Web Video

Over the last few weeks, Mullet and I have been spending a lot of time discussing web video, and I realized haven’t written about it here very much.

When I started buying video gear seven years ago, the 3 major players in web video were QuickTime, Real Player, and Windows Media Player. All three played a range of codecs, but there weren’t easy ways of moving between the three formats. Being a Mac user, I used QuickTime by default, but I did have the other two players on my computer.

The players were all clunky and finicky. It wasn’t uncommon to see reduced frame-rates, lowered resolution, and even minimal action to make things look better.

Back then, I didn’t have a website or even an internet connection. The main means of delivering video was by running the signal from my capture card to my VCR. VHS was king—everyone, amateur or professional, used tape.

When I upgraded and got my G4, I suddenly had a DVD-R burner, and that led me to supplement Final Cut Pro with DVD Studio Pro (a couple months later, the Final Cut Studio bundle came out at a lower price than what it cost me to buy FCP and DVD-SP separately—thanks, Apple!).

Thus equipped, in 2003 I made history at the late, great Second Ciné video show by being the first to submit a video on DVD. But it was still a VHS world, and I backed up that DVD by exporting my clips to my VCR.

When I traded in my G4 for my G5, the new PCI expansion slot arrangement rendered my capture card useless, so I dropped the VHS option completely. By then, DVD burners were cheap enough that the indie world had shifted away from VHS.

DVD seemed to be the new king, unbeatable with its portability and flexibility. You could play it on your TV with a regular DVD player, or you could put it in a DVD-equipped computer. DVD sprouted in rental stores and retailers, offering special features and all the things impossible on VHS (subtitles and audio tracks in different languages, commentary tracks, alternate endings, etc, etc). The disks didn’t wear out like all tape-based technologies do—with care and handling, you would see the same image quality on the 1000th play as you would on the first play.

For an indie producer, you could easily crank out a DVD (maybe not the DVD-9 dual-layer format, but something that worked in most players and nearly all computers) that looked and played the same as the big boys’ disks.

I bought the 3rd edition of Chris Gore’s excellent film festival book in 2005, and we started to base our video efforts on the advice given. Film festivals were still king, and most of the ones that encouraged indie contributions readily accepted all the digital formats.

I bought Gore’s follow-up book on producing indie DVDs and used it as the main guide for our first appearance at the San Diego Comicon in 2006.

But it was at San Diego that I saw the future, and its name was not DVD but web video.

The big 3 players were still in the game, but Apple had introduced a new wrinkle—the iPod and iTunes. With incredible ease, you could download podcasts and listen to them on your Mac or iPod. The arrival of video-capable iPods sparked video podcasting. Flash video had arrived in force, with the help of some serious web video sites like YouTube. The big three media players changed membership, with Real player becoming a distant fourth. In fact, by 2006, I didn’t even have Real installed on my G5 as nobody was putting out video that QuickTime or WMP wouldn’t handle.

Gore and Mark Bell from Film Threat hosted a couple of panels at the con’s film festival (where my costumed appearance got some nasty looks from the black-clad filmistas—clearly a line is drawn in some people’s minds between the film fest and the convention itself!), and I attended a couple of them.

In one panel, Gore and Bell introduced the two guys behind Ask a Ninja as well as a couple of people from Hope is Emo, two of the most popular podcasts. I was still sans-internet at home, so I wasn’t aware of how big podcasting and web video had become. More people were watching these online videos than hundreds of film festivals put together.

But the indie aspect of these productions—Ninja was shot in the star’s apartment (painted up for green-screen production)—made it clear that you didn’t need a lot of money, just enough technology and, of course, a good idea well executed, to build an audience.

DVD suddenly looked less essential, just like VHS. Apple introduced its TV interface, and with flatscreen TVs and computer monitors becoming essentially the same, the average consumer realized they didn’t need a disk or tape to watch movies, TV shows, and indie video. The messy blue laser fight didn’t help, with the traditional market split into 3 different camps—DVD loyalists, Blu-Ray, and HD-DVD. Even with HD-DVD losing the fight, most people I know aren’t rushing into the blue laser world. After seeing CDs largely replaced by web music, most people are expecting the same of video.

