Back in June, I did my first Zoom production of The Yellow Wallpaper, you can find a detailed breakdown of it in this post.

In July and August, I worked on a second production with the same company, which was pretty exciting because it gave me a chance to try to fix a few of the issues we had with The Yellow Wallpaper and learn some more.

The point of both of these experiments was to see what could be achieved with a super minimal budget.

Our next production was Dracula, adapted by the director. We went through several script revisions this time and it came in at 103 pages and three acts. Quite a bit longer than The Yellow Wallpaper. The run time wound up being about 2 hours and 30 minutes, which included a 10 minute intermission.

Personally, I feel that’s a little long for a Zoom performance, though Mad Forest did clock in at a similar run time, so that’s probably just personal preference. In my humble opinion, I think an hour or less is golden. I will also say that in this case, the larger production did also equate to larger costs (which I’ll outline below, but as we already owned some of the equipment now, it wasn’t that much more).

However, we had a noticeably larger audience. For Dracula, our evening show had about 87 viewers steady throughout and 925 views, and our matinee held about 53 viewers steady throughout and 324 total views. For The Yellow Wallpaper, our evening show had about 60 steady viewers and 259 views, and our matinee held about 30 viewers and had 170 views.

I suspect there are two main reasons for this. One, our much larger cast had a much larger reach of friends and family tuning in to watch them. Two, we solved our horrible video/audio delay issues on this production, which I will address below.

The Audition Process

So a little more about the Dracula breakdown. We had a cast of 7 and our director wanted to make it very clear that everyone and anyone was welcome to audition for any of the roles, so when I posted our audition notices, he told me to make sure I checked the Transgender box.

I only mention this because we learned during the audition process that if you check that box, it makes the casting list read like we were specifically looking for transgender, not just open to transgendered, and so we had a lot of confused emails from people. I think this is an unfortunate move on Backstage’s part, but a heads up to others trying to be inclusive.

Our goal that auditions were open to all was outlined in the description of the production.

We wound up doing two nights of auditions for this production. We managed to cast all but one character in the first night, so we did an additional last minute audition over the weekend to look for the one character we were struggling with.

Scheduling

Our cast was much more spread out this time. Though the majority were still in the NY/NJ/PA area, we have one up in Boston, one in California, and one in India. For our design team, we were working with New Jersey, Chicago, Kansas, and Brazil.

My call time emails had lots of reminders about all times being EDT.

Our auditions were the first Friday in July. Our second audition was that Sunday. The cast were notified on Monday and our first rehearsal was on Wednesday evening.

We doubled our rehearsal time for this performance and did 8 weeks of Wednesday night rehearsals from 6-10 PM.  In the final week, we also did a 4 hour tech rehearsal on Thursday, and a 4 hour dress rehearsal on Friday.

I did not add the two hours of tech time without cast that I recommended in my last post because we had the same team working together and now, we know what we’re doing. I do still highly recommend it though for those embarking on this journey for the first time.

We did bi-weekly instead of weekly production meetings this time, which were certainly plenty. We did them at the same time on Thursday afternoons.

One thing I would do in the future is give more time for costume fittings. I gave it a two hour block because we didn’t even come close to using that in The Yellow Wallpaper, but we definitely were a little rushed at the end with 7 people this time.

I also split them into two groups so it was easier for the costume designer to manage them, grouping them by people who had the most scenes together, and put an overlap of about 30 minutes when everyone was there for her to check anything she wanted to.

A nice thing about the longer rehearsal time is that by the end of July everyone was off-book, so we still had about 4 more rehearsals to clean things. One of these rehearsals our director had a lot of technical issues with his connectivity, which made it kind of frustrating for everyone (though it also reached a point where it just became humorous to everyone but him and we all just rolled with it), but even with that one problematic evening, I think we had the right amount of time on this production. If you’re really pressed, we probably could’ve made it work with a week less of rehearsals.

Again, length of the play also matters here. With The Yellow Wallpaper, we could easily do two runs and notes in a night of rehearsal. With Dracula, there were several rehearsals where we didn’t even get through the entire show.

At best, we would only be able to do one run through and some notes, due to the length of the performance and the breaks we had to take.

Technical Things

For this show, it was important to get our graphics early, because we had the performers swapping their own background on Zoom. The production had 20 scenes, so we wanted them to have some time to practice with this.

We also used props for this performance.

When I sent over their backgrounds from the graphic designer, I made them tracking sheets to go with each set. The tracking sheets broke down the performance by scene and noted what they should be wearing, their graphic background, and any props they should have.

I was also lucky that our sound designer is pretty good with computers and he and I had both been researching how to improve the quality of the stream.

He was the one who solved our worse issue. The video clarity and audio lag in The Yellow Wallpaper was pretty rough.

My computer is the one that controls the stream. I run the main OBS to the Facebook Live stream.

I have a MacBook Pro (2015) with an Intel Iris Graphics 6100 1536 MB graphics card.

Funny thing, as good as MacBooks are for many, many things, they apparently have garbage graphics cards.

And this was the source of all our problems.

So we looked at gaming computers, because they have amazing graphics cards and then we LOLed our butts off because they cost like $500 for a week rental and like $3,000 to buy.

That was a hard no in our budget.

Fortunately, I had been taking an accounting class at the local community college that required me to use a PC for one of the programs and I had a very cheap loaner Dell Latitude. When I picked it up from the school, I had to set the whole thing up myself, so I thought, maybe I can download whatever I want on here?

