I’m
in Portland, Oregon, shooting an episode of TNT’s prime time drama, Leverage.
Just
about every night after we wrap I meet up with my friend John Rogers, who is
the co-executive producer and head writer for the show, to have a beer and
decompress after a long day on the set. Whether we talk about filmmaking, comic
books, nerdy geeky gaming stuff, or technology, a common thread runs through
our conversations: it’s pretty awesome to live here in the future, we sure are
lucky to get paid to make stuff up and entertain people, and holy crap has the
industry changed since we first entered it.
Leverage
is totally shot in the future. We use the Red One digital camera, we watch
takes right after we finish them to make sure nothing went wrong, and we get
our dailies via secure internet connection anywhere we have computers and WiFi.
John told me that at least once, they realized they didn’t shoot a single or
needed a tighter angle to make something work, and were able to create
coverage in post-production, which is done entirely on Final Cut Pro.
During production, we could send pictures and updates from the set to Twitter
and our blogs, and engage the audience in a direct and intimate way that is
unlike anything I’ve ever done before.
The Red One camera--relatively affordable, studio-quality, and used to produce many shows and short filmsEvolution
I’ve
worked in television and movies for so long, I have a hard time remembering a
time in my life where I wasn’t going to auditions and spending most of my days
on the set. I started acting in the mid-70s, and over the course of a three
decade career, I’ve seen several subtle changes and a few paradigm shifts in
how we get ideas out of a script, bring them to life on the set, and deliver
them to the audience.
When
I was a kid, everything was shot on 35mm film, which came in in magazines
ranging from a few hundred to a thousand feet, and always produced a certain
amount of noise. There were two main cameras back in those days: Panaflex and
Arriflex. Everybody loved shooting the Panaflex, mostly because it’s a great
camera. Arris were usually less expensive to rent, but were always louder. Even
when they’d wrap the magazine in a baffle, I can remember some Arris being so
loud, the sound of the film spinning through the camera would blast right out
of the lens at us during a scene. There’s a certain romance to the sound of
film churning past the gate, but as an actor, it was distracting and usually
meant that we were going to have to re-record our dialog once the film was cut
together.
Because
film stock was a nontrivial production expense, if anything went wrong during a
take, from an actor flubbing a line to a technical problem with camera or
sound, we’d cut, reset, and start over to conserve film. Because developing
film was a nontrivial production expense, depending on the show’s budget, a
director could only pick a handful of takes to print and possibly include in
the final cut.
Shooting
digitally on the Red One means the camera is silent, and because there isn’t any
film to load or run out of, shooting a scene is more like doing a little bit of
a play. It’s so quiet, the director can stand right next to the camera and talk
to us, and since we’re not burning film, we can quickly reset and keep rolling
if something goes awry, and there’s no reason to stop rolling if something
awesome or unexpected happens during a take.
How
did we get here? I think it all started with the advent of video tape in the
1980s. Because video tape was so cheap and didn’t require a developing process,
it lead to the home video revolution (and that unfortunate incident where
Roller Girl stomped on that one guy’s face) but very few serious filmmakers
liked shooting on video because it looked and felt so different from film.
There was inherently less control over the entire process, and old habits died
hard, you know. Video never really replaced film, but I think digital will
finally provide an acceptable, game-changing alternative.
I
think it was inevitable that we would get where we are today, and I think it’s
only a matter of time before more shows (and networks who are scared shitless
of anything new) catch up to where Leverage has been for over a year. This show
is truly at the tip of the spear, and every day they rewrite the rules for
television production.
Revolution
In
the early 90s, emboldened by the type of unwavering certainty that only a
twenty year-old can have, I went to work for NewTek, as a tiny part of the team
that brought the Video Toaster 4000 to life. The Video Toaster was an
absolutely magnificent bit of technology that took everything you’d expect from
a television studio, and crammed it into an Amiga computer. (Kids, ask your
parents ... unless they are Amiga fanboys, because it’s just too painful to
talk about.) In these days of iMovie and Final Cut, it may not seem like such a
big deal, but about 25 years ago, being able to do real-time digital video
effects, 3D computer graphics and animation, and titles for less than $10,000
was unheard of. Also, there was Toaster Paint (Robert Blackwell, I hope you
read this, because that one was for you.)
If
video was an incremental shift for filmmakers, the Toaster was a paradigm
shift, because we made it affordable for just about anyone to produce
high-quality video television, eliminating one of the biggest barriers to entry
for a lot of hopeful filmmakers.
Despite
all the magic NewTek brought to the world with the Toaster, we could never
cross two vast chasms: What we didn’t have back then, that we all take for
granted now, was digital, nonlinear editing. Hard drives were simply too
expensive and computers weren’t fast enough to make that sort of thing anywhere
close to affordable for average people, so filmmakers had to invest in
additional editing equipment that was cool at the time, but seems as elegant as
a Civil War field hospital today.
There
was also a significant problem with distribution, which was still controlled
entirely by the same moguls who controlled the networks. Today, a filmmaker can
pick from dozens of different online options to put their work in front of the
audience, but in the early 90s, it was a different world. We were still waiting
for the Real Player to even start buffering, 56k dial-up was considered screaming
fast, and our online porn arrived in ASCII art or .gif files that took an hour
to download. (Er, I heard from some guy, because I never would have even
dreamed of looking at Kimberly Conrad online in 1992.)
Get
Excited and Make Things
Every
day I work on Leverage, I can’t help but think about how much the entertainment
industry has changed in my lifetime, and how what we did at NewTek fits into
that.
Right
now, if you have a creative idea, you can produce it and get it to an audience
for under a thousand dollars. Right now, you can get your very own HD video
camera for about the cost of feeding one of those kids in Africa for two months.
Right now, if you have a Mac, it ships with everything you need to cut
and finish your story. Right now, you can have a screening for more people,
more easily, than at any other time in history, and they don’t even have to be
in the same room.
In
the 1960s, film stock, sound equipment, and cameras became (relatively) cheap
and affordable. This put advanced tools into the hands of creative people, and
lead to the greatest decade of filmmaking in history: 1970s. I think we’re
poised for a similar revolution.
See
you at the barricades.
