A Tale of Live Production

Live production is fast, technical and, yes, sometimes crazy.  Live events are just that: LIVE.  They can morph and change at any second.  There are no redos or second takes.  It has to be done right the first time, every time. You need a team that can roll with the punches and has the ability to troubleshoot on the fly in any situation…  especially under extreme pressure or stress.  At the end of the day the show has to be (or at least seem) flawless.

Gather around the fireplace, youngsters, and let Uncle Dave spin you a yarn about the wild and woolly world of live production.

FEBRUARY 14^TH, 2011 – 7:00 A.M. (yes, Valentines Day)

It was cold and snowing that morning when we pulled into the venue before sunrise. We had less than 6 hours to get all our equipment set up before our client’s full dress rehearsal for the event that was scheduled to kick off bright and early the next day. There was no one onsite at the loading dock to meet my crew, so I ventured around the front of the building, wading through the snow in hopes of finding someone to let us in.  I barely made it to my destination, having to navigate around a pack of ravenous squirrels and a couple of mean-looking pigeons. I’ll never forget their crazy pigeon eyes or that incessant blood curdling cooing. Cold and noticeably shaken, I was greeted at the front door by a surly maintenance worker who was obviously too busy watching the morning news on his little black and white television to help me. I waited patently as he continually adjusted the aluminum foil rabbit ears while gulping down monstrous bites of an egg and cheese sandwich.  During what I believed to be a commercial break, he decided it would be best to draw me a crude map on the back of his sandwich wrapper than to actually show me the way to the loading dock.  With a grunt and a nod he sent me on my way through the back door of the convention hall and through the damp, dark corridors that would eventually lead me back to the garage door of the loading dock.

Once loaded into the convention hall we immediately starting setting up our “video village,” unpacking cameras and running various cables.  Within a couple of hours, my team was set up and ready to start testing, except for one small problem: we were using the venue’s internal audio team for the event and only two crew members were onsite. They were frantically running cables and trying to set up an “audio village,” but they were noticeably ”in the weeds.” This event called for 12 wireless lavalier microphones, three wireless hand held microphones, a PA system and 5 ClearComm packs for my crew….at this moment we had none.

We were running short on time, so since my crew was ready to go, we fired up our cameras and started to walk through the rundown for the event.  I noticed during that first dry run that there was something not quite right. I found a ground loop pulsing through the main video screen at the convention hall. (A ground loop occurs when there is more than one ground connection path between two pieces of equipment. The duplicate ground paths form the equivalent of a loop antenna, which very efficiently picks up interference currents.  In layman’s terms, our video had a horizontal line rolling through it.)

I contacted the venue’s electrical guru who promptly told me that the ground loop had to be coming from my crews’ equipment and had nothing to do with the venue’s electrical system.  We double-checked all our wiring and cabling to see if we had in fact missed something.  We ran a diagnostic check and after powering back up, I noticed that the ground loop was mysteriously missing from our camera viewfinders and control room monitors, but was front and center on the main video screen.  By this point the client had arrived and was starting to set up for their dress rehearsal.  The third audio person had finally arrived and was starting to mic everyone up.  I noticed more than one person glancing at the video screen…I forgot to mention that our client is a group of world-class engineers.  The CEO of the company, now armed with a live microphone, cleared his throat.  Everyone at the venue froze.  The CEO slowly walked on stage, raised his hand towards the video monitor and said in his best booming CEO voice, “Now David, will this be fixed by the time we go live with our event tomorrow morning?”  After swallowing my gum I assured him all would be ready by morning’s light.  Except for the ground loop issue, the rehearsal went off without a hitch.

Once the client had cleared out, I calmly explained to the venue’s electrician in my best outside voice that the ground loop was not on our end and was happening somewhere on his end.  At that moment one of my wily veteran crew members looked to the ceiling of the convention hall and pointed to a small catwalk containing a bunch of cabling.  With a knowing grin he just pointed and asked if all the wiring was properly insulated.  I watched as all the blood drained from the poor electrician’s face.  He just mumbled a few words then yelled to a subordinate to grab a lift.  They worked for about an hour separating and distributing the cables, th

us removing the wretched ground loop.  After further testing and one final run through I decided that everything was in order and we were ready to go live bright and early the next day.  Our “normal” day had turned into 16 hours and I was ready for a glass of wine.