So… in the 9 years I have been dabbling with indie video, I have seen it change completely. A physical product is no longer the primary goal since you can find a larger audience thorugh the magic of internet pixels.

Mullet and I are prepping our old feature, Babysitters, for web in small chapters. Our long-in-development DVD project is now a web video project with a DVD version also available. We’ll follow the footsteps of successful web video people like Rob Schrab or the guys behind Chad Vader and put the videos online and make a full-quality DVD available for sale.

More on web video to come. After all, it’s Tuesday. There’ll probably be some new development on Wednesday….

What’s Going on Today (or, Meanwhile back in 2007)

Now that I’ve updated what went on in 2001-2002, here’s an update on what we’re doing right now in 2007.

Mullet is slaving away on the issue 2 script. This is taking a lot of his free time, naturally. But he’s way ahead of where we were for issue 1 so there’ll be more time for story editing and polishing. I’ll see the script eventually and give him some feedback as his story editor.

Writing a comic book is a unique craft compared to screenwriting or prose—you have to come up with the usual story elements (plot, character, dialogue, action), but you also work on the layout of panels and pages. Until Mullet started writing our comic book, I had no idea what the roles of the writer, artist, etc were in that format. Like with movies and TV, well-written and well-designed comics make the writing transparent, so I never really thought about it before. I have more respect for the writers now, to be sure.

Meanwhile, back at the video ranch, I’m chasing a bunch of loose ends. This blog takes some of my time, and I’ve used it to find the discipline necessary to get back to writing almost every day (with the goal for every day). I am working on several script ideas, which I hope to have ready for Mullet by December. I have 4 shorts on the go as rough drafts, plus about a dozen interstitial/blackout type ideas that I think we’ll either use on the DVD as transitions and/or as a collection of short bits that we’ll post online.

When I get tired of writing, I’ve been playing around with the Babysitters final cut, and I finally got back to working on the edit of Can that Andrew Currie did for us. I still have to put Stalled together, and I’m working on an idea for opening credits (for the shorts) that will tie into the comic a bit (I sketched out some quick storyboards and then started some tests in Motion to see how I could accomplish what I’d drawn).

I’ve also downloaded the demo for 2 elements of Red Giant Software’s Magic Bullet Suite. More about that next time, once I’ve had the chance to play with it.

So that’s where we’re at, for the moment.

The 74-Minute Skeleton in Our Closet, 4: Post-Production

When we wrapped, of course, we had an enormous job in post-production ahead of us. We had over 30 hours of footage to on a large collection of mini-DV tapes. By then, I’d traded in the Powermac 8600 for a brand-new G4. I captured footage each week, once we’d watched our “rushes,” and I’d logged all the takes, but I did nothing more at that point until we were wrapped.

Mullet and I spent one memorable week sitting in front of that G4 trying to put together our first cut. It was sheer hell, so in a blaze of inspiration, we called it Hell Week.

Our self-taught shooting style came home to roost that week.

Our coverage was thin, so we didn’t have a lot of alternatives or any way of speeding scenes up—there was nothing to cut to. So… things had to stay as they were, usually as master shots. To match shots, we had to let things go on too long, and, to further complicate matters, very few shots matched perfectly (no continuity person to notice these things). We ended up using takes because they matched rather than using the best takes. That was the hell part of Hell Week.

There are a lot of first-time filmmakers who have made and who will make the same mistakes, but the silver lining is that we all learn more about putting moving images together when trying to solve problems than when something together easily (an equally important lesson is, of course, to learn from the mistakes and not repeat them the next time).

Today, we edit as we go, so as soon as we’ve shot something I start to put it together to see what we have. Otherwise, you’re blind to what you’ve missed, and your mistakes will likely not be fixable, unless your cast and locations are still available.

Another frustration appeared during Hell Week, something we couldn’t avoid that late in the project.

We’d started working on the project on with Adobe Premiere 6, which proved to be crash-prone and completely unreliable for anything other than crashing the computer at random moments. We had each scene in a separate project file to keep things manageable, but it didn’t matter how long or short the scene was—the software would crash regularly, and whatever work we’d done since the previous save was gone.

