Jennifer Summerfield and Carl Guarneri rehearse a scene from A Doll’s House while director Josh Hitchens looks on.
As of August 23rd, I’m in the middle of co-creating a video of a recent production of Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, performed at the Ebeneezer Maxwell Mansion in Germantown.
The production was directed by Josh Hitchens; I’ve been working on a video of his one-man show about Jeffrey Dahmer, and he’s done his one-man Dracula at the Maxwell mansion in the past. Once again, Kyle Cassidy spearheaded a project to record a performamce.
Only this time, we’d try to shoot it more like a movie than like a live play performance. This meant closeups. This meant planned camera angles. This meant reblocking the action for the cameras. This also meant an intense and very rushed preproduction process.
To start with, I shot the play’s dress rehearsal, and the photos you see here are screengrabs from that footage. The play takes place in the mansion’s largeish parlor, and you can see the audience seating in the background. (The blond man with glasses is director Josh Hitchens.) I shot this footage so that I could compile a shot list that we could follow for the final video.
Jennifer Summerfield and Carl Guarneri rehearse a scene from A Doll’s House.
We were really under the gun, because schedule-wrangling gave us only two days to shoot a two-hour play: a Thursday night from 4 to 10, and a Sunday afternoon, roughly six hours each. This meant fast camera setups, very few retakes, and severely reduced opportunities for shooting Absolutely Perfect Camera Angles. Also, there were two actors who could be present for only one day of shooting, so we had to rejigger our shooting schedules to accommodate them.
However, we seem to be doing this pretty well. We’re shooting with two camerapeople– myself and Kyle Cassidy– and we have three cameras, making for some swift coverage setups. (It’s tough to get great angles when you’re preventing the cameras from seeing each other, but we manage.) I’ve been transferring my own footage to my hard drives, and so far it looks pretty good.
We hope to have a DVD and Blu-Ray ready by mid-December, so that out Kickstarter funders get a product in their hands in time for the holidays. Which means that I’ll be teaching myself how to design menus in Adobe Encore during November.