This past February, while the city was in the throws of Olympic fever, the Electric Company was in the throws of an intense 3-week shoot for the film elements of Tear the Curtain! As part of his Director in Training program at Tarragon Theatre, Praxis Theatre’s Co-Artistic Director Michael Wheeler was on hand for the first half of the process. Check out his thoughts on the experience below and some of the great photos. The first preview is only two nights away!
From Michael’s post, The Electric Company blows my mind:
“The biggest day of the shoot was my last one, when a huge number of extras were used to create the crowd shots both of the audience filling the theatre and of a party in that occurs in the lobby of the theatre. On that day over seventy volunteer actors (myself included) showed up at 8am on a Saturday to be dressed in high fashion of the 1930s and strike a number of sophisticated poses and while feigning conversation throughout the day. Most ingenious use of the RED One Camera occurred at the end of this day when the seventy actors were shuffled to completely fill small sections of the 600ish seats the theatre with the camera “locked down”. Later in the editing room these multiple iterations of ourselves will become citizens of the same time and space filling the entire audience in a single shot.” Read more here.
Laura Mennell, Director Kim Collier, Jonathon Young
Director Kim Collier on-set
The Stanley lobby transformed!
Thanks for including me in this post. I wrote a new one about the rehearsal process of Tear The Curtain! http://praxistheatre.com/2010/09/director-in-training-so-thats-why-they-call-it-progress-lab/