We all arrived about an hour before showtime the next morning.  My crew fired up our gear, we had a quick meeting, then it was time to go live.  The house music played Sinatra as the attendees sipped hot coffee and mingled before the event.  The witching hour fast approached as I gave the final countdown.  ”We go live in 5, 4, 3, 2, 1…  audio up and fade to camera one.”  God, I love the smell of hot coffee and doughnuts in the morning!

Christmas at WAF!

First Christmas in our new office! It looks so festive.

Lenticu-What?

By Keith Johnson & Shane Seley

So, we got this call from the Virginia Historical Society.  The Virginia Sesquicentennial of the American Civil War Commission had funded a traveling exhibit to commemorate the 150th Anniversary of the American Civil War.  After a nine-month process, we had been selected to produce a few of their exhibits!

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First Conference Call

They’ve got a five-minute film project that they’d like done entirely with high-definition motion graphics, stereo audio and displayed vertically on a high-definition monitor.  Piece of cake.  We do it all the time.

Then, they begin to describe their next project… and in the process, threw us a wicked screwball.

As one of their components, they’d like to produce an exhibit that shows visitors via still images and 5.1 surround sound what it was like to be amidst a Civil War battle.  And one more thing, they want to make it a giant lenticular wall.  We immediately asked them to repeat and spell the word – lenticular – as we Googled a definition.

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Now, to back up, one of Wide Awake Films’ concentrations (or…obsessions) is recreating Civil War combat for film.  In fact, there are few teams on the planet with as much experience in this niche as ours.  Since 1991, we’ve done it for the big screen (NatGeo, PBS, History, Discovery, A&E) and for a multitude of museum projects across the country.  Here’s some of our work.

Our other niche is successfully executing technically demanding projects such as creating a moving train experience via synched high-definition “windows” for Nortel and pioneering Blu-Ray Disc authoring in early 2006 for use at a European trade show, well ahead of any facility in the Midwest.

Lenticular couldn’t be THAT hard.  It’s just a still print.

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Lenticular 101

We immediately called our Emmy-award winning friend and uber-techy KC Art Institute Professor, Richard Welnowski.  We’ve won a few regional Emmys for our PBS documentary work.  But as Richard likes to remind us, his national Emmy is bigger than ours.

For the next two months through his contacts and others we developed, we talked to everyone we could who had experience in lenticular design and printing.  Our best advice came from a printer who intoned, “With lenticular, if you don’t know what you’re doing, you’ll do more than stub your toe, you’ll shoot yourself in the foot and then bleed to death.”  Encouraging advice!

Once we’d finally gotten enough information to begin pre-production, we blazed our own technical trail.  Keith, our 3D animation/compositing guru, utilized his toolset for creating moving images to pave a new way to combine multiple still images to create the three-dimensions of true lenticular.  Here are his early workflow findings.

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3D Mockup

Then we worked to develop the context of the exhibit space.  Utilizing CAD files provided by the exhibit designer, we built a scale 3D model of the entire exhibit that allowed us to try out various design solutions.  We temporarily comped in some great Don Troiani paintings which captured the scale and energy we were after.  These served as stand-ins for our mural as we explored the space.  Here are some of the early 3D renderings of the exhibit.

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The 1864 Battle of Kernstown

As all of this was underway, our production team worked with the client to specify what we would actually be shooting for the lenticular graphics.   Exhibit Coordinator, Andy Talkov, directed us to use the 1864 Battle of Kernstown, Virginia as the basis for our content.

Now we were cooking…doing what we love to do as a design/production team – researching the history and gathering the pieces to bring it back to life.

Hailing from Kansas City, Missouri, we were delighted to find that the Union commander at this battle, who was mortally wounded at Kernstown, is none other than Colonel James Mulligan, the same flamboyant commander who earlier in the war commanded the U.S. troops at the Battle of the Hemp Bales at Lexington, just 45 minutes east of us.

To gather our information we consulted the National Archives to get information regarding equipment and clothing issued to each of the Civil War regiments we intended to feature.  As content reference, our client provided specific works from famed historical artist, Don Troiani.  We put the wheels in motion to generate interest for our upcoming shoot amongst some of the best Civil War living historians in our region.  These are the “scratch golfers” of the reenacting community and we’re honored that they lend their talents to our projects.

