The other night, my mother treated David and me to the production of Jesus Christ Superstar that’s playing Broadway right now. We did this because somehow, despite living in the New York Metropolitan Area all his life, David had never seen a Broadway musical before, which was in serious need of rectification. I, on the other hand, have seen quite a few, and I’ve always been fascinated the most by shows like Superstar: the ones with minimalist staging.

Many Broadway shows use elaborate sets, realistically depicting the surroundings and location of wherever the characters are supposed to be. The process of changing these sets mid-show is often just as elaborate — the stage crew scrambles to move props and backdrops offstage, move new ones on, sometimes using pulleys to drop them from the rafters, elevators to lift them from below the stage, whichever. The most impressive productions automate all of this, with setpieces that seem to magically roll on and offstage without the aid of crewmembers.

This is expensive.

Because of the cost — or sometimes purely for artistic reasons — many Broadway shows resort to minimalism. They don’t have a set. They don’t have a backdrop. The few props and setpieces they have are often multi-purpose. In lieu of backdrops, they set the scene with lighting and writing. For example, Superstar handles scene-changes by scrolling the location across a big text marquee; “STREETS OF JUDEA – FRIDAY” scrolls across the stage the way stock prices glide through Times Square. The RBC production of The Threepenny Opera used neon signs. And both times I saw Company — the 2006 Broadway revival and the 2011 Lincoln Center thing with Colbert and Neil Patrick Harris — they basically just moved props around to indicate a scene change.

In 2009, I remember asking myself, why not do this kind of thing in film? The result was the clusterfuckity failed experiment of Bright Black, which is something I’ve vowed to revisit someday when I’ve actually had the chance to coherently plan it. Getting another look at minimalist theatre got me thinking about it again, though.

First, actually, let me answer that question. Why not stage a film in the style of minimalist theatre? Because films don’t have to deal with set changes, time constraints, or any of the other things that makes minimalism advantageous in theatre, for example. Also, theatre has a rich tradition of the audience suspending their disbelief and filling stuff in with their imagination, whereas films have to depict absolutely everything or risk seeming unrealistic. To which I retort, or do they?

My idea for Bright Black was a film lit entirely with black light. Costumes and props would be painted with UV-reactive paint, while everything else would be bathed in dark blue if visible at all. This lends itself very well to minimalist set design, because most of the background is going to be shrouded in darkness anyway.

And besides, the plot would be about wisecracking, katana-wielding Illuminati assassins who have sword fights in Belgian dance clubs. So any pretense of realism has already left the building.

Now, I’m definitely not the only person who’s ever had the idea to stage a film this way. I’ve seen it in Adrian Noble’s 1996 adaptation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and…well, that’s it, really. Rob Marshall’s Chicago kind of did it in a few scenes. Spike Lee’s Passing Strange movie (pictured above) was actually just a recording of the Broadway show, so that doesn’t count (By the way, watch Passing Strange. Right now. I firmly believe it is the most spectacular piece of performance art that anyone has ever staged in any theater, anywhere, ever.). Hitchcock’s Rope was a film staged like a play, but not like a minimalist one. So minimalism on film is, from what I can tell, fairly uncharted territory.

It’s interesting, because when film was first invented, the medium struggled to be anything more than recorded theatre. It wasn’t until Griffith and Kuleshov that the idea of film as a narrative medium distinct from live theatre really took off, only for it to regress back into emulating the stage for a few years as soon as talkies appeared. It seems like film has ever since been trying to loudly proclaim “I am not theatre!”.

So I was thinking, during the intermission of Superstar, when I decide to pick up Bright Black again and really do it right, why not stage it like one of these minimalist shows? And not just borrow the sparse set design, like I was originally envisioning? Why not totally go for broke? Don’t cut to the next scene, have a bunch of ninjas in the background change the set while the actors are still there. Use spotlights and stage lights, and have them all be very noticeable and visible. Let’s make the head of the Illuminati be called “the man behind the curtain”, and literally open a curtain every time Jarod Bright walks into his office.

