See you at the theatre!

Airport Security, the newest play by award-winning artist Patrick Gauthier, marks Gruppo Rubato’s return to the Ottawa stage. Presented at the Irving Greenberg Theatre Centre-Studio Theatre, 1233 Wellington St. West (at Holland Ave), the performance runs June 4-12, 2010, with a special preview performance on June 3rd. Can’t wait that long? Visit our website, www.rubato.ca, to catch the latest installment of our 4-part short film, Airport Security, before we open!

Airport Security exposes our fears and foibles of airport protocol in Rubato’s characteristic witty and political style.  Playing on our insecurities and overconfidence in a system destined to both convolute and demystify air travel, from shuttles to baggage carousels, departures to arrivals, Airport Security scans Canada’s growing obsession with “security.”

Written and directed by Patrick Gauthier (2010 winner of the Council for the Arts in Ottawa’s RBC Emerging Artist Award, Rideau Award-Emerging Artist nominee and director of the multiple award-winning production Countries Shaped Like Stars), the production features talented local actors Simon Bradshaw, Kris Joseph, Catriona Leger, Tania Levy and Kate Smith. Sarah Waghorn designs Costume and Props (having previously designed for Rubato’s productions of Listening and The Churchill Protocol). First time design collaborators are: John Doucet (Set), Pierre Ducharme (Lighting) and Original music by Ottawa newcomer, Ann Walton. Emily Pearlman (co-creator of Countries Shaped Like Stars by ¡Mi Casa! Theatre) is production Dramaturg.

Tickets are on sale now through the Great Canadian Theatre Company Box Office, in person or by phone (613-236-5196). Show times are 7:30 p.m. with a Pay-What-You-Can Matinee on June 6 at 2:30 p.m. Tickets are $25 ($20 for students). For more information, visit our website at www.rubato.ca.

Gruppo Rubato was founded in 2002 by Patrick Gauthier and Tania Levy, and includes core members Kris Joseph and Gavriella Silverstone. Rubato presents challenging, contemporary, politically-charged Canadian theatre for a young, educated, urban audience. We are exclusively dedicated to the creation and presentation of new work, specializing in works by Ottawa artists.

In theory, shooting digital makes things easier.  The data goes on to a hard drive; there’s no film stock to budget or worry about, no processing and conversion costs.  You can shoot fast and cheap and fill up as much storage space as you’ve got with tasty, juicy performance work.  The downside of all of this is that it’s really easy to shoot too much — extra takes, extra camera setups, extra coverage — and the more raw material you capture on the front end, the more work you create on the back end.

The shortest scenario we shot — which clocks in at just under four minutes in its final version (without credits) — came to the editing room in the form of more than an hour’s worth of footage, spanning 10 internal “sub-scenes”, covering as few as two and as many as seven camera angles per sub-scene, with a grand total of 51 takes.  Using a little quick math, and assuming every shot was perfect, this gave the editor (and who are we kidding — by editor I mean me)  more than 6 000 possible versions of the end product.

Thankfully, some material was not perfect.  Jumping back and forth in a script on-set discombobulates actors and crew, no matter how prepared everyone is.  So lines get screwed up, movements get screwed up, arms and heads are in different places from take to take; off-camera noises happen, boom mikes appear in shots (though not nearly as often as the shadows of boom mikes), and unwanted camera movements add unnecessary drama. Accounting for all of those kinds of issues, we can blessedly knock off a few thousand permutations.

Then there are the frustrations that come from matching footage together.  A sequence of brilliant takes can be ruined by one shot that doesn’t match, for whatever reason.  Usually it’s continuity-based: switching from one camera angle to another reveals dialogue that doesn’t quite overlap right, or an out-of-place arm, or a mismatched movement in the background.  On several occasions I spent hours trying to make a sequence work, only to have to abandon it altogether and build something else using a different series of takes.  This is probably the most frustrating part of the editing process: even when all of the parts seem brilliant, the sum of the parts can be fatally flawed.

