Some of the configurations we used enabled the relevant live camera and replay signals or feeds to be shown to the director according to what scene they were relevant to, changing instantly as each scene was approached. The many other tasks of the technical director, such as handling chroma key and input/output routing, were all organized on the board with a facility and speed not possible on a standard board.
Our collaboration with Jürgen and EVS made me wonder if, in fact, a system could be created that represented one or two steps before the moment of actual performance, which might further simplify the entire process. It would essentially be a program devised to support the entire Live Cinema process even at the script and storyboard phases.
I began to think of approaching this company with creating a device that would work seamlessly with the new DYVI board. One of its features would be that it could integrate the text of the script in sync with the timeline of the editing in such a way as to facilitate the process of editing image and sound during rehersal by moving around the text in word processing format. An editorial assistant would align the text along with dialogue and action and a musical time signature, a task something like syncing the dailies in early cinema. Once this task was accomplished, moving a block of text to some other location in the script or eliminating it would immediately determine where the image and sound, or one or the other, were placed in the editor’s timeline. The rhythmic timeline would follow along much as in a musical score, so that the precision of the rhythmic measure, bar, and beat would allow the text to exactly determine the order and duration of the edited program, enabling all the elements to be synchronized (whether edited or not).
5
SCENERY AND LOCATION
It is my belief that the style, mode, or classification of any motion picture could be re-approached as Live Cinema. When I heard that NBC had announced a live television production of A Few Good Men, I thought to myself, sure, that’s a court martial story, with all the unity of the courtroom drama, perfect to be produced as a play and then covered with a television camera mentality (use of zoom lenses to cover the necessary shots) and the use of an extensive overhead grid to light it. This was similar to what was done on a live production of On Golden Pond, where an elaborate standing set, play-like staging, and classic conventional camera coverage made it resemble a typical television production. If I could choose any project I wanted for Live Cinema, I’d go to something nearly impossible to do as a live TV play, perhaps Lawrence of Arabia or something of similar grandeur. Obviously that tremendous film would push Live Cinema to its very limit (assuming it was even possible). But no matter how grand, you need to start the same way, by planning a storyboard of the shots you intend to get—and then figure out how to get them.
Now of course, there is a trick card in such speculation. Clearly one doesn’t expect some Bedouin camel-handler to be standing throughout the production, ear to walkie-talkie, waiting for the command, “Send the camels!” The shots of camels may already have been recorded and loaded into the EVS machine, cued and ready to go. That fuels the contention that Live Cinema isn’t really entirely live, and in truth, it isn’t. Live Cinema, as it turns out, is a juggling act of many, many discrete pieces derived from live cameras and EVS-based cameras—which behave as if they are live but in fact can be juggled and used later, either fractions of a second later, or whenever wished. Then there is what is called in television sports “the package,” a collection of EVS clips, often edited together quickly during a game and available to the director. This offers the possibility of having a pre-cut sequence available to add to the on-line live program.
Is this cheating? For me, it’s about what percentage of the resultant production is truly live and what is not. The recent production of Grease Live!, the most exuberant of the recent live musicals and based more on the movie Grease than on the play Grease, was time-shifted so we in California saw a recording of a live broadcast of the show from New York. In truth, the original live broadcast lost sound for several minutes and flirted with rain, but this was actually corrected when it was shown on the West Coast three hours later. To me, pre-recorded (EVS) shots and sequences are part of Live Cinema, just as staged shots are part of the classic documentary film.
There has never been a documentary film, going back to the great classics such as Robert J. Flaherty’s Nanook of the North (1922) that doesn’t include any number of staged shots combined with reportage footage. When Flaherty was creating his evocative poem of the real lives of indigenous Inuit people, I am sure he told Nanook, “Go over to the fishing hole in the ice and catch a fish, which we’ll put on the hook.” All art cheats. As Flaherty said, “Sometimes you have to lie. One often has to distort a thing to catch its true spirit.” Having some staged shots doesn’t make something less than a great documentary. And having some EVS shots doesn’t make a live baseball game any less live, and by the same token doesn’t make a live performance of cinema less of a work of art. It is part of the recipe that a percentage of the production can be derived from other sources, other channels, and other methods.
My impression from working on two Live Cinema workshops was that it was like juggling a few hundred oranges in the air, and having them fall into place by virtue of skill, planning, luck, and magic. Cinema is by nature a complex collection of many images and sounds coming together to create emotional and intellectual impact. Whether those pieces are assembled over months or years of editing, as with a normal motion picture, or snatched out of the air on the fly, as in Live Cinema, the artistry and effect on audiences is determined by how beautiful its makers are able to perform. Having made it clear that by my definition, Live Cinema is made up of a percentage of true live camera feeds and a basket of pre-recorded, pre-edited components made available to live-switch during the performance, I’d like to move on to the issue of scenery and locations.
