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School
& Youth Theatre
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The Big River Project 3If there's one thing that the kids in our school have in common, it's a lack of self-confidence. I don't mean onstage - they are very confident there - but it's a lack of confidence about their place in the world. The school serves three local council wards: two are among the top 5% for deprivation in England, the other is in the top 10%. When they knew they were going to have to meet with the kids from the other three schools at a special "sharing" (I hate that word in this kind of context!) meeting with the kids from the other schools, they were desperately worried. "Are they posh schools?" I was asked continually. "We'll show ourselves up," they repeated time after time. They were worried, too, that the meeting was to be in a hotel. They'd have been perfectly happy if it had been a theatre, but a hotel was foreign ground to most of them. I had to keep reminding them: "Look, you're actors. That's what you're going as. None of them will have had the breadth of experience of acting that you have." They perked up a bit when I told them we were going to go to the hotel by taxi (two six-seaters, as one was away on holiday). that made them feel good! Anyway, they more than held their own. The other kids were clearly writers rather than performers, so our kids experience shone through. That was just the boost they needed and when, during the meeting, they met James de Marco, the videographer, and he enthused about the play and their performance, they were relaxed and happy. When he came to the first of his four sessions, they were ready and willing! We do a video course as part of Drama in Year 9, so most of them were familiar with the technicalities, so James only had to do one session on that aspect and, in the second sessionm, we got down immediately to deciding what we were going to shoot and how it would relate to the play. There were to be three video clips used as a backdrop to the play: at the start we would see the worst part of the river, in the middle we would watch the coin rolling away and down the drain, and at the end the river would look attractive. The final two sessions were location shotting down by the riverside. Like Neil, James was only contracted to do a limited number of sessions, but, again like Neil, he gave freely of his time once those sessions were finished. Thanks to a grant a year or two back from the Single Regeneration Budget, we have an excellent digital video edit system, so I used up all my free lessons for a couple of weeks (and an hour or so after school, too) digitising each clip, and then James came in for a couple of afternoons - totally unpaid - and he and I edited the three sections. We started with the third section, the river looking good. We had some nice shots of water glinting in the sun and it took no time to cut together a 45 second tape. Then we looked at the opening. We had a minute long shot - a stroke of genius from a couple of the girls: with the camera pointing straight down to the ground, they walked very quickly along the cobbled street in front of the Customs House. Without a Steadicam - the SRB grant wasn't that generous! - there was a lurching movement to the shot which gave exactly the feel of a drunk staggering along. So that shot went onto the timeline in its entirety and we simply split it and inserted the grungy riverside shots very briefly. We gradually shortened the inserts and the splits until, by the end, it was as if the tramp was running, and then - a bit of serendipity here! - we had a three minute long panning shot (taken by a couple of the girls) of a big ship going downriver towards the sea, so we dissolved the "run" into a sot of disturbed water, and dissolved that into a shot in which the bow of the ship just appeared. We then let that shot run. We converted the whole thing to black and white and it looked really good! The middle section caused us the most bother. Being a miserly so-and-so, I was not prepared to throw money away, so there was no way I was going to have two-pound coins going down the drain! We'd spent an hour rolling coins along the ground and filming them in close-up; then we'd lined everyone up and did a tracking shot along their feet (well, actually, we did four - for safety's sake); then we shot everyone, masked, in close-up; and, finally, James sat on the ground, pointed the camera straight up while all the masked figures stood in a circle staring down at him. He then rotated the camera to give what was essentially a coin's point of view shot. The editing took forever. We had almost thirty coin-rolling shots, most about a second long, so we decided to use slow motion and black and white. We then laid down one of the feet tracking shots as the basis and intercut a rolling coin, followed by a masked close up, then another bit of the tracking shot, then another coin rolling shot, then another masked shot, finally ending up with the coin PoV shot. Remarkably, it worked. What happened onstage was that the tramp decides to toss the coin to decide whether to buy pasties for the rats or a double vodka for himself. All of the masked figures move in in a semi-circle around him. he flips the (imaginary) coin: heads go up and follow it on its downward path. There's a lighting change: a parcan on the stage floor pointing straight up illuminates them from below, and the video runs on the cyc. As the video runs, they bend lower and lower until the video ends, the parcan snaps off, the masked characters howl with laughter and the tramp howls with anguish that his "two whole pounds" has gone down the drain. Relief that the video was done was followed by horror that there were only two weeks to go to the performance, and, for one of them, the nine Year 10s were out on Work Experience, and next week the show's overall director, actress Annie Orwin, was coming in to take a rehearsal. Oh 'eck! >> Next
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