Shots from the dress rehearsal of 'Ghetto' performed by the Summer Acting Institute for Teens at The Theatre Lab, directed by Deb Gottesman, a founder and co-Director of the The Theatre Lab.
This production, a Jewish morality play about the Holocaust written by Joshua Sobol was put on as part of a four-week theatre training program for 13 - 19 year olds. It was pretty dark and adult stuff with a lot of movement in with a diverse set.
This was a dress rehearsal and the lights (spots, colored gels and such) were way off and just being aligned while I was shooting. Because of this, I had to rely on Canon's 50mm f1.8 'nifty-fifty'. This $99 lens is a bit soft in focus but can really pick up the light - which was necessary since there was not a lot of light happening in the first place. Shooting off-camera flash was not really possible due to the diverse set which would have caused me to be running around with light stands changing their orientation every two minutes or so. Given what was going on with the stage lights, this is the best I could do playing off of whatever the intermittent spots were catching. Lots of grain here but there is some visually striking stuff going on.
Pretty confident the technical difficulties were worked out before the play opened and the show was a success!
I am not a big fan of anything graphically "Nazi"... but it was an essential element of the play. Since I can generally not hear the dialog when shooting, I think the moral of the play is that when rounded up by Nazis in a ghetto and forced to perform theatre, you should probably not make fun of the guard with the machine gun! It is much more layered than that - but that was my initial take.
This production, a Jewish morality play about the Holocaust written by Joshua Sobol was put on as part of a four-week theatre training program for 13 - 19 year olds. It was pretty dark and adult stuff with a lot of movement in with a diverse set.
This was a dress rehearsal and the lights (spots, colored gels and such) were way off and just being aligned while I was shooting. Because of this, I had to rely on Canon's 50mm f1.8 'nifty-fifty'. This $99 lens is a bit soft in focus but can really pick up the light - which was necessary since there was not a lot of light happening in the first place. Shooting off-camera flash was not really possible due to the diverse set which would have caused me to be running around with light stands changing their orientation every two minutes or so. Given what was going on with the stage lights, this is the best I could do playing off of whatever the intermittent spots were catching. Lots of grain here but there is some visually striking stuff going on.
Pretty confident the technical difficulties were worked out before the play opened and the show was a success!
I am not a big fan of anything graphically "Nazi"... but it was an essential element of the play. Since I can generally not hear the dialog when shooting, I think the moral of the play is that when rounded up by Nazis in a ghetto and forced to perform theatre, you should probably not make fun of the guard with the machine gun! It is much more layered than that - but that was my initial take.
Click on the title of the post to get to the Flickr Set to view all 101 photos.
No comments:
Post a Comment