Ordinary Days, a hybrid theater/film project streaming online through December 13, 2020, is a unique concept that brings theatre and film together in a new multimedia hybrid conceived by director Dave Solomon and Emmy-winner Jason Ardizzone-West (Jesus Christ Superstar Live). Set in New York City, this musical follows four characters whose ordinary lives end up connecting in the most unexpected ways. Working in partnership with composer/lyricist Adam Gwon, this show was digitally produced with two casts. Live Design chats with Jason Ardizzone-West about this innovation production.
Live Design: How does the hybrid theatre/film concept inform your design process... are you thinking differently than for a live production?
Jason Ardizzone-West: In a way, the design process informed the selection of this musical and the idea of creating a hybrid theater/film production. Like so many in our industry, I had been reeling from the shut-down of theater production as we know it, and the inability to create physical spatial designs where people could gather in person to tell stories. As a designer who is particularly interested in how the human body occupies physical spaces in order to tell stories, I was getting frustrated by the design limitations of Zoom, and the oxymoron of “virtual space” and I wanted to experiment with finding a hybrid theatrical / film language that used the unavoidable elements of isolation and separation as a conceptual building block, but wasn’t a narrative about isolation and separation.
In the early summer, Dave Solomon (the director) and I were commiserating together about all of this, and our desire to try to initiate a project where we could create a connected theatrical production during this time of disconnection and separation. He mentioned to me that he had been thinking about trying to find a theater to produce Adam Gwon’s 2008 musical “Ordinary Days” for a number of reasons: It’s themes of four individuals trying to find connection and make their way in New York City in 2006 felt resonant to our present moment, and on a practical level, there are only four characters and they sing a lot of solos, so it seemed well-suited to some sort of remote theater project.
At the same time, I had just had an interesting moment during a zoom meeting where I started seeing the matrix of faces and spaces, not as a frustratingly inflexible grid of low-quality video, but as a unique series of windows into tangible human space, and I imagined that each of these windows could be a pixel in a huge picture if we were to somehow magically zoom out far enough to see it. This got me thinking about impressionistic paintings, and I didn’t know it yet, but this is an essential idea written into “Ordinary Days.”
The design for this production came from this conceptual idea about humans inhabiting separate pixels of a big picture, but it also came from the logistical reality of the pandemic, and this idea of needing to film each actor individually in order to keep everyone safe.
The design development process was unusual in that it really was a hybrid of live theatrical design, film design, and yes, virtual spatial design. I constructed the spatial world of the musical in the computer using Cinema 4D, figured out how all the cameras were going to interact with our one physically built pixel cube, and then I storyboarded the entire show shot by shot, still using Cinema 4D. There were three different types of video content combined together ultimately to create our show: 1) video content projected onto the physical scenic cube, 2) the filmed clips of actors performing in this cube, 3) video content of virtual cubes with matching video content virtually projected onto additional cubes to complete the final image. We used Adobe After Effects and Premiere Pro to edit these three different types of video content together. Mickey Miller edited the musical. William “Buzz” Miller was the director of photography.
LD: How did you collaborate with the lighting designer? It seems that would be really essential to work hand in hand for something like this?
JA-W: Cat Wilson was the lighting designer. She was given the great challenge of how to light someone in a closed box without washing out video projects! Cat was in the room with the actors, the cube and the cameras, while Dave (director), Pei-Chi (costume designer), and I were only “in the room” via zoom, so Cat’s artistic eye was so valuable for confirming that things were looking as intended. The interesting challenge of how to light the human body inside a cube was slightly offset by the fact that the cube itself acted essentially like a 4-sided film/video shoot style soft box, providing side, back and top-light in lieu of traditional theater lighting positions. We also ended up blending video projection with color-balanced back-lighting, and many of the looks that I had thought would be projected vignetted colors from the video projectors ended up being provided by Cat’s lighting plot as she was able to mix some really subtle colors.