Ultimately, there is the realization that, like in all forms of art, perfection is nearly impossible.  Patrick and I stared at the rough cuts of our scenes, and made note of every jarring cut or continuity error we could find.  In many, many cases it was ultimately impossible to create a completely error-free sequence.  During the weeks in which I was overwhelmed by the editing work, I became obsessed with all of these errors and was determined to correct them.  At the same time, though, I was watching other peoples’ films and television shows with a different set of eyes, and began to spot constant, small continuity errors in everything.  Eventually I came to the realization that I was just trying too hard.  The devil really is in the details, but the truth is that if the storytelling is even minimally effective, most people don’t notice the details.  (Now I suppose you’ll want to watch all the videos again, just to look for the mistakes we intentionally left behind.  Go ahead.  Some of them are pretty funny.)

As in all things, it’s great to have a road map.  The script is the guideline, but the editor really does create the performance.  As an actor, I hear this constantly; as an editor, I now know it inherently.  Ultimately, it was unnerving lesson of all.  In the editing room, I can create pace and timing; I can shape the emotional arc of the scene; I can add or eliminate action.  Almost every aspect of the actor’s performance is under the editor’s control — even elements of non-performance. On at least three occasions, I used shots of actors waiting for “action” to be called in order to flesh out sequences that needed some space.

The amount of material you can’t use in the end product is disheartening.  The options open to you, based on the material you can use, are infinite.  And over the course of six weeks of editing and tweaking and re-editing and refining, it all finally came together.  And so I have just a handful of recommendations for myself on the next big editing project:

• on the set, don’t shoot every possible bit of everything just because you have disk space to fill.
• make detailed notes on every take, as you log your footage, so you know what you have.  Make note of your favorite takes, but make note of favorite bits of takes, as well.  Make note of “bad” takes, too, but don’t delete ANYTHING because you never know when a few seconds of footage from a “bad” take can solve a serious editing problem.
• back up all of your data.  Twice.
• take frequent breaks while editing.  It is very easy to lose perspective and get boxed in by your work if you stare at it too closely.  I had to stop when I started to feel frustrated.  Occasionally I had to step away from the editing suite for a full day or more.
• take your time.  Unless you can’t.

I found editing work to be extremely enjoyable, most of the time.  And I recommend an editing project of some kind to almost any actor, just to help teach you things you shouldn’t do in front of a camera.

Tickets are $25 (or $20 students), with a pay-what-you-can matinee on Sunday, June 6 at 2:30 pm.

AIRPORT SECURITY
at the Irving Greenberg Theatre Centre Studio Theatre
(1233 Wellington Street West)
June 3-12, 2010, 7:30 pm (pay-what-you-can matinee Sunday June 6 at 2:30 pm,  no show Monday)
$25/20 students
Call the GCTC Box Office: 613.236.5196

Back in January we shot a short-film component of Airport Security, parts of which you can now see over on Vimeo. We managed to scrape together enough money to make it a low-budget union shoot, with great rental equipment and insurance and Officially-Rented Locations, and it was absolutely the biggest video project that we’ve undertaken — not that we’ve undertaken many. All told, the project cost us $2600 (mostly actor costs) and an immense amount of “volunteer” hours in pre- and post-production.

In the weeks leading up to the shoot, I chewed up and spit out every “how-to-make-a-movie” resource I could find, including The Filmmaker’s Handbook and Extreme DV at Used Car Prices. They were immensely useful, but the absolute truth seems to be that the only way to learn how to shoot a video is to shoot a video. Here are a few things we learned while shooting Airport Security:

Never shoot without a video monitor. We knew this going in, and had a TV in the trunk of the car to use as a monitor… but we had no way to hook the monitor up to the camera because of its antiquated inputs, and didn’t have time to find the proper signal adapter. As a result, the only tool we had on-set to assess the quality of our shots was the LCD monitor attached to the camera. This is not at all ideal: small LCD screens don’t look much TV screens; they’re not calibrated, so it’s impossible to judge if contrast and brightness settings are anything close to correct; and all the visual indicators and doodads superimposed on the LCD-screen image can give you a skewed idea of what your shot composition actually looks like. If you’re using the LCD screen to judge your shot, you’re also not properly accounting for things like light levels. We had a lighting kit with us, but because time was tight and the natural light seemed good and the shots looked great on the small LCD screen, we never really used it. Ultimately, shots that look perfectly exposed on an LCD screen may be over- or under-exposed in reality. With a good prosumer camera and editing software you can compensate for some of these problems in post-production… but it’s better not to create those problems at all. Oh — I’ll never shoot again without using a light meter, either.

A two-man crew is silly. Patrick and I got so caught up in casting and scheduling that we never really thought through the logistics of the shoot. In the surface it seemed like a camera op and a sound op would be sufficient; our locations were contained, the scenes were short(ish), and we weren’t dealing with huge numbers of actors. But our confidence in this area cost us. In hindsight, we really could have used:

• set control. In our “lobby” location, we had terrible problems controlling the environment. Despite being in a relatively quiet area, we were still in a public space and so we had constant problems with people wandering into the shooting area, or talking loudly enough to be picked up by the microphone, or deciding to empty garbage bins, or wanting to find out what we were up to. As an actor, I’ve been on many sets where shooting in a public space is necessary… but in all cases there are people around who can politely ask people to keep quiet and steer clear in the precious moments were cameras are rolling. It’s tough to keep a crowd of students from walking through your set when one member of your two-man crew is holding a camera and the other one is clinging to an eight-foot boom pole.
• extras wrangler. We lucked out here, because we actually had a wrangler. She came in the form of Nancy Kenny, who stayed after her afternoon acting call was finished, and helped coordinate the eight background performers we needed for the evening. She made sure our background people were properly dressed. She kept them quiet when they needed to be quiet, and out of the way of the hack two-man crew. She kept them informed about what was going on. And until she offered to stay and help us with this, we had no idea how critical she’d be. We couldn’t have gotten through that evening without her.
• a “script supervisor”. I put the term in quotes because a real (read: professional) script supervisor would do more than what we needed on our set. On top of shooting, our two-man crew was responsible for making sure that all of our takes were slated properly, for making sure scenes were shot in the right order, for managing continuity (in cases where actors weren’t managing their own), for making sure that every line was the script was said by the actors, and every line in the script was covered by the camera from as many angles as we needed. Our shoot took place over two days; we were not efficient at managing all of this on our own on the first day, and over the course of those two days we inevitably made mistakes.

Don’t forget about sound. We lucked out with the locations we found for our shoot: they looked great. The conditions for sound recording, however, were not ideal. We had a great mike and a boom pole, but we were running the microphone right into the camera — meaning we didn’t have much control over gain or other parameters. We relied on the acoustics of the spaces we were in, and in the case of the large lobby space used to shoot Passenger Protect and Missing, we were dealing with concrete walls (read: echo, and very “live” sound that carried for hundreds of feet), overhead sodium lights that buzzed loudly right in vocal range, and a bank of vending machines that had to be unplugged when cameras were rolling. Adding sound to footage is easy; taking unwanted sound out is not. Shot-to-shot changes in sound quality jump out to listeners, and in our case we didn’t allow for extra dialogue recording (ADR) after the shoot. We had to go with what we got on-set, and what we got on-set wasn’t always ideal.

Never shoot a video without gaff tape. I don’t care who you are or how little you think you need gaff tape. You need gaff tape. It keeps cords out of the way. It keeps phones stuck to desks. It keeps costume bits from flapping around. It keeps shoes from making noise on hard floors. It keeps unruly actors quiet. If you’re in a hardware store and you see gaff tape on sale — ever — buy it.