To be fair, we were probably demanding too much of Premiere. If we’d been working on a short, it probably would have worked just fine, but even keeping scenes in their own project files was probably too much at times.

Nonetheless, after the rough cut was done, I switched over to the first version of Final Cut Pro, which proved to be much more stable. I ended up using FCP to recreate the editing of a few scenes, and the rest I exported from Premiere as QuickTime movies. I stuck to the separate project files for each scene, but the crashing stopped and we were able to get through the rest of the process much easier.

Despite the obstacles, we had a 124-minute rough cut assembled by December, 2002. Technical errors, the lack of coverage, and the convoluted plot—for a first, student effort, I don’t think we did that badly. If you were to set a classroom full of first-year film students off and running for 8 months of Saturday shoots and the same budget, I think we would have held our own.

Some of the jokes were really good—a DVD gag played really well in particular, and we were complimented by a few people about specific gags that worked well. Some of it doesn’t work, and the story isn’t clear enough at times to make sense—we more or less walked away from the plot during Act 2.

The ending didn’t work very well, but it was because we made a classic rookie mistake when we reshoot parts of it to try to make it work. We didn’t reshoot the entire scene—just the specific shot needed. The retakes, naturally, didn’t match the original shots.

Lesson learned: any time you have to reshoot something, always look at the footage for the entire scene or sequence, print screen caps, and take them with you to the location. Or you can save yourself headaches by getting yourself a really good continuity person!

The project taught us things that we wouldn’t have learned otherwise.

The team itself was well-balanced. Mullet has a lot more performing experience than I do, so in our live performances he did better than I did because I wasn’t as experienced in improv—and we improvised almost everything on stage. With a script, I could hold up my end of the stick better, and the team was much more balanced, something that has carried on in our following projects and live performances.

We both learned a lot about storytelling with video, and the old saying about telling a story three times (on the page, in the camera, in the editing) is very true.

It was time to show our project to an audience to start working on pacing and structure. We had a Christmas Party at the now-defunct Tim Sims Playhouse for the cast, crew, and some invited guests, and we showed them the 124-minute version with temp audio tracks and placeholders for some of the graphics.

I remember not wanting to be in the room while it was playing. Surprisingly, the cast and crew were still in the room when the lights came up.

It was useful to see it with a real audience, though. Audience reaction showed us where we had to make cuts, and so, a few months later, we had a second cut running 74 minutes.

I moved onto the audio. All of our onscreen dialogue was recorded with a shotgun mike directly into the camcorder so the audio was, in theory, synched with the video, although the software occasionally disagreed and shifted things. Otherwise, all I had to do to was adjust volumes for individual clips until they were consistent.

On a dare from me, Mullet composed a crazy patchwork of a score, ranging from solo piano to a wall of indescribable noise. Dave Pearce recorded some songs that Mullet had written. Scott McClelland, a recording engineer/musician/music teacher, mixed and mastered the songs for us, and I used Final Cut Pro 1 to mix the final audio together. I exported everything as QuickTime movies.

We showed the car theft scene at Second Ciné, a show hosted by Andrew Currie, at the Tim Sims. Each month, AC screened a number of short comedies, having the director and/or performers come up after the short for an interview.

The Second Ciné audience wasn’t moved to violence, and I even got asked about what camera we’d used, likely because of the clarity of the image when we were shooting through the windshield (a Cokin circular polarizer and an ND filter, which made my one-chip Ultura look a lot better than it should have).

AC nominated us for newcomer of the year for the season-ending awards, but we lost out. Still, it was nice to be nominated, and, no, we didn’t prepare a speech in case we won. We would like to thank the academy….

Next time, the financial aspects of a no-budget feature….

September Roundup, Part II

If you made it through Part I, congratulations! This part will deal with the non-writing stuff I’m doing right now.

I have started work on a few video projects in the last month or so. Andrew Currie delivered the first cut of Can last month through the magic of a portable hard drive. I have AC’s project file as well as all the clips as he had logged and captured them—I haven’t had to go near my camcorder on this project!

