The Second Act - Virtually Acting

My first movie, “A Public Execution,” had its public premiere earlier this month at the Bigfork Independent Film Festival. Admittedly a modest effort, it was my hands-on way of learning what filmmaking is like and how it compares to stage production.

I’ve been actively involved with the Bigfork Community Players for several years, acting and directing on stage, and I thought movie making might be an interesting new avenue to express our creativity. I mean, acting is acting. Right?

Well, maybe not quite. A veteran film actor (who, at the time, was hanging wallpaper for me to make ends meet) once told me that making a movie is like watching paint dry. I’ve never acted in a movie, but having watched our “making of” video, I can see how this might be the case. In live theater, at least after you have your lines down, you get to run through the entire story in order and you get to act several times, some of those in front of audiences. It’s a social experience with immediate gratification.

But movies are recorded in snippets, usually completely out of order, without an audience, after a lot of time waiting for the technical crew to get the lights and the sound levels right. The camera is your audience and a camera can be remarkably devoid of any kind of meaningful response to your performance. And shot in snippets, the movie remains in kind of a chaotic virtual state until it is assembled into a sequence.

Of the eight actors in “A Public Execution,” only three of them had ever been in a theatrical production. Acting in a medium in which only a single performance counts for anything just didn’t seem to appeal to community-theater stage actors, who thrive on the enthusiasm of audiences they act for across several performances.

From a director’s perspective, filmmaking offers more control than does stage acting. In directing a play, the director’s vision and influence on the actors diminishes with time. The casting and the first read through where the director expresses a vision offer the best control he or she will ever have. When the play opens, the director is done (often literally dismissed) and the actors are in control. But in a movie, the real control happens after the acting is finished.

Editing has no counterpart in stage acting. A play is presented from start to finish and if anything goes wrong, well that’s live theater. It’s the actors’ responsibility to fix it, an aspect of live theater some actors seem to relish. But nothing goes wrong in a movie. In the editing suite, you just look for the perfect take of every scene and figure out how to seamlessly merge a sequence of them together. Sort of.

What if the perfect take doesn’t exist? Sometimes you can go back and reshoot it. Sometimes you can’t. Several of our scenes were shot from the front porch of a house with a vacant lot in the background across the street. As luck would have it, a house was built on that vacant lot during the time we were filming. It’s not necessarily a problem, as houses do get built in the background of reality. But it becomes a problem when you want to reshoot a scene earlier in time. It’s okay to watch the story develop on film and see a house being constructed in the background. But seeing that house come down and be rebuilt can be kind of jarring.

In a play, you depend on the actors to keep the story rolling in sequence. Big-budget films have continuity specialists to do this when the scenes are shot out of order or at different times. They watch over the shooting to make sure actors wear the right clothing and that everything proceeds in a natural progression on film, even when someone builds a house on the set. We didn’t have a continuity specialist. And if you watch closely and know what to look for, you can see that one of our actors lost his ponytail on the walk from the street to the porch.

Producing a movie turned out to be a lot different than producing a play. There was a lot more time spent planning with spreadsheets and storyboards, a lot more time spent in front of a computer editing, and a lot less time spent with the actors. There was a lot more solitude and a lot less socialization. It was less a community effort. If there are more community theaters than amateur production companies, this may explain why.

Will I ever make another movie? Maybe. Will the Community Players ever take up filmmaking? I’m not holding my breath.

David Vale made his movie with no budget, which is not the same as with no expense. He now has a closet full of filmmaking equipment waiting for his next big idea.