STBD 5-4: Revealed!

This week's episode of STBD included some brand new locations, a cameo appearance and the return of a missing cast member. (Not bad for 8 and a half minutes!)

The Making of "Creative or Desperate?" involved:

- 2 mostly-scripted scenes

- 1 mostly-improvised scene

- 1.5 hours of raw footage

- 3 shoots in 3 days

- 10+ hours of editing

Fun Facts, Scene by Scene:

* When STBD first began in 2003, Lacey Fleming (aka Dierdre) smoked a lot more than she does now. In fact, she's nearly quit entirely several times, only to complicate things when Dierdre is asked to smoke on-camera...

* Brent's entry-level fraternity task of calling strange women and asking them for naked photos is directly inspired by a similar type of phone call someone in my own family received this summer. (In case you're wondering, that caller struck out too.)

* The 24 Hour Creative Marathon at Creative Treehouse took place overnight on Sept 28-29. We filmed the scene of Pryce and Caroline working through creator's block at 11 PM on Friday night, and then I edited the entire sequence together, minus the music track, by morning.

I had to leave for Connecticut at 12:30 PM on Saturday, so I transferred all assets from the Final Cut Pro project to my laptop (with its broken monitor) and finished the episode at 3 AM Monday morning.

All of that would explain the original typo in the episode's title, "Creative OF Desperate?," which was typed, bleary-eyed, at 4 AM...

Rewrites and the 10 Minute Rule

I'll be editing a rough cut of our next episode today. I say "rough" because not every scene has been filmed yet, so any estimation of time is an educated guess at this point.

But that's exactly what I'm looking for.

The script for this episode clocked in at 17 pages, which translates (again, roughly) to 12 or 13 minutes. (In theory, a properly-formatted screenplay page should equal a minute of screen time; our scripts always run faster.)

But we've had to reschedule a few shoots, and now a couple scenes will need to be rewritten / replaced to accommodate existing timeframes. That's fine -- but I need to know how much time I have left to play with.

So I'll drop all filmed scenes into a timeline, find a useable take of each one -- straight through, from beginning to end, no edits -- and time that footage out. Subtract from 10:00, which is our maximum episode length, and voila: I'll know exactly how much time I have left to fiddle with.

(The converse of this approach would be filming everything in the script and then some, as we usually do, and then trying to decide what scenes will live or die in the editing process. Not as fun, and invariably leads to the "Hey, whatever happened to that scene?" questions...)

The Peril of Background Music

I was up til 2 AM yesterday re-encoding and re-uploading our most recent episode of STBD because Ann pointed out something I hadn't noticed (but have been told before): the background music was too loud to hear the dialogue.

Very often, I don't notice that because, while I'm editing, I'm paying attention to the dialogue. I block out the music in my head. But to someone who's never heard that dialogue before, it might get trampled by the backing track. (I made that mistake a lot in our first two seasons.)

The other side of the coin is audio compression. I've noticed a LOT of background noise coming through in our final mixes that I don't pick up in Final Cut Pro. If the entire mix is going to be leveled up during compression, figure that your background music will get a bump as well, and might interfere with your dialogue.

The Ups and Downs of a One-Camera Shoot

We filmed two scenes for STBD yesterday at Affogato.

In each of them, characters were having conversations across a divide -- either sitting on opposite sides of a table or staring at each other from different vantage points.

Normally, a professional film crew would use two cameras (at least) to cover this setup, ensuring that the characters' reactions to one another were consistent. But, on our shoestring budget of zero, we use one camera to cover each side of this setup.

How? Multiple takes.

Do you see the potential problems?

The Cons

- If one character ad-libs a line, it may not match the other character's response in the reverse angle.
- If one character changes his or her delivery or motivation during subsequent takes, it may not match earlier takes.
- It may ALSO not match the reactions of the other character, creating a disjointed conversational flow.
- If props are moved, or if one character's hand / body / mouth enters the other character's frame, it could disrrupt continuity.

And yet, despite all of these pitfalls, there are upsides to using a single camera.

The Pros

- Less footage to capture, sort through and edit (in fact, presumably, HALF as much).
- Lighting only needs to work for one angle at a time, rather than both.
- Half a set is NOT in use during the filming of each angle, allowing the unused portion to be dressed / lit for the next setup.
- Fewer potential mistakes by multiple camera operators (and, as a result, only one operator needed).

How a One-Camera Shoot Affects the Actors

This is the tricky part, because the actors always know whom the focus of a shot is on when the camera is only pointed at one of them. This can lead the off-camera conversant to drop his or her energy level. That's understandable, since they can rest assured the visuals of their performance won't be recorded... but that also affects the energy level of the actor being filmed.

If someone is flirting with you, or yelling at you, and they're putting 100% of their effort into it, you'll respond much differently than you would if they're only putting in 50% effort, no? The same goes for actors. Despite their best intentions, it's still inherently unnatural for one to react at 100% when the inciting incident that causes his or her reaction was only delivered at half-energy. The actor being filmed may become self-conscious because he believes he's over-acting -- when, in fact, he's merely doing what he's supposed to be doing.

Suddenly, the entire scene loses its zip.