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Setting the Stage

We also turned to our good friend and National Geographic still photographer, Robert Szabo.  We’re video geeks not still photogs.  Working with Andy and the Kernstown Battlefield Association, Bob immediately went to work to capture an empty panoramic background, sometimes referred to as a “clean-plate” that all of the actors and talent would be inserted into.

Bob visited the Kernstown battlefield, armed with our research.  We had found a moment in the battle we wanted to recreate for the exhibit.  Due to the large-scale nature of the lenticular mural, Bob took a series of images that we then stitched together.

With the proper background established, we were ready to fill it in with hordes of battling soldiers.  We turned to  our friend Robbie Maupin, who runs The Big River Ranch in nearby Lexington.  With a portable greenscreen in tow and our crack team of Civil War reenactors, we trekked over to the ranch to capture some carnage, but not without some serious pre-planning.  Here is the graphic we developed which clearly shows the poses we needed to photograph.  And with only 14 reenactors, it meant we needed to be very mindful of wardrobe changes to create the ultimate sensation of thousands of soldiers.

We proceeded to shoot away, gathering hundreds of shots of our reenactors in pose after pose – some on horseback, some in the midst of a charge, others taking fatal hits to the chest, all the while being mindful of how each pose would add to the total effect of our composition.

  

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Assembling the Puzzle Pieces

Keying, scaling, placing, retouching…more keying, more retouching.  As the massive process of building up the composition was underway, we could all begin to see the final impact of the image, and we started to get excited!  Before our eyes, the Kernstown battlefield was being transformed from an empty historic site into a depiction of mass mayhem.  Here is a brief run-down of the compositing process.

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The Sound of Battle

In addition, we set out to create a 5.1 audio mix which would accompany the exhibit.  We were able to source most of the battlefield sounds from our extensive library here at Wide Awake, however we recreated the famed “rebel yell” from 1920′s recordings of actual Confederate veterans, sourced from the archives of the Museum of the Confederacy and layered to sound like an onslaught of wailing soldiers.  Here is a motion preview of the lenticular, along with the audio mix.

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Making the Print

With our digital work essentially complete, we turned the reigns over to Tom Saville and his team at Big3D, an amazing lenticular printing house in Sacramento, CA.  We supplied them with “frames” of animation, which they then interlaced and sandwiched under a lenticular lens.  Each image in the 16-frame sequence was subtly unique in order to create the impression of depth and motion when viewed through the lenticular lens (See motion preview from previous video clip).  And here’s an example of  what the interlaced image looks like.

Needless to say, we were a bit nervous leading up to this next important step.  Our massive mural was to be printed at 8 feet tall, over a total width of 26 feet, which meant Tom and his team needed to create 11 individual lenticular panels which would be seamlessly joined together to create the final installation.  We were told by other potential print vendors that seaming multiple lenticular panels could NOT be done.  The images would be out of phase and almost certainly never line up.  Tom reassured us on the phone that it was indeed possible and proceeded to ship out a physical test sample to us.  When we opened the package and placed the two panels side-by-side, it was evident we found the right printer.  The alignment was flawless!

With our confidence building, we shipped off all of the final digital files to Big3D and they worked their magic to print the final panels in a matter of a few weeks.  The panels were shipped down to Virginia and assembled by the VHS staff without a hitch.   Many thanks go to Dale and Andy & the rest of the VHS team for their amazing collaboration and patience with this project.   Since this time, Wide Awake Films has produced lenticular for Vegas-bound trade show exhibits, in-store point of purchase displays and will be working on a lenticular depicting the battle of Shiloh in anticipation of its upcoming 150th anniversary.

And there you have it!  The exhibit will be on display at the Virginia Historical Society through the rest of this year.  After that it will travel the state of Virginia through the end of the 150th Anniversary (2015).   So if you’re in the area, drop by and take a look at the battle of 2nd Kernstown, in eye-popping lenticular!

Here are a few links to the press coverage generated by the exhibit:

• Virginia Historical Society

The USS Monitor Sails Again

Here’s a short segment we did as part of a 126-minute documentary on the history of the International Brotherhood of Boilermakers. More snippets and news of the show coming soon!

