Teacher Central: On Audition Mishaps and Decision-Making
Our crew started the week off on Tuesday by holding an audition for actors in the photography studio as organised by our producer. Since I suggested to use this opportunity to also practice lighting the green screen and gathering some test footage for me to practice edit, I was also scheduled in, as was an old green screen that hasn’t been used for a long time.
However, when I arrived five minutes prior to the scheduled time for setup, we already ran late due to several issues with the equipment:
The wrong camera equipment had been taken out
No lighting equipment was booked in
Only half an hour was planned for setup of camera, sound and green screen
1. Solving the Issue with the Camera Equipment
With the wrong camera equipment taken out (the BlackMagic Cinema camera instead of the Ursa Mini Pro), I suggested that I would talk to our technician demonstrator and see whether I could quickly get the Ursa out. Apart from the required memory card, I succeeded in my negotiations when I came back with the right camera.
Since no one had an additional SD at hand, I offered mine for recording the video footage and reminded people that we could not massively run into overtime with only 32GB of memory left on it after formatting.
2. Solving the Issue with the Lighting Equipment
With the lighting equipment, however, I was less fortunate, as it had already been taken out by other production crews prior and thus could not be obtained anymore. As even lighting is required to avoid underexposure or overexposure on the green areas of the image and thus avoid visual noise once overlaying an image on the green screen, I then proposed that we could use the general studio room light.
Whilst photography lights were rigged in the grid above the green screen, they were all much too close and to poignant in lighting to light the green screen evenly. In order to make this lighting remotely work, we would have been required to get on a ladder and re-rig the existing lighting one by one on a purely experimental basis to see whether it could – theoretically – work. While I would have loved to have a go at the lighting equipment of our photography department, by then we had less than fifteen minutes left to set everything up, but nothing set up yet, which is why I prioritised the setup before the experimentation this time.
3. Running Overtime
With a delay in obtaining the camera and no prior experience in setting up the old green screen accordingly, we ran into overtime and sadly took 40 minutes in total for setup, which meant that the actors were already gathering but not yet ready to go.
The Auditions
When everything was finally set and done, I offered to stay for collecting documentation and to feed lines to our actors. Whilst the auditions themselves started smoothly, they sadly ran into overtime and were cut after 2/3 of the audition due to a full memory card. However, since the two remaining actors at the time applied for the role of the voice-over narrator, we carried on with the sound recording. After all was set and done, we quickly de-rigged everything and returned it to the stores five minutes before the next appointment in the photography studio started.
Decision on Actors
Since no decision was made on the actors by today and we would not be able to meet in person due to a location recce with Adam, Katie, and Craig, I organised a collective vote on the actors online. Collectively, we then settled on my recommendation of Alistair and Pamela as Tyler (who would swap their gender during the ‘build-a-character’ story arc), settled on Isaac as both the manipulative narrator and bandit, and on Grace as Tyler’s companion as well as Danielle on the damsel in distress. With this, we had not only cast all our actors and extras, but were finally able to settle on costume sizes.
Decision on Costumes
Moving on to the issue of costumes, I asked the crew, whether we could source carnival or Halloween costumes for the actors. The benefits of these costumes would be:
A rather cheap, seasonal price that remains within the budget
An array of different sizes and designs
The fact that they usually come with their relevant props, and
Their more colourful and ‘goofy’ appearance befitting this age bracket
However, the disadvantage of sourcing these kind of costumes could be that they might look really tacky if not properly sourced. Which is why we did not yet settle on that question as it really depended on the design of the individual costume.
Our Budget
Since the amount of our production budget hadn’t been settled either, I furthermore asked for a vote on the amount of the budget, which left us with a budget of £25 per person or £125 in total. Our producer then agreed to search for costumes online over the weekend and settle on the final budget on Monday.
Our Edit
With roughly 2/3 of the storyboard done by today, we were finally progressing into the stage of visualisation of the piece. However, since this project – with its video game style – relies heavily on editing and editing techniques, I asked the crew for a production meeting on Monday to have a collective read-through vis-à-vis the amount and specifics of editing required.
Whilst I had already created a list of 15 different effects, that I could detect and envision in my own read-through, I wanted to make sure that I was on the same page with the project vision and bounce ideas off of one another, thereby informing cinematographer and director of certain requirements.
I then pre-emptively booked out 88 hours of editing time after the Easter break and made sure to ask for the installation of and access to my project workspace on the Editshare.
Since we did not yet hear back from any of the actors vis-à-vis their availability, and thus could not yet get a proper shooting schedule done, I decided to settle on that amount and time for now. Regarding the fact that we have 13 productions to be edited, I already feel that 88h – even for the use and application of more complex green screens – could possibly be too much and did not yet want to book out more than that. Whilst I did already record some test footage for me to practice edit, I will need to schedule the actual editing of it as soon as possible.
We are slowly starting to make up for the time we lost.
My Lessons This Week
Regarding the fact that the auditions should definitely have gone way smoother and organised in a better form, I realised that I could have put more effort into checking the equipment booking with our producer prior to booking it to be on the safe side.
With the limited amount of time for the setup, I had initially flagged up that half an hour would be too much of a push regarding the fact that we needed to install a green screen that we did not get access to before (as well as relevant lighting to go with it). However, since this was the maximum amount of time that we could get regarding the booking of the photography studio and the actor’s availability for auditions on that day, there was nothing much that we could have done differently, apart from booking the audition on another day completely.
In order to work any quicker than I already did, I would have had to work in disregard of health and safety regulations (such as leaving out safety pins keeping the green screen together or running on the floor) and could have resulted in either me, or one of my crew members, or one of the actors getting hurt, which is nothing I am particularly fond of.