Sunday, February 26, 2012

How I spent my Sunday morning

I spent my Sunday morning riding back and forth between Ditmars and Queensboro Plaza on the N training making a 10-minute video out of the NYCPlaywrights February Play of the Month. That's Valerie David playing Mike Ideglio's mother - although Mike's character doesn't know it.

I thought that the trains would be empty because we did this at 9AM and who the hell is awake at 9AM on a Sunday morning?

Lots of people, it turns out, it was almost weekday rush-hour levels of traffic. It took two and a half hours to record and there were actually fewer people on the subway at 11AM than at 9AM. I'll remember that next time.

Before we began I imagined we'd have the train to ourselves, but of course it didn't work that way, and at first I was bashful about doing video work in front of all the passengers. But pretty soon I forgot they were there, and when I noticed them, they were an unexpected annoyance. I asked one young man to move to the other side of the aisle so we could use his seat, and when some guy asked Valerie for directions while I was trying to shoot an important scene, I got really annoyed with him - and he was all apologetic for ruining our movie!

So now I'm in editing mode. Ironically I decided to shoot on the subway because the radiator in my apartment is so damn loud - the subway is louder and the sound quality is pretty crappy. Although at least the subway is supposed to be loud - unlike random hissing noises coming out of nowhere while shooting a script-in-hand reading in my apartment. Still, it would have helped if I'd had some kind of clip-on microphone set-up, but I didn't. I relied exclusively on the microphone in my crappy Panasonic camera and how we have to do some post-shooting audio work. Oh well, that's show biz.