This is Rosencrantz and Guildenstern’s first scene with Hamlet. In this production, this was their first entrance; the earlier scene with the King and Queen was cut.
My goal here was to set up a strong relationship between Hamlet and his old friends — see this post on my analysis of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, and this post about directing this scene.
A bit about the technical aspects of the video below.
This is cut together from two different performances. I shot one with my shitty camera, sitting close to the center front part of the audience. I borrowed two cameras from actors in the show to shoot another performance with a total of three cameras — the nice camera (thanks, Crystal!) was house left, another was at the back of the main audience area, and my crappy camera was house right and gave me almost unusable footage (you can see a few shots that I had to rebalance the contrast in Final Cut to use at all). There was heavy wind the night we had three cameras, which plays havoc with the sound. And theatre on video always seems to magically sap the chemistry and vitality that makes live theatre work.
Still, I think I’m fairly happy with how this turned out, all things considered. This was one of my favorite scenes in performance: I love what the actors do with the language, and I’m happy with the rhythm and staging choices we made. Hopefully some of that comes across in the video.
September 18, 2006 at 1:14 pm
Found a new filter in Final Cut Pro that drastically improves the footage from the shitty camera. I’ve gone back and fixed this up but getting it from Final Cut down to a YouTube-size file is a bit of a hassle… if I get a chance, I’ll repost this clip sooner or later. And the next clip I post should look slightly better.
This is good because it allows me to use more footage from that camera, which mostly got closeups from the house right side.
September 30, 2006 at 7:31 pm
[...] I’m loving my new job as Education Director of the Marin Shakespeare Company, but it’s quickly becoming clear that I’m not going to be able to continue regular posts about Hamlet. Which, considering the show closed a month and a half ago, is probably appropriate anyway. I’ll leave this blog up, and I’ll continue to post erratically — when I can’t sleep, or when something occurs to me, or when the official archive photos finally come in, or when I finish editing more of the video. But no more trying to post something every week. [...]