It’s kind of like how the House of Blue Leaves in Kill Bill was clearly designed by an architect who knew the choreography of the sword fight that would one day happen there. But even further off-the-wall and thoroughly divorced from reality, concerned only with the abstract aesthetics of what’s happening on screen.

There were lights and crew members in some of the shots, but that’s what CGI is for. There wasn’t nearly as much frenetic camera movement as I wanted, but that could be simulated in post. The problem was that in our rush to get Jesse Pieper’s shots done the first night (he couldn’t make it back the next day), we forgot all of the establishing shots of the thugs.

There is literally zero footage of the thugs not looking in Jarod Bright’s direction. Therefore, there are no shots that would be usable before the Interrogator gets killed. This means the thugs would just appear out of nowhere, as the viewer has no idea that they were in the scen until then. It would effectively push the film beyond “silly” and into the territory of “amateurisih.” As in, it would actually, legitimately suck. But it’s impossible for it to not be terrible, since we don’t have that establishing shot.

Unless I decide to go all non-linear on yo’ ass.

So, that’s what I’ve decided to do. The film will be completed in time for its previously alluded to May 8th upload date. It will start with a shot of the interrogator and end with a shot of Bright watching Clarisse leave. Everything in between will be in a completely different order. And it will be even more ridiciulous than I imagined.

The problem is that I don’t particularly love that idea. It’s not being done because I’m excited about the idea, nor that I think it will work very well, but that it’s pretty much the only way the footage we got would work correctly. Also, the entire cast would hate me forever if I decided not to finish the movie because I didn’t like it. Especially Shannon Mary Burgess, who would probably cut my testicles off with her fingernails.

Well, it’s certainly been a learning experience for me: I am much better at getting what I want from animation than from live action. Working with action-focused videography of live actors is not something I should do when I have to devote half my time to unrelated homework and classes.

Also tapes. I hate tapes, with their dropped frames and broken timecodes and gahhhh. I’m not shooting a scripted production again until I have a memory card video camera.

Of course, had we continued the way I originally planned, it wouldn’t get done because my cast and crew weren’t available for the next 197 hours straight. We did three shots on the film stock and realized that film is infuriating. Fortunately, my director of photography had the foresight to bring her digital camera and shoot those first three shots on DV at the same time. It looked beautiful on the digital display, and the view through the Arri 16mm camera showed that the film might possibly get exposed if we were lucky. So after those first three shots, I came out of my “but I spent money on this film stock”-induced denial and decided we’d go forward on digital.

Oh no, not high definition, how terrible, ewwww. Well, at least it’s a low resolution beautiful image, as opposed to a 1920×1080 pixel image of black.

There were a ridiculous amount of things that made me insane, afraid it wouldn’t get done, afraid I’d smash my head against a wall too many times before it would get done, etc. But we finished the shoot around 10 PM on Sunday. And I think it’s going to be fairly awesome once my head clears enough to import the footage.

Some logistical issues caused two of the thugs to have an abrupt change in casting on the day of the shoot. David Tufano, originally supposed to play Purple Thug, had to cancel on the morning of the 21st because he’d been sick for several days and hadn’t gotten better. Having not known this, I didn’t make any plans for an understudy, but fortunately I had a second David on hand doing production assistance. So with a quick change in character from nerdy thug to burly manly thug, the wonderful David Lanz fit nicely into the role. He was quite knowledgable at how to cough and twitch on the floor as he died, being a forensic science student and all. The second change occurred because Blade Rogers had to go before we ended up taking a single shot of Orange Thug, so I swapped in Dan Clifford, another production assistant. Blade did help a tremendous amount with lighting before he had to disappear, though.

Oh, and one of the plugs for a light socket exploded. Nobody was hurt, but it did mean we had to finish the majority of the film with only two black lights. A third would have been nice for some shots, but we managed.

But now that all this has happened, I have two personal goals: Get a Red camera, and never shoot on film again. We had lights configured so that my eyes were in pain looking at the bright glow in front of me, and the light meter wasn’t even moving. What an incredible waste of my time and money that attempt at film was.

