Page 14 - Priorities #74

“Murder in the Knife Room” via Zoom
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John Sugden and Matt Roth answer the burning questions of how they produced the Middle School Play, “Murder in the Knife Room” entirely through Zoom!
How did the idea come about to produce the
play via Zoom?
It was an interesting situation to be thrust into. The actors had one live rehearsal on campus and the next Monday we moved to Distance Learning at Priory and rehearsals moved online.
I huddled with Matt Roth and Stefan Fisher who was directing, and we were all certain we wanted the play to continue. We weren’t sure how soon we would be back on campus so we devised three different schedules for putting up the show. We hammered out what would change with each plan, and when we talked through using “Speaker View,” on Zoom along with green screens and some other tricks built into the software, it became clear that we could do the whole show online if need be. Which is what we ultimately did.
How did you manage the rehearsals, costumes and sets?
We moved all the rehearsals online and the actors really invested hugely in learning their parts, developing their characters and connecting with each other in this new world of “screen acting.”
Our set designer Micaela Sinclair adapted her earlier designs to be digital backdrops, Miranda Waldron our lighting designer gave great advice
on lighting spaces and green screen use and Karoli Clever our costumer had parents measure the actors and she pulled costumes from our stock and found others online.
I ordered props and huge rolls of green screen paper for actors to use in their homes. Karoli bagged each actor’s costume individually and labeled them and we included internet cables and headsets for actors that had connectivity issues or needed their sound bumped up. Then we had a two day “pickup your costumes and props” at curbside; loading people’s cars while masked and gloved.
How you did it (from the tech side)?
We recorded two complete “takes” of the show, and for each show
we had both a gallery recording and a speaker view recording. Stefan sometimes had to decide if the take with “better” performance or the take with the “cleaner” recording was the one to use. He made detailed notes about which sections he liked best.
For special effects... Alexis Levin ’23 did all the flashback chime sounds, and then we had two other students on the call sharing their laptop audio. Chloe Huffman ’23 did all the thunder and Nate Chen ’24 did all the other SFX and Huck Twerdahl ‘26 creating the end credits.
What were the challenges/problems you encountered?
• Differences in people’s internet connections could make it hard
for an actor to sign-in to rehearsal and sometimes they’d suddenly disappear from a dropped connection and they could pop up at strange times.
• Lighting and framing of actors in their homes so they could be seen on the Zoom screen well, timing reactions between actors because of lags in internet connections, and the frustration of not being able to physically move very much because they would go off camera.
• How to get musical cues and music overlapping for a Boy Band scene (shout out to Oliver Trevithick ‘25 for welding that scene’s song together!)
PERFORMING ARTS