AC’s cut was a first cut, so a lot of the clips are not trimmed completely so it plays really, really slow. In the second edit, I’ll trim everything up to pick up the pacing. I’m not changing any of the shots AC chose or the order he placed them, so the only differences will be the trims and any slow-mo and, er, fast-mo shots. There’s also a bit of CGI in it, a gag that AC came up with that wasn’t in the original shooting script. I’m using Motion to create it, and I’ll probably end up doing 10 different variations. I’ve tried 3 different ways so far, without coming up with what I want, but that’s how I’ve always worked with pixel-pushing software like Motion or After Effects: hack away at it until you get something.

After the CGI is done, I’ll start the audio work and get some sound effects in there, adjust the dialogue tracks, and prep it for whoever ends up scoring it. I will likely put in a temp score courtesy of my iTunes library to give us and our future composer an idea of what the music should do in different places. A couple of shots will need “stunt music,” specific genres to help set up or payoff a gag.

So that’s where Can stands this month. Next, the other short we worked on this summer, Bags.

Mullet has to come over and watch the rushes from the 3 shoots we did. We still need to shoot the exteriors for it, but all the interiors are done. Once we watch the footage from the 3 shooting days, I’ll start putting the takes we liked into a first cut.

We’ve always watched “the rushes” together after a shoot, just to pick out what works and what doesn’t work. Of course, sometimes in the editing you can’t use the best take because it either doesn’t match the preceding or following clip, or the best take is way too long/short and kills the pacing, or it steps outside of the story for too long or at the wrong time in the story. Most of the time, though, the best take ends up in the final edit. Sometimes, watching the rushes reveals that the takes we liked on the day aren’t the best takes on tape. We judge the takes by feel as much as by story logic, visual and aural clarity, etc., so it’s all about listening to your gut. The best takes tend to make you laugh out loud, even if you are watching a few hours after doing whatever it is that is making you laugh.

I make my notes, noting takes and timecode (we don’t usually keep continuity records while we’re shooting—we’ve evolved into a looser system where I number the takes on the clapper and don’t bother making notes about no-goods and goods until we watch the rushes.

Afterwards, I rewind the tapes, fire up the Mac, and start logging everything to batch capture. I capture all takes, even the false starts, because you never know when you’ll need something unexpected, and you can quite often find good stuff in bad takes, between takes, etc., especially with closeups. Most of it, of course, will never see the light of day, but during editing it’s invaluable to have all your crap handy, just in case.

Also on the go is a blast from the past, Babysitters. This was our first project, a 74-minute epic that took nearly 2 years to write, shoot, and edit. More about it in a later post….

Finally, I’ve been working on a teaser to post on our website and elsewhere to promote the DVD. I’ve done a couple of versions of one that I think we’ll likely put up when Mullet revamps the website in the New Year. I’ll have to come up with followup videos, of course, so that’ll be an ongoing process until we head to San Diego next July.

And, of course, we need opening credits for the shorts.

I did some quick ‘n’ dirty credits last July to loop on DVD at our table at the 2006 San Diego con, but it was basically Miller & Mullet running around. Someone recently gave us advice about the comic book, suggesting that their lack of knowledge of the characters made the story harder to understand, and I think this applies to the DVD as well.

We’ve been performing the act for 7 years, and it’s sometimes hard to remember that the rest of the world doesn’t know who we are.

So, our opening credits will likely be a Gilligan’s Island type with the lyrics carrying exposition as to what’s going on. Another, more recent model is the House of Cosbys from Channel 101. An animated series of shorts, House of Cosbys has a great, funny theme song that, with animation over it, explains the backstory to the series so that you know instantly what’s going on. We need the same thing, so as I work on these other things on my Mac, I’ll earmark footage that we can use. Of course, we’ll have to come up with a theme song, or at least lyrics that someone can compose a song for, but that’s an entry for another day….

September Roundup, Part 1

If you’re checking out my rambling diatribes via the link that Andrew Currie graciously put on his blog’s links page, welcome to the drollhouse…. Sorry. Been saving that one for years, and this felt like the right time!

