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Previous Production | |
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Two distinct styles of video were used to convey the difference between the scenario and the question & answer section.
The scenario had to convey tension, revelation, uncertainty, and frustration. Therefore, the scenario was filmed cinematically rather than use the one camera/one shot theatrical style that would most closely replicate the live performances. The scenario filming was fully completed in the first seven weeks.
The question and answer section needed to engage the user in a way that captured the power of the live performance as effectively as possible. One of the strengths of the live performance was being able to see the non-verbal reactions of the other actors to the current speaker. Originally, to recreate this effect, three cameras were used during the filming of the first question & answer section. One camera was directed at each of the actors, capturing not only the speaker but also the body language of the other participants. In practice, it was discovered the reactive shots of the other characters gave a good sense of a group dynamic, but the responses could be more expressive.
Another concern is that each character's answer also has two response clips, one from each of the non-speaking characters. This ends up costing a huge amount of disk space on the DVD for very little gain. For the second production session, rather than recording three characters simultaneously, each character will have a small variety of non-speaking responses to be matched with the current speaker's comments. These responses (such as an angry glare, an eye-roll, or a disbelieving chuckle), can be triggered off the database in response to the speaking character's answer.
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Production | |
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Production required sets, locations, union actors, a producer, a gaffer, a videographer, an audio technician, and make-up artists. The team members filled in all of the other various roles, such as director and script supervisor. The first shoot spanned over three days: two days for the question & answer and one day for the scenario. The second shoot also lasted for three days, devoted entirely to the question & answer portion.
The new plan called only for one camera and microphone to be used at a time, as opposed to the three synchronized cameras in the previous session. With the decrease in necessary equipment, the demands on the crew was considerably less. The demand on the actors was also considerably less taxing, as they did not have to all be on camera constantly. Scheduling with the actors was also be an easier task, as all three actors did not need to be on set all three days.
Since the new content had to be integrated with the old content, special efforts were taken to keep continuity in filming. The actors' clothing and hair, the set's lighting, the quality of the film, the angle of the camera, and the audio conditions were all matched to the original shooting conditions.
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Post-Production | |
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Post-production for the first seven weeks involved editing the scenario footage and the answer footage. The second fourteen weeks were only editing video for the answers, but there were considerably more clips to be made and re-takes to be done from the previous cycle.
Each digital videotape was edited on a PC using Adobe Premiere 6.0. Cleaner 5 was used to compress the video, balancing file size and image quality.
The question & answer footage took about 240 hours to edit into 1750 individual responses between the three characters. With the single camera approach, the current cycle's editing time was lower on a per-clip basis, but had more content to sort through.
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