There are lots of things we did right — perhaps by accident, perhaps not:

We shot the easiest scenes on the first day. This was planned, because we knew that we had no idea what we were doing. The Paste Protocol was shot first because it involved four actors who didn’t have to move much, a single light source, one significant prop, and a small quiet room with four walls. In this environment we got to make all kinds of mistakes safely. We learned how to run the set, and used that information to regroup and plan for the second (more complex) day of shooting.

A production cart. We set up a rolling cart that we could keep alongside our camera and sound equipment. Paper copies of our script lived on this cart, along with our shot list, slate, hard drives, and a laptop armed with soft copies of all our documentation and our storyboards. The shot list was kept in a spreadsheet, and we updated it as we worked: this is how we compensated for not having a script supervisor. Every shot was tracked, along with the planned camera position, the actors in each shot, the opening and closing line, key props, notes on composition, and the slate codes (take numbers) for each shot. Footage was pulled off the camera’s media cards as we went, and put on the hard drives, giving us multiple, safe copies of our data. And because the cart was on wheels, it moved with us and was always easy to reach. Simply put: without this cart and the gear on it, we would have been utterly lost.

We kept actor calls short. This was partly an accident, but with only a few exceptions we didn’t plan on having any one actor on-hand for more than a four-hour call. The agreement we were working under paid each actor a daily rate, so we could have kept each actor for up to eight hours (accounting for breaks); calling people for only four hours meant we had a buffer, if needed, in case shooting ran behind schedule. This buffer came in handy for one of the three scenes we shot… but because we allowed for it, it cost us nothing extra and didn’t stress us out (any more than we already were, anyway).

The preparation for the shoot and the shooting itself was pretty stressful for us, but I think we managed rather well for a couple of guys with minimal prior experience. More than anything else, the experience got me excited about and interested in doing other projects… which may be dangerous.

In the next post, I’ll cover what became more than a month of work after shooting was complete: editing and post-production.

Click here to view the embedded video.

We’re starting off right with a staged reading our smash hit comedy The Man Who Went to Work One Day and Got Eaten by a Bear.  A sell-out at the 2006 Ottawa Fringe Festival, playwright Patrick Gauthier has updated the script (now with 50% more bear puns!) and reunited the original cast of Simon Bradshaw, Jordan Hancey, Kris Joseph, Tania Levy and Natalie Joy Quesnel for this special one night only event.

If that weren’t enough, A Grand Evening also marks the WORLD PREMEIRE of our short film Airport Security.  A major component of the Airport Security Project, this 20 minute film brings you deeper into the world of air travel – and of the play.  Why wait when you can attend our exclusive advance screening?

And A Grand Evening will wind up with a dance party hosted by DJ AL Connors, CHEAP drinks, and maybe a surprise or two.  Tickets are $15 (available at the door or in advance); the doors open at 7:00 pm and the art begins at 7:30!

Gruppo Rubato presents:
A GRAND EVENING (a fundraiser is support of Airport Security)
- A staged reading of The Man Who Went to Work One Day and Got Eaten by a Bear
- The WORLD PREMIERE screening of the Airport Security short film
- DJ AL Connors
- CHEAP drinks, prizes, and sur-prises!

Wednesday, March 31; 7:00 – 11:00 pm
Club SAW (67 Nicolas Street; corner of Daly/Nicolas)
Tickets are $15, and are available at the door or in advance.

For more information or to reserve tickets please email info@rubato.ca

Creation-company Gruppo Rubato was founded in 2002 by Patrick Gauthier and Tania Levy, and includes core members Kris Joseph and Gavriella Silverstone. We produce exclusively new works with an emphasis on Ottawa artists.  For more information visit our website at rubato.ca.

That’s what I kept telling myself.

