Once again, I shot video of a play by John Rosenberg at Hellafresh Theater.
This time, I shot the play so I could try two different editing strategies. I shot two performances with two cameras each. I put the stationary TM700 at one side, while I panned and reframed my GH2 from the other, and on the next performance, I reversed the positions.
So there’s two basic ways I could edit these. I could take the GH2 footage from both performances, so the camera coverage would be the better coverage from both sides. But, I’d have to edit it to make the two performances seem like one (as I’ve done elsewhere), and that takes a lot of time and care… especially if the performances varied a lot from day to day.
And that’s what happened. Actors would be in different positions when they’d say the same lines. One day an actor played a scene wearing sunglasses, and the next, he played them without. Another actor would cross and uncross his legs at different points in a scene. After getting about fifteen minutes done, I threw up my hands, and decided to try the other strategy.
This other strategy was to synchronize the two video streams from the same (June 9) performance, and switch between Camera 1 and Camera 2 as though I were directing a live broadcast. Editing is a LOT faster this way– ideally, the project could be done in under two hours. Of course, there’d be tweaking the cuts after the fact, but I had a good First Draft of the play within three days.
Thing is, not everything was covered well during that performance. As I said, the TM700 didn’t move… and there were two or three long passages where the action occurred outside of its field of view. So I edited those sequences using footage from the June 8th performance. That took a few days as well. Once I had that done, I trimmed out the sections where the lights went out and the actors arranged themselves for the next scene.
I also created a small title sequence. One of the props in the play is a famous photo of a Buddhist monk immolating himself to protest the Diem regime; the photo in the play had a handwritten note, attributed to Madame Nhu, urging that we “enjoy the barbecue!” I figured this’d be a nice graphic for the titles. So I found a copy of the original photo, rescaled and cropped it to match the prop, and the did a slow fade so the Nhu-note version gradually became visible over time.