CREATING SHOTS
Shot creation involves the question of how one handles scenery, and the extent to which scenes or images are pre-recorded on location. After the cast has been suitably rehearsed and prepared according to the methods previously discussed, there comes the time when one must create the shots. Sure, if desired, one could work with a storyboard artist or team of storyboard artists, in a process which I named “pre-visualization” in the early 1980s when we were preparing One from the Heart. (The term met with resistance—“How can you have pre-visualization, shouldn’t it be just called visualization?”) I had no idea the phrase was still in use until many years later, when, during a tour of Pixar, I was asked, “Would you like to see the pre-visualization room?” I felt vindicated. Storyboarding is an expensive process, and Pixar and the other successful makers of 3-D animated films spend years creating, editing, reconceiving, and refining the storyboards of their films. Said simply, the storyboard in the pre-visualization process is the plan of the succession of shots that tell the story and specify the scenes.
One way of looking at Live Cinema is that you would have each frame (from the storyboard) standing on the set, while the actors rush from one to the next performing the scenes. And that is not far off from what actually happens. In the animation process of storyboarding, one doesn’t really create the set and then cover the actors within as dictated by the logic of the set; rather, one starts making the desired shots, freely using the logic of the set to fit the needs of the shot.
In the Oklahoma experimental workshop I wanted to focus on the question of lighting, and so I decided basically not to have sets. Sets are expensive, and sets for cinema need great detail. The little money I had would be better spent on first trying to understand the creation of shots without the need of sets, so I could focus on the lighting.
I arranged some set pieces—a door, a window, along with set dressing and furniture, and basically let the set be only an occasional black curtain or scrim or just plain space. At first I thought the production would look something like Lars von Trier’s 2003 film Dogville, in which an entire town is represented b
y a ground plan and furniture, to an eerie effect. I discovered, however, that even though like Dogville my set had no walls, the result looked very different. This was because of the lighting. Dogville is deliberately lit to reveal the lack of walls as a desired element, whereas our workshop used lighting to allow areas without walls to go black.
I resolved to light from the floor, with only some wrapped soft lights (snoots) from the grid: 50% of the lighting was from the grid, 40% film lights and projections from the floor, and 10% practicals (set lamps and other lighting fixtures). We bought a dozen or so LED movie lights, which could be rolled around easily, each powered by a battery left over from previous productions. These lights, along with the actual set dressings of table and floor lamps, and the several downward-focused soft light snoots, provided a cinema-style look. The new LED lights were moved around easily from scene to scene according to marks on the floor, because they had no trailing power cables.
The fact that we were using fast flat lenses rather than long TV-style zoom lenses meant that the exposure level was low and the mood and lighting tone were quite beautiful, with plenty of contrast and even some black—something television executives never allow. In truth, much of the look in television comes from the fact that edicts from the head office disallow anything but very bright, overall illumination, and mainly close shots, which is just the opposite of the approach taken in cinema. If I were to become the director of a soap opera and given some authority, I would be able to create a more cinematic look merely by switching off half of the lights. But this isn’t permitted by the executives. Also, in the routine cutting pattern of the typical soap opera scene, one immediately goes from the establishing shot to the close-ups. In 2015, I spent some time attending rehearsals and tapings of various shows at CBS Television City including The Young and the Restless, Dancing with the Stars, and The Late Late Show, as well as live NFL football broadcasts. Once when I visited a soap opera taping, I suggested remaining on the master shot for an entire scene for the reason that the next scene would involve the close-ups, but was told that wouldn’t be permitted because it was not the style of the show. Interestingly, the male prison population are among the biggest fans of long-running soaps like The Young and the Restless, and they prefer to see things uniformly lit, with plenty of close-ups and ladies in nice hairdos. Should anything vary from that formula, the fans would be greatly disappointed.
What I learned during the Oklahoma experiment was that with a variety of lighting, the shots took on a reality that resulted in a show that did not look like the great see-through vision of Dogville, but rather, had a different style of more discrete cinematic shots, where with so few elements—a mattress, a dining table, a door and little more—the audience was not aware so terribly much that in fact there were no sets.
SECOND PROOF-OF-CONCEPT WORKSHOP
When I was planning the second experiment at UCLA, I listed some questions I wanted to be able to answer. In particular, what would happen if I did have sets, but I was constrained by budget, since scenic settings are expensive? Here are some essential things that would be needed:
•Modular sets. Have some sort of modular set elements that could easily be dragged into place as needed to create the shots.
•Electronic image screens. Use LED or other electronic image screens to slide in and out to conjure scene elements into the sets that had been predesigned, photographed, or drawn. This would be a modern equivalent of the Translight screen used in movies: essentially, a large transparent photograph that can be integrated into a set to provide a view out a window, etc.
•Digital settings. Just as in big action films such as Star Wars, sets could be constructed within the computer, and then integrated live with the actors on the stage using green screen chroma key technology. This process generally requires that the camera shooting the scene be stationary. However, if it does move, or, to the extreme, if it is handheld (a style popular in contemporary cinema), it requires an elaborate electronic motion-control system. This works by triangulating the camera, locking it in to several points in the ceiling or walls, so that when the camera moves, the image on the green screen moves with it. This is tricky and costly, and so in the workshops I avoided it merely by not moving the camera when using green screen. But where budgets aren’t so restrictive, it would be possible to use computer-generated scenics and yet move the camera freely with this method.