LD: How /why did Ordinary Days lend itself to this kind of production?
JA-W: Ordinary Days takes place in New York City in 2006, which particularly right now in 2020 seems like another era, and in a way the musical is a period piece in that it really does need to take place in 2006 to work given it’s connection to a still recently post-9/11 New York, and it’s relationship to technology, etc. However, the themes of perspective and the desire for connection feel so relevant now - particularly in the midst of the global pandemic. The show is essentially about 4 isolated individuals trying to find connection.
Part-way into the musical one of the characters —Warren, an aspiring artist—tries to explain his theory of life to a soon-to-be friend as they look at a Monet painting at the Met Museum: “This painting reminds me of people like us. Thousands of tiny specks huddled together in random arrangements that nobody expects. Every dot on its own ordinary and pale, but thrown together one by one, they make this dazzling, joyous, hopeful sort of [fairy tale]”. In our hybrid theater/film production of Ordinary Days, our characters literally inhabit the pixels of a larger picture. This quote by Dave Solomon is relevant here: “Right now, we see a lot of the world, and of each other, through pixels...and through boxes on a screen. An ordinary day today might be quite different than it was in the fall of 2006, but who we are—our humanity, our need to connect with others and our drive to figure out our ‘Big Picture’ and discover our ‘Life Story’—remain unchanged. We might be looking at these things through a new lens (or computer screen), but we are still asking the same questions. Adam Gwon’s beautiful, funny and thought-provoking musical may not have the answers to life’s biggest questions, but it offers us some comfort in the constant unknowns”.
LD: What are the biggest challenges in creating something beyond "zoom" for online productions
JA-W: There were the usual technical challenges of theater and filmmaking, but the unique challenge of our time of course was not being able to share space together throughout the process. And though our concept was a move away from zoom as a theatrical space, we relied heavily on zoom as a communication tool to make our shared theatrical space. The auditions and rehearsals were all conducted via zoom, with everybody in their own spaces, connecting via zoom. Actors sang individually to pre-recorded tracks and got used to singing to someone on their left even though that other character would only be on their left after filming and editing.
Dave, the director, is located in New York City. I am in Westchester NY. Pei-Chi Su, the costume designer, is in Long Island, and everyone else was in Pittsburgh. Dave and Camille (music director) rehearsed the two casts via zoom (or was it google’s video conferencing service?) with each actor in their own home. The set (the one cubic pixel) was constructed and installed in the Highmark Theatre at the Pittsburgh Playhouse. The cube is made from rear-projection screen panels with lighting and video projectors pointed at each surface. There is an array of 14 different cameras pointed at the cube from a wide range of different locations, very precisely located in relationship to the cube to match the locations of virtual cameras in Cinema 4D where I modeled the virtual version of the set.
For the tech and filming process, Cat Wilson (lighting designer) was in the theater space along with the rest of the production team. Dave, Pei-Chi, and I were zooming into a computer sitting on what would have been our tech table in the theater. The actors and production team could see us on a big monitor and our voices were connected to the sound system in the room. We had various camera feeds so we could see each of the cameras as well as a devoted “director’s camera” so Dave could see facial expressions and details. We shot one actor at a time in order to comply with COVID-19 safety requirements which allowed us - for most of our shoot - to have the actors unmasked, lip-synching to pre-recorded (masked) audio sessions. With only a few days left of shooting, rising COVID-19 cases and a new PA state mandate forced us to switch to everyone wearing masks at all times, so in the final edit, there will be a mix of mask-less and masked performances.
Buzz Miller engineered the zoom tech set-up as well as the camera array. Mickey Miller edited the many individual pieces of content back together.
LD: Was there one specific problem/solution?
JA-W: Not sure this is an answer to that question, but the basic challenge that Dave and I were exploring with this production was whether it might be possible to create a sense of connected theatrical space in the midst of a time where we cannot connect in theatrical spaces.
Ordinary Days: Buy Tickets Here