A couple of weeks ago I told you all I had a new project lined up. Well, that time has arrived, and it involves me working with Starlight, Kettering's own dance and musical theatre school. Natalie (who of course you may remember from previous posts about News Man and such) got me involved in all of this, and now I'm filming as many of their shows as I can.
This all started because Starlight wanted to replace their current DVD suppliers, who were charging a whole heap of money to film their shows and send them DVD copies. The DVDs were... eh. The filming was okay, but the sound was... eh. I, of course, said I could produce something at the very least on par at what I reckon to be about a fifth of the price. They snatched that up offer very quickly indeed.
So a few weeks later, I had set up my camera in the Castle Theatre in Wellingborough and I was once again making money doing the very thing I actually want to do with my life. Yay!
This show was the sort of thing I'd never actually come across before, it was a sort of variety show with loads of dance routines performed by the kids who attend the dance school. It was sweet. It ranged from two/three year-olds who didn't really do very much more than bounce on the spot and wave at their parents, but nonetheless did try to follow the routine, to some quite talented teenagers. Some bits were better than others. But really, the show is for the parents, to watch their little angels on the stage for (maybe) the first time and going "aww" a lot. One of the routines was to the theme of James Bond, which had a very young Bond brutally murdering some teenage girls. That was pretty cool. It got loads of complaints from parents. But hey, art doesn't happen when you don't tread the line between what is and isn't acceptable in respected society.
So that one was easy, I just set up my camera and watched the show. Easy squeezy.
A few weeks later, Natalie's shows came around. Peter Pan and Second Star to the Right. Peter Pan, of course, was an adaptation on the original story in which a young boy brutally murders pirates and kidnaps children. The kids performing in this were the younger of the two groups of kids Natalie teaches, and they did an absolutely stunning job. It was remarkable that these young minds could adopt a persona, learn 90 minutes worth of dialogue and then perform to an audience. I couldn't do that.
Second Star to the Right was written by Natalie and her friend, John. It's a completely original story, and sequel to Peter Pan, performed by Natalie's teenagers. Again, they pulled it off spectacularly and made the audience roar with laughter and shed some tears. It was fantastically written and it was a genuine pleasure to be able to sit through both the rehearsals and the performances.
I decided to make my filming of these far more complicated than the dance show by literally tripling my work. I didn't need to; it's not even what was asked of me, but I wanted to. Because filming. Instead of just setting up a camera, leaving it and trusting a sound tech to record the audio, I set up a central wide shot on the balcony well above everything else, had my DSLR recording close-ups with a 300mm lens and captured sound using a shotgun mic. So I was doing the work of what I would normally direct three other people to do. But no matter, I'm Peter Hutchinson, the best videographer in Kettering (probably). It was stressful, tiring, and awesome. I hadn't felt that kind of buzz in such a long time. By the end of the two shows (which both happened in the same day, I failed to mention, making this feat by the team even more amazing), all of my gear was down to the five minutes or less, either in battery life or card space. It was one of those shoots where I had to stop and think in every break to try and maximise efficiency in my gear. Thankfully, everything worked.
Immediately the day after that mega tiring day I was back in Wellingborough filming more kids dancing. It was... Less good. I decided to only use the one camera again basically sleep through the show. And it was a bloody long show as well. Each act lasted nearly an hour. But hey, there were a couple of bits of interpretive dance in there that were pretty cool. Everything else was literally for the amusement of the parents, I feel.
Now, of course, I have to edit it all. The trickiest part of that will be synching up the footage from Second Star and Peter Pan, but for all the effort that was put into making those shows, I owe it to make some damn good videos from them for the parents to enjoy all over again.
I very much hope that life gives me more of this sort of stuff to do. It really is fantastic.
Pete out.
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