I decided not to use electronic (LED) screens as the new more modern form of a Translight, for cost reasons, but would love to explore that further in the future. For one thing, using that type of screen rather than green screen allows the camera freedom to move extensively, and even to be handheld. The cost of LED screens is coming down quickly, as you’ve noticed with your own home flat screen television, and now new technologies such as LG’s OLED are becoming available, and display images that are wonderfully beautiful, with true blacks and vivid colors.
In creating a modular set at the UCLA workshop, I was inspired by the work of Edward Gordon Craig, a theater visionary from the early twentieth century. He was the son of the acclaimed British actress Ellen Terry. Craig was at first an actor himself, but eventually became the premier innovative scenic designer of the times. In the migration from realistic settings, he and other great artists, such as Adolphe Appia (wizard of stage lighting and décor), imagined more abstract settings rich in mood and tone, which might better serve as settings for the great theatrical productions of the time, whether new works or Shakespeare. Craig patented an ingenious system of movable and foldable panels that afforded an infinite number of combinations; in combination with light projections and shadows, they could be used dramatically and effectively for the staging of plays. He sold his idea to the Moscow Art Theatre and its director, Konstantin Stanislavski, and the panels were used in the Theater’s 1912 production of Hamlet. “There is a persistent theatrical myth that these screens were impractical and fell over during the first performance. This may be traced to a passage in Stanislavski’s My Life in Art (1924); Craig demanded that Stanislavski delete the story and Stanislavski admitted that the incident occurred only during a rehearsal. He eventually provided Craig with a sworn statement that the mishap was due to an error by the stagehands and not the design of Craig’s screens.”* Later, Craig sold the panels to Yeats and Lady Gregory at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, where they were used successfully for years.
A page from Gordon Craig’s original patent application
My thought was that perhaps these modular neutral walls might function as a set for the UCLA workshop. Easily moved and with panels that folded in both directions, a group of them might constitute a labyrinth with infinite possibilities for shots. They posed a special challenge for live presentation because they had to be especially easy to move. But also I liked the fact that they could be slid in and out of shots in the creation of those images. If I said I wanted a window here, or a door there, or wanted stairs to protrude, this might be easily accomplished using the panels. We built a number of units much in the way Craig had envisioned, and added more, with doors and windows (interior type on one side, exterior on the other), resulting in a total of 29 units. These, along with set dressing curtains and props, were the only settings used in the UCLA workshop.
I had built a scale model of the Craig panels with small magnets on their bases and could plan by setting them on a metal base.
The neutral off-white panels, with their endless possibilities of flaps opening and closing, provided many scenic configurations. It was literally a maze, but the two-way folding panels allowed actors to make exits and entrances, cameras to lurk, and new scenic situations to be quickly created with the mere opening of a flap. Thus the Gordon Craig patent answered my need for modular settings. Certainly, with the great possibility of projections and lighting elements shot onto the off-white walls, many textures, ambiances, shadows, and moods could be achieved. One could say that we combined use of the Craig panels with Adolphe Appia–type effects (image and gr
aphic projections on scenery). We had a foldable, easily swiveled labyrinthian setting that would yield hundreds of sets, and could differentiate them with projections, shadow, and other effects.
In a true commercial production of my script Distant Vision, which is set in a tenement from the 1920s, I would have wallpapered the panels and perhaps added other details as a setting for a tenement party, but I did not in this experimental workshop, so I could use those panels for other scenes.
In addition, realistic effects seem possible: the shadow of a banister, or light from an exterior element, brick and stone textures, all have potential to be tried. Another possibility might be that these panels could be aged and textured as with normal sets, yet still retain their modular function.
THE SHOTS
It was quickly evident that despite the intriguing folding flaps and walls which afforded good means to hide cameras, and although the main shot being constructed might be very optimal, with perhaps a second and even a third shot from the same axis, many shots were compromised. The best reverse angles, even close-ups, couldn’t be shot live within the group of cameras focused on a scene, for the simple reason that the cameras were not invisible. This led to any number of shots which, while useful, were not the best I might have wished. Our cinematographer, Mihai Malaimare, Jr., was ingenious in setting the seven or more cameras covering each scene for various shots, but I realized that though they might be fine for the workshop, I would not be able to get the angles I really wanted. As with so many things, there was a good and bad to that, because some of the compromised shots, being less than typical, were more interesting. Yet, I’d say definitively that this is a problem with Live Cinema: you cannot easily get the best shots you wish for all at the same time. There were some possible solutions for this problem, such as the 4K camera I mentioned previously, and I took those when there was no other way to get the shot I wanted.
Live Cinema and Its Techniques Page 5