I've been saying for a while that I would talk about the shoot for Grove Park Theatre. As I finally got the chance to see the play that the video was shot for on Friday night, now seems like an appropriate time to talk about the experience.
I've written before about how I cast Little Things by getting in touch with Grove Park theatre. One of the guys who read for the part of Leonard was Rick. I decided to go another way with casting Leonard, but Rick's audition was excellent. Rick though expressed an interest in getting involved in the production irrespective of whether he was cast or not, an offer I gratefully accepted. A couple of weeks after first meeting him Rick contacted me on a different matter. The director of their latest production, David, wanted a video sequence for one of the segments of their Canterbury Tales. The segment of the Wife of Bath was interpreted as a Jeremy Kyle/ Trisha/ Ricki Lake/ Jerry Springer style talk show and he wanted a small vox-pop, talking heads, sequence shot and showed on a screen. Rick, who does a lot of the technical stuff for the theatre, asked if it was something I was interested in. Wanting to get some experience both of external shooting and editing, my answer was "hell yeah!" So I met with David the director and had a chat about what he wanted, then we got stuck in.
We shot on a Sunday in Wrexham so as to get streets as empty as possible of what my brother would refer to as "slack-jawed yokels". First thing I learned for future reference, if the weather is not good enough, don't fucking shoot outdoors. The weather was crap so in order to shoot we went under a covered alleyway. Covered alleyway equals echo, echo equals god awful fucking sound, god awful sound means that you spend all your energy on making sure that the sound is right, and as a result the picture suffers.
Second lesson, pick a style and run with it. Don't, for fuck sake, don't shoot the same content in two different ways and try and see what's better later. The camera I'm using, the XL-1 has two shooting modes, video and progressive scan. I will explain the difference for non video heads on the condition that any video heads among you don't shout at me. Video mode has a harsh real life quality to it, progressive scan, tones down some of the quality in a way that makes it look a bit more like film. Davis didn't know which way he wanted to shoot, so he asked me to shoot each vox pop in each mode and then we can choose later which method looks best. Big fucking mistake. Why? Because what I ended up with was some unusable shots in each format, so the final result needed to be a mishmash of both. The final video was projected and was unnoticeable to any of the audience. Except me.
Lesson three. Colour matters. One of the cast was wearing white, she stood in front of a white wall. She looked like a floating fucking head.
Final lesson. This shit takes time. The shoot on the day took about two and a half hours. I got about 45 minutes of footage (which is a pretty good ratio I think). That was edited down to just over a minute. working off those ratios, Little Things will be about 18 hours of shooting, about 6 hours of footage to get an 8 minute movie. That's a lot of stripping down.
Despite massive quantities of self criticism the end result was something I was reasonable happy with. I learned shitloads. I learned how to use editing software, I made my first chunk of schoolboy errors and I got my first credit for film making in the Canterbury Tales program. And context is so important. The footage slotting straight into the show.
Canterbury Tales is playing in Wrexham Grove Park Theatre until Friday and not only can you see my footage but Lisa Solari, from my cast, doing a fantastic turn in the Miller's Tale. Go check it out.
M
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