I was right. It let me add OBS and Zoom. It had an Intel UHD Graphics 620 card in it and the results were immediate. On the very first test stream, all of our video and audio delay issues were gone.

I found the same model online for $420 when I searched because I realize that if I try to do this again, I’ll either need to buy one or tell the company hiring me that they need one.

Since I’m staying at my dad’s, I also found an old monitor in the basement and was able to hook up to that and use both screens. I was pretty pleased with my setup this time.

I also made a same little word document with common phrases I needed to type so I could just copy and paste them into the chat to communicate with the cast, because it was much quicker than typing things out each time.

Assistant Stage Manager

I was able to have an ASM for the last week of the production, which was helpful. She downloaded OBS and was setup as the backup stream in case anything happened to my internet connection.

We had a much more complicated OBS setup this time with a lot of filters and various media at different times, and she only had a MacBook, so I just had her setup a Technical Difficulties slide with the understanding that it could run for a few minutes if it had to while I rebooted everything on my end.

I also learned how to setup the Facebook stream so it would automatically default to her if my stream stopped, which I hadn’t managed to do for our first show.

This led to my biggest fail during this show, after our first performance, I cut out the stream from OBS, which had stopped everything for The Yellow Wallpaper. In this case, it stopped my stream, went to her technical difficulties screen and you could clearly hear all of us talking in the Zoom, thinking we were off-air (in a Technical Difficulty, it would’ve gone to music).

Fortunately, most viewers had left and the few still there found it hilarious, because it was really just everyone celebrating together. Our PR person sent me a text and was like “we can still hear you on Facebook” about 1 minute into it and I stopped the feed on Facebook.

Face palm. But new streaming info learned and another line added to my post show checklist.

In addition to being the backup stream, she was also in charge of reordering the cast if they entered wrong, because I had too many cues in OBS to be doing both things.

It definitely would’ve been a little smoother if she had been at more rehearsals to understand the flow of the performance better, because I feel that deciding the timing to turn off someone’s video when they’ve entered wrong is a bit of an art.

You don’t want to do it while they’re talking. You don’t want to do it when they’re being directly addressed. You need a plan if you have to shuffle multiple people. You need to know if any filters or tech elements are coming up that require they be in a certain position by a certain time. You have to know if the director has strong aesthetic reasons for why he wants someone in a certain spot. You also want to be confident enough to evaluate all those things and decide to just leave them in the wrong spots sometimes because that’s the cleanest option.

And you have to do all that pretty quickly, because it looks best (I think) if you rearrange people quickly after they enter instead of randomly after they are settled into the scene.

That can take some practice, but I also think it comes pretty naturally over the course of being at several rehearsals – or maybe just being a more experienced stage manager. It’s like when a cue can’t be fired when it’s supposed to go and you have to decide what you’re going to do about taking it later or skipping it.

Something else new for me, I also used my iPad to draw in blocking for the first time so I could send her a digital copy with the blocking. I used PDFelement to draw on my script and I’m honestly not sure if it was the best choice or if there’s an easier way to do this or if there’s even just a program in my iPad that I overlooked that should let me draw on a PDF.

It didn’t seem like it should be a difficult ask to draw on a PDF with an Apple pencil on an iPad, but I must be missing something here. I would like to find an easier way to do that for the future.

I also experimented with the line note software Line-It during this production. You can read my whole review here.

Budget

As I mentioned above, this production was a little more expensive than the others.

• Our cast of seven all needed green screens except one performer. We had 3 screens from The Yellow Wallpaper that were mailed out to the cast (approximately $30).
• One of them got lost in the mail, so we had to buy 4 more green screens. ($59.70).
• Two more months of Zoom Pro ($29.98).
• Playbill audition notice, fortunately Backstage was still free ($34.95).
• Props came out to $19.64 and shipping them cost $12.20.
• Reimbursement to cast for mailing the green screens back (approximately $60).

The total was approximately $246.47.

We also did three trivia night fundraisers that were kind of fun to put together. The first was a general trivia night, the second was theatre themed trivia, and the last was vampire trivia night.

We charged $10 per team of up to 5 people. We had 4 teams for the first night, 3 teams for the second night and only 1 team the last night. The winning teams won 25% of whatever we made, so we netted $67.50 (because we made up an imaginary team for that last game so the one team that did come out thought they were competing against someone).

If we did that again, I think we might be better off spending a month hyping up one big trivia night fundraiser rather than doing all three.

We also did a Facebook fundraiser that was kind of successful. I had never done one before, so I pretty much had no idea what to do. I kind of arbitrarily picked a $700 goal. We wound up raising $352. Facebook does take a cut of that it came out to something like $332.

That was added to our PayPal and Venmo donations and split between the 7 cast and 6 creative/design/crew, we each made $67. So it looks like our final income total on this production was around $871.

Final Thoughts

In conclusion, all of the things I felt were true and that make digital performances particularly valuable for students still held up.

A lot of the mechanics of all of our jobs were still the same, it was merely the final product in its streaming version that is so different from what we’re all used to.

One nice benefit for performers is that people who don’t usually get a chance to see them perform can. One of our performers has a lot of family in Columbia (she was actually in both of our shows) and mentioned how nice it was that some of her family could tune in to watch her.

If you want to check out our final product, the show will be up for a while on the Dunvegan Productions’ Facebook page here (and if you watch the last minute and a half, you’ll see what I mean about forgetting to switch off the stream at the Facebook level instead of just the OBS leve).

Anyone else done a Zoom show and have some tips or tricks? Leave them in the comments.