performer the Amazing Amy, the Clockwork Dolls, and a fashion show by MayFaire Moon.

April 2011

Performers include Ak’Ana and Platform One.

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). We’d developed two distinct versions of the trailer in January. One began with moody shots of the various rivers, and another was built around the shots of the Imp character at her typewriter. Eventually, Caitlin decided to try a fresh start. taking a more direct and detailed approach to the editing. As she’s in Rhode Island and I’m in Philadelphia, and she doesn’t have editing software, we developed a workflow where she could refer to particular shots in previous drafts, referring to timecodes I’d placed in the videos. I could then arrange them, upload the next draft, and send emails with further suggestions and comments.

(It usually took my machine about an hour to render a trailer draft, and about half an hour to upload to YouTube. This is why this workflow works well for a trailer, but wouldn’t work for anything longer than five or ten minutes.)

When Caitlin approved the final draft, I made a set of very minor changes– half-second trims and extensions here and there, adjusting dissolves, but no radical changes– to balance the flows of video and music. Once she approved that, we were done. The video was uploaded to our YouTube channel, a video file was provided to Penguin for their use, and word was spread via LiveJournal, Twitter, close friends, book review sites, and more.

Several people have asked me about how we accomplished certain shots. The shot where the camera moves along the forest floor, past Eva, was done simply by holding the camera’s tripod upside-down and flipping the shot in post.

Most of the water shots were shot at 60fps, which facilitated graceful slow-motion of the moving water. The shot where Eva looks up from under her hood required some tricky color correction. These shots were filmed in January, and most of the background leaves were a light brown. We decided to try color-correction to make them more in-line with what we’d shot in October. One attempt gave us a rich, green-blue background, but Eva’s face was also green and pale; another attempt gave us good skin tones on Eva, but the background coloring was weak.

I used After Effects to create a matte around Eva’s hood, which enabled me to use the background from the green-blue shot behind her better-color-balanced face. Although the coloring in this shot is somewhat more theatrical than many of the other shots (in fact, almost no color correction was used in the rest of the project), we liked it a lot.

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.