On one end of the spectrum, you have the Robert Rodriguez “10 Minute Film School”, where everyone is a filmmaker because they say they are, and everyone is a film expert because they’ve been seeing movies all their lives.  On the other end of the spectrum, you have Steven Ascher’s “Filmmaker’s Handbook”, which provides tons of detailed information, and just enough to scare you into thinking you should be going to film school.  I used both — plus some great tutorials at IndyMogul’s 4-Minute Film School — to get a handle on what we were getting ourselves into for the Airport Security shoot.

Patrick and I knew we wanted to shoot scenes from Airport Security almost a year ago.  It was clear that good scenes were going to be cut from the play as it was evolving, and the idea of being able to film those scenes and use them in another aspect of our theatre project was very exciting to us.  When we wrote and toured Churchill Protocol in 2007, we wrote a two-minute teaser scene that actually served as a prologue to the play.  We shot it in one night using a Digital8 camcorder, and the resulting video — while not perfect — served us well in pitch sessions, as grant application material, and as multimedia used to promote the play as we took it across Canada.  This time, we wanted to up the ante.

What sold us on the idea of going for broke this time was a quick look at the local resources available to us.  SAW Video in Ottawa has terrific training courses, and as a co-op it also offers members the ability to rent some high-end equipment at reasonable rates: they have a Sony PMW-EX1 in their inventory, which would let us shoot in high-definition video.  So we got excited at what was possible, joined up, and started looking for dates where we could take their workshops.  Sadly, aside from the camera workshop, our schedules didn’t allow for as much training as we’d have liked — so I ended up relying on a lot information from other sources to fill in gaps.  Patrick had the benefit of having taken a documentary filmmaking course while he was working on his MFA, and I’m still jealous about it.

In spite of our lack of formal film crew training, we knew we needed to be prepared for this shoot.  In order for us to be able to commit 15 pages of script to video in only two days of shooting, we also knew we had to be as organized as possible.  Aside from scouting locations and figuring out costumes, most of the pre-production planning involved setting up storyboards for the scenes, and using those storyboards to figure out where we’d need to put our camera, what to shoot, and in what order shooting should take place.

You may have seen storyboards before; if not, here’s a nice example I found on artist Josh Sheppard’s site.  A storyboard helps a filmmaker visualize the end product well in advance of the shoot by outlining the visual look of the project in a series of still images.  Putting a storyboard together illuminates issues that you just can’t see when visualizing the film in your head.

The problem with me and storyboarding is that I can’t draw worth a damn.  I tried for a couple of days to draw stick figure diagrams that described shots, but I kept getting confused about angles and continuity and things, and I ended up very frustrated.  My eureka moment came when I realized I could mock up the set and characters using household objects, and the shoot photos of the “set” to show how each shot might look.  Of course, I don’t have kids and don’t collect action figures, so I had to get creative about what to use to represent a person.  I ended up using tubes of face cleaner and glue sticks and bottles of saline.  But in mere minutes I began to see and resolve problems with angles and sightlines that I could never have conquered with scrawled stick figures.

Once I had horribly and sadistically photographed every skin cream and lotion in the house, I put all of the storyboard photos together into a coherent order, saved them as a deck of PowerPoint slides, and then arranged to bring them to the shoot along with a spreadsheet that listed all the shots we needed for each scene.

I tried to organize the spreadsheet in such a way as to minimize the number of times the camera would have to be moved: start at a wide angle, then get other shots and closeups; then move the camera to a new position and repeat.  Using the skin-care-storyboards as a reference, we set up our shots on set to match, and carefully logged each take as we went in the spreadsheet.  Having my laptop on location was a Good Idea.  As you can see from the example photos above, we did a pretty good job of making the camera shots match my hygiene-product-photos.

It is precisely the state of point-and-shoot cameras and easy-to-use tools that made this kind of storyboarding possible: I was not limited by my artistic inability or, in many ways, my understanding of how this stuff “should” be done.  And doing it all with my iPhone camera and household objects cost me nothing but time.  The resulting time savings on the set were immeasurable.

In my next post, I’ll give you a list of Things You Don’t Learn Until You’re On The Set And Have To Make Do.