On a more positive note, I have now completely come to terms with the fact that good filmmaking cannot be done by one person. That may seem obvious, as someone has to act in front of the camera, of course, but what I really mean is that if it weren’t for my DP, Claire Ensslin, and my sound guy Gregory Wells, this entire shoot would have fallen apart.

Oh, yeah, and the cast. Them too. I love you all.

Will Rosenberg, who played the Interrogator, set up a YouTube channel exclusively for Bright Black. At first I thought that was a bit redundant, but it’s probably best not to clog my Plankhead account with a ton of different videos; he already uploaded some of the B-roll he took with his pocket camera thing. I leave you with a short clip of our celebratory last shot: Clarisse smashing the bottle on Orange Thug’s head.

So the most realistic prop gun I’m legally allowed to purchase or possess in this city is yellow. In theory, I could spray paint it black and hope that nobody reports me, but since we’re shooting under black light, there’s a much more fun and infinitely more legal solution.

It’s quite simple: spray paint it MORE YELLOW!

That awful, disgustingly blurry photo was taken by my cheap point-and-shoot camera that can’t cope with the pressure of shooting without a flash. But it gets the basic idea across: yellow prop gun + black light + yellow black light paint = really, really yellow. And that’s a very helpful thing for post-production. By strategically positioning the camera so nothing else is yellow in the shot, I can just chroma-key the gun to black:

Yes, I’m aware that there’s a white halo around the gun. That won’t happen when I shoot with a film camera, nor would it happen if I shot with a decent digital camera. For now, it’s a proof of concept. I should also note that the same technique can be used for shooting a movie in runner vision:

None of this footage was slowed down; the reason some parts look like a Zack Snyder film is because we never managed to do the entire thing full speed. It would probably take a lot more rehearsing for everyone to do this perfectly at full speed, so we’ll compensate by shooting from a lot of angles and focusing on bits at a time.

Needless to say, everything you see is just a “sketch” of what it will all eventually look like.

(I’m currently exporting a version of this video where “Roy Mulhall” is spelled correctly, so that’ll be fixed)

Also I got writer’s block trying to write the gunfight, which is where I stopped writing the original. Because of this, and becuase getting realistic prop guns in New York City is expensive when legal, I decided to replace the guns with shurikens and lightning. Well, okay, just shurikens. And katanas!!! It’ll all be very Snow Crash-y; Jarod Bright actually is kinda similar to Hiro Protagonist if I remember the novel correctly.

When is Snow Crash going to get adapted into a movie or video game already? Actually, to be really meta-weird, someone could code a Snow Crash action/RPG in LSL and put it on Second Life. It would be like…Third Life.

But now that you’re here I suppose I should blog at you. BLOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOGGGGGGGGGGG.

So tomorrow (well, today, technically) the Spring semester of classes at SVA start up for me. They actually started the 12th but I have no Monday classes. But yeah, when I wake up after…sleeping I’ll be heading back to my Production class. I’m excited for this semester since we’ll be able to spend the entire duration of it working on one short film. And with six months to put together ten minutes, how can I NOT make it epic?

Anyway, the idea I’ll be proposing is “Bright Black,” a short glimpse into the life of a manic secret agent who thinks he has the best job in the world. And 99% of the lighting used will be black light.

I think it’s going to work out quite well; shooting in a studio won’t be a problem since most of the light will be focused outside revealing areas. I’m hoping that in the darkness I can create the illusion that the space is larger or more complex than it really is.

I’ve got a work-in-progress of the script up right now. Less than two thirds of the whole thing are written so far, but I know where I’m going with it.

I’m hoping to cast Santo Ciaravino in the lead role if he can work with me again. He played Mike in “The Drawing Board,” which is the movie I made for last semester’s final project. You can watch it and most of my other half-decent stuff on my Vimeo page.

It’s almost 3 AM and I should sleep now so more blaggitying later.