The solution? Simple. Encourge everyone involved in the scene, even if they're not on camera during that take, to give it 100% every time. It's natural for the off-camera actors to still withhold just a bit, to make sure they have a little something extra in the tank when it's "their turn." But if everyone is running around 80-90% energy, the scene will flow much more effectively -- and believably.

How NOT to Film an Episode

Once upon a time, we were only supposed to have one New Year's Eve episode. We intended to cross-cut three or four separate stories and weave a tight, interrelated narrative to usher in the new year.

Then Dex went missing.

Not in the back-of-the-milk-carton sense, but the "oh, didn't I tell you I was going to Philadelphia for the holidays?" sense.

So, realizing there was physically no way to film the conclusion of the Dex / Liz storyline in time for Episode 15, we (and by "we" I mean "I") decided to turn the episode into a 2-parter. Looking back, there would have been no way to tell the complete story as well as possible in a mere ten minutes, so 2 episodes worked out much beter for us. But it's easy to consider yourself blessed when all you've done is survive an easily-avoidable accident.

So, for those of you considering filming things in advance, here are a few tips to help you keep your lid on tight:

5 Tips for Saving Time (and Your Sanity) While Making Web Video

1. Know Everyone's Schedule - Especially During the Holidays

Do you think you know who's going home and who's staying put? Call or email to make sure. Banking on the fact that you can pull off that pivotal shot "anytime next week" is an invitation for on-the-fly rewrites.

2. Schedule an Extra Hour Per Shoot

When Dex (really Kevin Koch) returned from his holiday vacation, he also returned to work at a local hotel restaurant with flexible scheduling policies. Considering he'd been getting cut early all week long, he reasoned that scheduling our shoot for Friday night -- when he was scheduled to be out by 10 at the latest -- would give us ample time to film.

As irony would have it, Friday was the night Kevin wound up staying until 10:36 PM, just in time to catch a bus to the shoot that dropped him off at 11:06. Considering I needed to pick someone else up at 11:30, that gave us a window of -20 minutes to get the shot. Long story short: someone wound up sitting on a bench for an hour waiting for me to pick her up while we finished the shot on the only night both actors were free.

Long story shorter: If you think it'll take an hour, give yourself two.

3. Fewer Edits Means Faster Editing

If you watch Episode 16, you'll notice the Leo and Dierdre sequences are planted firmly around one setup: a loveseat. This isn't because I didn't think multiple setups would help tell the story better -- in fact, we used multiple setups in their first scene. It's because I realized continuous shots would cut my editing time down severely, so we kept the action in the latter scenes to a minimum in order to allow as much of the story to be told in one long shot as possible.

When editing, those long shots saved me at least half an hour apiece in total cutting time. Conversely, the Todd / Rich conversation, which might seem like the easiest thing to film and edit, was actually the most time-consuming because we only have one camera on STBD so every setup -- including each side of a conversation -- must be filmed separately. Since Matt Pavlosky and Erik Schark were improvising most of their dialogue -- again, a fault of the original scene we'd planned falling through due to a scheduling hiccup -- that forced me to find the threads of dialogue that actually connected from take to take, which wound up being a plethora of possibilities.

Limited angles = limited possibilities, and while the storytelling is always my first priority, not going crazy while editing at 4 AM certainly helps.

4. Edit the Scripted Scenes First

If you're sticking to a target time -- for STBD, 10 minutes per episode -- you need to know which portions of each episode are static in time and which are flexible.

For example, I know in advance that every episode will have a "Previously on STBD" recap (30 seconds), an intro scene (30-60 seconds), a title sequence (30 seconds) and closing credits / extra footage (30-60 seconds). That leaves 7-8 minutes of new "story" per episode, on average (some have less, some have more).

If a scene has been scripted and the actors don't ad-lib or improvise too much, the finished edit will usually come in just under the estimated page time (which is expected to be 1 minute per printed page, as per Hollywood standards). Edit those scenes first, because that's screen time you can't easily add to or subtract from. Once those scenes are in place on your timeline, along with the standard elements like titles and credits, you'll know how much time you can actually allot to the improvised scenes (if you have any -- we almost always do), and that will help you make the hard decisions of what to keep and what to cut.

Or, put another way, you don't want to spend 2 hours editing a scene only to discover that it needs to be chopped in half to meet your time limit.

5. Let the Episode Tell Its Own Story

When I first drew up the plot and order of sequences for Episode 16, I devoted most of the page time to the Dex and Liz story. On paper, it seemed the most interesting, and their getting-to-know-you banter was meant to include numerous crafty insights and references to plot points past and future. I figured the Todd and Dierdre scenes would each take up another quarter of the story.

When it actually came time to film the scenes, we had to junk the 5 page script I'd written for Liz and Dex because we literally had no time to rehearse. Instead, they improvised the entire sequence from beginning to end, and I was left to use what I felt helped tell their story AND intercut well with the other sequences. This meant reducing their screentime significantly AND changing the pacing and order of the episode.

Meanwhile, the Todd and Rich scenes wound up including a lot more information than I orginally intended because of the way the actors improvised around the necessary plot points. Thus, that sequence comes in with more screen time than the scenes I felt were the "heart" of the story -- and yet, the Dex / Liz and Leo / Dierdre sections still feel like the center of the episode, despite the fact that they appear in a completely different order than they were supposed to.

Now, let's see if I can learn from my own advice for next week...