This entry appears near the end of our first month of our shooting hiatus and I am exhausted. No, not really. I’m writing this on a Monday, so it feels worse than it looks.

Mullet is recovering from his dental work and writing issue #2 of the comic book as our artist, Kam Gates, sharpens his pencils and stirs his inks. But what am I doing, dear reader, while we wait for January and our planned return to shooting video?

I’ve been reading that bestselling screenwriting book, Story, by Robert McKee. I’m doing this as part of my plans to write more scripts this autumn by edumacating myself gooder. This book has been the 800-pound gorilla on my bookcase for about a year, and I figured it was time to reduce my yet-to-be-read books by one.

I was expecting something different, based on comments I’d seen about the book, and the author’s portrayal in Adaptation a few years back. I was expecting something that was geared towards cranking out mindless action-based fun as that is what happens to the Kaufman brothers’ script after they attend a McKee seminar. But the book is, happily, a detailed examination of how we tell stories, and how to tell stories. McKee is in the neo-Aristotelian school of writing, and The Poetics is referred to regularly, especially at the beginning.

I’ve never read anything formal about this, but I’ve noticed that screenwriting authors tend to be either pro-Aristotle or anti-Aristotle, with a few straddling the fence or avoiding the argument altogether. I read The Poetics long enough ago to have forgotten anything I read (other than remembering the section on comedy has been lost to the ages), but in examining how I write and have written in the past, I can see that I’m probably closer to the pro philosophy than the anti-Aristotle philosophy. But I’m not a purist or espousing one school of thought over another—I’m a pragmatic writer. Still, any tool in the wrong hands can be dangerous, and like all those books that become the new Hollywood bible (Syd Field, McKee, John Truby and Christopher Vogler being the ones I’m aware of becoming must-read script gurus ), I can see how someone could take this book and either write crap or greenlight it, if their grasp of the concepts laid out in the book isn’t a good grasp or is beyond their reach.

(Side note inspired by that last sentence: Bob Odenkirk has a hilarious short about a pitch meeting online, and he plays both himself and the exec to which he’s pitching. Has bad words, so NSFW.)

My first screenwriting book was Syd Fields’s first book, Screenplay, about his 3-act paradigm, and I also read Joseph Campbell’s Hero with a Thousand Faces. I haven’t read Vogler’s Writer’s Journey, which is basically a rehash of Campbell, but I have read a few things Truby has posted to the Raindance website. I have an ancient version of Dramatica Pro (running in OS 9), just to round out the screenwriting materials out there.

One of the key anti-Aristotelians I’ve read is Lajos Egri, whose Art of Dramatic Writing was really difficult to find in the 1990’s as it had gone out of print, but I managed to get a 2nd-hand copy, and I’ve seen new editions out there since then. I was urged to read Egri’s book by the 2nd screenwriting book I ever bought, whose title and author have vanished in the mists of my brain—all I remember is a white cover with purple detail—you remember the one, right?

I have a copy of Elements of Screenwriting by Irwin R. Blacker that is composed of photocopied pages of the library’s copy. I couldn’t find a new or used copy at the time, but it’s now back in print. I’ll buy the book itself one of these days….

I’ve read all of these books with an open mind, Story being the only one I had any preconceived notions about—when something becomes a must-read or must-see, I usually wait until the hoopla dies down before checking it out for myself. This approach has saved me from watching reality TV shows, for example. I’ll try to rent Season 1 of The Sopranos to see it for the first time. Yes, I’m that out of date….

Back to my point! I’ve used all of these screenwriting gurus in my efforts to try to become a better writer, and all of these books have the stench of truth about them despite their differences in philosophies and practical approaches to writing screenplays. I don’t think there’s any ultimate truths about writing anything, so each approach has things I can use.