The Sesquicentennial in Missouri

The Sesquicentennial is upon us and celebrations of the 150th Anniversary of the American Civil War are happening right on our home turf. So far this year, WAF filmed both the Battle of Wilson’s Creek Reenactment in Springfield and the Battle of Lexington in, um, Lexington. We just can’t get enough of this stuff, you know.

Some Amazing Projection Work!

Congrats to our friends at Bazillion Pictures and Substream Music on their amazing artistic spectacle! These guys put on a spectacular show at the opening for the Kauffman Center of the Performing Arts here in KC.

Opening Night Projections at Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts

 

Americans by Choice

We’ve been working with Jean Svadlenak of Svadlenak Museum Consulting since June on an exhibit film for the US District Court in honor of Kansas’ 150 years of statehood. The exhibit, entitled ”Americans by Choice,” presents the history of immigration in Kansas and includes incredible stories, from 1840s Irish immigrants to modern day Sudanese refugees. Our film features about 15 new Kansas citizens, who describe their reasons for naturalizing, their personal plights, and their pride as Americans. We’ve also produced a version of the film that will play at all naturalization ceremonies in Topeka, Wichita, and Kansas City, KS.

The exhibit  at US District Court in Kansas is now open to the public at 500 State Ave, 6th Floor, in KCK!

 

 

Two Weddings and a…Labor Day Weekend

Two weddings this weekend at WAF! Congrats to Jeff & Kate and Keith & Julie! Best wishes for all of you.

Aftermath: From the Civil War to Today

Interesting comments regarding a video Wide Awake Films produced for and in collaboration with Andy Talkov and the Virginia Historical Society, as part of their exhibit “An American Turning Point: The Civil War in Virginia.” If this all sounds familiar, that’s because “Aftermath” is one of three pieces we created for VHS’ traveling Sesquicentennial exhibit.

BTW – That’s not Jimi’s version of the “Star Spangled Banner” – it was done by our good friend, Cody West, an amazing musician and great fellow.

What We’ve Learned: Traveling to Canada

Traveling with professional grade camera gear is not easy. Especially if you’re traveling internationally. Especially if your destination is Canada. And it doesn’t help if you’re rolling with over 300 pounds of equipment (that’s about 140 kilos, if we’re going to get all metric like they do in Canada).

For starters, it isn’t like there’s some sort of “how to travel internationally with lots of heavy, expensive stuff” guide. What would you even type into Google, in this instance? Fortunately, we know someone who works at a government agency and that person made some recommendations, and then I spent two days on the phone with customs offices, travel brokers, and representatives of the US Council for International Business. Here’s the thing about Canada: they are so pleasant and patient and organized that you can’t get angry with anyone. Not even with a woman in Canadian Customs who is explaining their super complicated temporary importation procedures, which read like James Bond’s mission instructions, if he was moonlighting as a tax attorney. Here is an actual transcript of our conversation:

Me: So I need to get what exactly?

Customs lady: Go to our website, then click on “forms,” then click on “customs.” Then near the bottom you’ll see “D Memoranda,” that’s “D,” like “dog.” Look for document D8-1-1, then you’ll see the appendices. Find Appendix A. Now the chart is alphabetical, and it will tell you whether you need the B3 form or the E29B. For the E29B, you’ll need to look at Memorandum D8-1-4 and D8-1-7. This is assuming that you qualify under tariff item number 9933.00.00. Do you?

Me:  (silence)

Because all I’ve managed to do is to write down a seemingly random list of letters, numbers, and punctuation marks.

Fortunately, I find a  much better alternative to cracking this customs code: a carnet, which is basically a passport for your stuff. Carnets are issued by various entities, so it wasn’t difficult to find someone to do it, but in the short turnaround required by our impending shoot dates, it was a bit of a feat to accomplish. The biggest task: compiling an exhaustive list of every item we planned to utilize for professional services while in Canada, from our cameras to our power cables. The list also had to include each item’s serial numbers, model numbers, country of origin, weight, and distinguishing marks. All of this was entered line by line into a database by one of our interns, then sent to an agency in New York, which then processed the carnet and sent it via Priority Overnight Fed Ex for Saturday delivery, to be picked up by me, driven to a customs office in Kansas City, and finally stamped by a very helpful US Customs officer.

In short, we acquired some amazing footage in and around Toronto and Edmonton, thanks to a few harried days of pre-production.