Kevin Surace shows how director John Caird filmed Estella Scrooge with actors alone in green-screen studios, using tape markers and invisible co-stars, then composited them into shared 3-D spaces. The remote production broke each shot into puzzle pieces that required exact costume and eyeline cues to make the final picture seamless.
So the genesis of the idea was, was quite interesting because John, the director, and the rest of the creative staff thought I was crazy. I've been working with green screen for a very long time, and there's a lot more we can do today. And in fact, we can create some very simple worlds and put people together so that they can be filmed separately and then be put together in a very safe way, but they'll look like they were together. Or we can actually make 3-dimensional surrealistic worlds. Again, not a movie. It's not realistic, but it's surrealistic.
Reading with the Brady Bunch boxes has outplayed and outlived its welcome. Wouldn't it be cool if there was a way to do a— create a world where we didn't have all the boxes, but we could do it in isolation? And Kevin said, oh, there's a way. And I didn't believe him, and none of us really believed him at first. We were skeptical, but he put together a little demo for us where we could see and hear what the capabilities were. And all of us, you know, John being the most skeptical, I think, of the group initially, and we were kind of stunned with what we could create and how amazing it could look.
With respect to Mr. Podsnap, one of the things I want to tell you about the acting of this world in terms of green screen is that they make it look like you're actually talking to somebody. But in point of fact, of course, you're the only person on the set, only actor during our COVID times. That was part of the prerequisite from the union that we could do this. So, any case, the cool thing is that you aren't talking to somebody, you are actually talking to a piece of tape.
Hmm.
The tape is placed around the room so that when you're speaking to one character, you're looking at the tape, and then they tell you where to look elsewhere so that it does indeed look like you're talking to somebody.
The director was in London, John Caird, the brilliant John Caird, and then some of the producers are in Hawaii, And so there's, you know, you see 8 different faces on the screen in front of you giving directions, and the reality is you kind of forget that we're all in these different locations, and it becomes very normal, actually, to just kind of be talking to the screen of all these people. And John has such an incredible way of being such an actor's director and understanding what it's like to be in our shoes and looking at these dots and trying to make sense of The fact that we're trying to see real people.
I've never done anything like this before. It was a completely unique experience that feels like a little time capsule of what it's like to make work during this pandemic, creating this project together and figuring out this character together over Zoom because we didn't have the normal getting-to-know-you process of being in a rehearsal room live together day after day, week after week.
There's so many things that we have to envision in this process, whether it's actors, any kind of a set, any kind of a prop, and then any kind of response from another actor, like a genuine response. So just trusting that and knowing And that if you're just being as real as you can be, that that will actually indeed translate, was probably one of the hardest things about the green-screening process.
The hardest thing in terms of working with the actors was having them only one at a time in the green-screen studio, because we had to set up eyeline for them for all of the characters that they had to imagine that they were talking to. And that's very, very tricky for an actor to get his head round. If you're in a rehearsal room, of course you've got the other actor there and you're sparking off the other actor. The other actor's giving you ideas about your character, informing the whole relationship and how the whole play works. But as a director, I was having to supply to every single actor all the other actors' thoughts, all the other actors' motivations. So I had to become an actor for everybody all the time.
There was one scene where I'm obviously with a ghost But of course the ghost isn't there. So I am sitting on a couch, and you will see this. I'm sitting on a couch and I'm speaking to a ghost, but that ghost is our brilliant editor Tyler, who was underneath a sheet, a blue sheet, so he was also hidden. Um, and he had an iPad and was reading the lines with me and then was also holding simultaneously a boom.
Boom.
It was nuts. It's completely nuts what we did.
I was nervous about acting without a net, without a partner there with me, but everyone around me was so professional, so smart and adept at their jobs that I was able to film 10 pages in one long day, and that's unheard of.
And basically it's Like taking a finished picture where you know what the final product is going to look like, and then breaking it up into tiny little puzzle pieces. And each puzzle piece then needs to be perfected with each actor in the right costume, in the right— looking the right direction, at the right eyeline. And then the digital backgrounds put in. And so you create each little piece of the puzzle. Then you put all the pieces back together. To create your finished picture.
It completely opens up the scope of stories we can tell and the possibility for those stories to be told and actually reach people and reach an audience and communicate ideas. Because that's like the whole point, right? Like, in my opinion, that's, that, that's the main thing.
And it was like I was looking right at Betsy and Clifton, but they weren't there. It was crazy. It was completely mind-blowing. It's so funny to be in real life creating it just by yourself surrounded by these green screens and then look at a screen and see how real it looks, that it really looks like you're playing off of them. It is a technology that I truly did not understand at all before this and barely understand now.
In this particular show, you need to start with a high-rise office block with Estella in the, in the penthouse room of the office block overlooking New York, and it's— she's there for one And you can't spend tens of thousands of dollars on a single scene. I think I'll look back on it just thinking, well, at least we did something. At least, however it turns out, at least we created something out of nothing. We did our best in very difficult circumstances to create a new piece of work.
To a stellar— never look down, never look down, never look down.