On the creative front, I’m starting to brainstorm ideas for some more scripts. Ideally, I’d like to have a dozen ready in December to give us plenty to either reject or shoot in January. Some of the past scripts will be in that pile, but I’d like to have at least 5-6 new ones worth showing to Mullet (he’s my best critic). Our plan is to shoot some interior stuff this winter, thus taking the pressure off our schedule in the spring. At this point, I have no idea of what I’ll write, but I’ll try to keep most of them indoors. I’m following Robert Rodriguez’s recommended method for writing no-budget scripts: start with a list of things you have. His famous El Mariachi list included a bus and a tortoise. My list will be radically different.

By the way, even if you’re not a fan of Robert Rodriguez’s films, his DVDs always include his famous “10-Minute Film School” segments and are well worth checking out. He has included these on all the DVDs of his I have owned or rented, and the earlier ones are much more applicable (El Mariachi and Desperado, for instance). The Once Upon a Time in Mexico edition shows how he did a couple of shots with CGI in a surprisingly low-tech way (not the CGI itself, but rather how he shot the 2 shots with Salma Hayek and Antonio Bandaras that the CGI was drawn into later on).

And I will probably watch Lloyd Kaufman’s DVD, Make Your Own Damn Movie, again, as I’ve found myself staring at the gaudy yellow spine the last few times I’ve browsed my out-of-order DVD collection. It’s a funny look at no-budget, B-movie filmmaking, made cheap but with tons of interviews and that Troma craziness.

I like to review these low- and no-budget filmmaking sources before I start prepping for shoots, just to shake things up and maybe come up with a brilliant idea that either makes something in front of the camera better or make the behind the camera stuff better. When you’re in a comedy duo that spends a combined 2 hours per day putting on and taking off the makeup, anything that makes the actual shooting easier is much appreciated on the day.

This post is probably long enough to wade through for now. Next post, likely minutes after this one, I’ll go through the list of post-production projects I’ve got on the go.

End of Summer (almost) Roundup

OK, my biweekly promise has gone the way of Paris Hilton's dignity. I can't even remember what I wrote the last time, so I'm probably going to repeat myself from earlier posts here.

So here's an update on the Miller & Mullet DVD:

1. This week, Andrew Curriecopied the media and project files for Can onto my external hard drive. I now have his rough edit on my Final Cut timeline. The cut turned out really, really well. It's different from how we would have shot it on our own, which makes it a better short, I think. We've been doing a more theatrical style of shooting, and Andrew shot Can in a dynamic, visually interesting way. The cut he gave us is a rough edit, so the cuts have to trimmed for timing and any future sound effects added, but the overall shape is there. The current running time is 4 minutes, and I'd expect at least 30 seconds to come off that, if not more (depending on how much I play with speed).

2. We did all the interiors for Bags, the short formerly known as Dressing Room (finally found the one-derful, er, one word title we wanted). We shot the stage manager scenes with Alastair Forbes, a Theatresports colleague of Mullet's and an outstanding talent. Alastair graciously allowwed us to shoot in his home, so he gets two gold stars on his Miller & Mullet report card. A week later, we shot my interior pickups to replace my laryngitis-plagued original takes. Mullet directed me, and while I was batch-capturing the takes, a few things made me laugh out loud (which is rare becuaase I normally cpature stuff as soon as I get home from shooting, which means I'm watching something that was repeated ad nauseum all day and has lost all the funny by the time I watch the multiple takes of said something repeat itself on my camcorder). I still have to sit down and watch all the takes for the 3 shooting days before I even attempt to start cutting something together. Unlike Can, I'm too close to this to be excited about it --if the magic struck this production, too, I won't know until I play it for another person and see their reactions. The only remaining scene is an exterior with Alastair's character to wrap up the short, which we'll shoot when schedules permit.

3. I've dusted off our "boot camp" movie, Babysitters. We shot this from October 2001 to July 2002 and ended up wtih a 74-minute feature, all shot on a single-chip Canon Ultura. Insane? Yes. We went into it with the goal of putting something together that we could use as a calling card, but it was also meant to be our self-taught film school. We shot almost every Saturday, dragging friends Jeff, Kasia, and Nic out to help us shoot an episodic story about two babysitters (guess who?) who lose the baby they're supposed to care for --will theyy get the baby home? We ran a screening for cast and crew in 2002 and then put it quietly aside (after about a year's worth of post-producction). We plan on doing another screening this fall or in the winter for the cast, crew, and friends jsut so I can get it off my hard drives.

4. I'm re-editing a short we did in 2004, Stalls. Stalls was our first post-Babysitters project, so it has some similarities to it, such as a linear storytelling style and limited coverage. I've been working on it, on and off, since then, but we did have a cut that we submitted to the 2006 San Diego Comic-con film festival in conjunction with our entry into the small press section that year. The short didn't get in, so I've been tinkering iwth it since then. I'll likely turn a very linear story into a non-linear story. comparing Stalls to Babysitters, the first thing I notice now is that the writing improved greatly, as did the performances (especially mine --I was taking a directing class at Ryerson U when we shot it, and the Meisner technique had taken hold of my performing by then). but we cut out all the distractions and shaggy dog plotting that makes Babysitters a mess, and told a very linear story. But with us not shooting a lot of coverage, there's no room to change that linear story very much, so I'm going to break the plot up a bit with flashbacks to make it, hopefully, a less predictable and more lively short.

So that's where we stand --3 shorts in various stages of post, plus an old "feature" awaiting its final tweaking.

The NeutrinoPlex show ended in July, and I had withdrawal symptoms for a couple of Fridays afterwards. I think I benefitted from being part of the show, even if I wasn't actually shooting stuff myself. I was the cheif button pusher, running the intro and outro DVD clips, cueing up mini-DV tapes, and switching each scene. Three teams went out and shot 3 scenes each of a story, rushing the tapes back to the theatre, where we started playing them after about 20 minutes of videos or standup comedians. It was a high-wire act, with late tapes spelling disaster a few times, but otherwise, when the show worked, it was comedic gold with improvised scenes that made the most of what the performers could find and use on the bright lights of the Danforth. Each week, before the show, we'd watch the prior week's archive tape, and it would be the first time I'd really see the show without the distraction of loading and unloading tapes. I learned the value of closeups, making relationships between characters clear and distinct right from the start, and many other lessons that will come to me after I've posted this missive. I would say that the NeutrinoPlex cast and crew, plus the inestimable director, Andrew Currie, provided me with a course in no-budget, on the fly filmmaking that has freed me up from how I've thought out shots and cuts before. All for the price of dinner every other week! If and when they do the show again, I'd be glad to be asked back.

Alastair Forbes, the improviser I plugged earlier, asked us to help him out with some shorts he and Natalie Urquehart were putting together. Mullet's off for a while after some nasty dental work, so I volunteered. I was glad I did --the shoots were all fun and very easy-going. I did minimal prep for the 2 shorts, Spy Bum and Office Wizards, basically figuring out the style of shooting for both. For the Office Wizards short, I emulated the Office (UK version) with handheld camera, riding the zoom lever in and out to give it a documentary feel (I didn't hide behind office plants or anything like that --the emulation was a bit limited by geography). For Spy BUm, I watched the sole 007 tape I own, the George Lazenby Bond, On Her Majesty's HOlidays in the Sun. It had a very conventional '60's style, so I shot Spy Bum entirely on tripod, zooming only when needing to reframe (and practically panning on each zoom as well). Both shorts were a joy to shoot --the cast, all improvisers, worked out the beats with a few rehearsals, and then did the scene beautifully each time. Office Wizards was done from top to bottom each time, and with a master shot, 2-shots, closeups, and inserts, I think they did it about 20 times in total. Yet, with the skills of the improvisers at hand, they made minor variations work each time, and I am glad I'm not editing it as I don't think it will be easy to pick one take over another (aside from a few takes that did go south). With Spy Bum, the short was broken into several scenes, so it's much more of a bits 'n' pieces production. Again, the cast were amazing. My hope is that I managed to get that magic on tape so that Alastair can cut them into something wonderful.

So, now that the summer is rolling into Labour Day (the sound of summer ending in Toronto is the airshow at the CNE), I'm shifting into post. I also ahve to start writing more scripts for our winter shooting plans, which would likely be in January and February (interiors, naturally). And then there's the theme song we need to write and get someone to perform. More about that next time --hopefully in two weeks....