Spotlight: “Manual Cinema’s Christmas Carol”
Use code MANUAL5 to redeem $5 off your virtual ticket for “Manual Cinema’s Christmas Carol” until December 31. Watch the trailer here. To learn more about the performance and get your ticket, click here.
In the unprecedented year that 2020 has been, arts organizations have to prove themselves once again by pushing their innovation forward. FACETS is proud to spotlight the adventurous theater company Manual Cinema and a unique piece they created just for the holidays based on Charles Dickens’ famous novel, “A Christmas Carol”.
Manual Cinema combines handmade shadow puppetry, cinematic techniques, and innovative sound and music to create immersive stories for stage and screen. Using vintage overhead projectors, multiple screens, puppets, actors, live feed cameras, multi-channel sound design, and a live music ensemble, Manual Cinema transforms the experience of attending the cinema and imbues it with liveness, ingenuity, and theatricality.
The company was awarded an Emmy Award in 2017 for “The Forger,” a video created for The New York Times and named Chicago Artists of the Year in 2018 by the Chicago Tribune. Their shadow puppet animations will be featured in the film remake of Candyman debuting in 2021, directed by Nia DaCosta and produced by Jordan Peele’s Monkeypaw Productions.
This home-grown Chicago theater company is streaming “Manual Cinema’s Christmas Carol” nationally through December 31. Continue reading for an exclusive interview between FACETS Executive Director Karen Cardarelli and Manual Cinema Co-Artistic Director Julia Miller.
How was the idea formed to create an adaptation of “A Christmas Carol”?
We are a theater company that tours most of the year, so when the pandemic hit our schedule became wide open. We had talked about how fun it would be to adapt “A Christmas Carol”over the years but never had a window in our schedule. When it became clear touring wasn’t coming back this year, we needed to fill that gap and thought a holiday show would be the perfect thing.
Earlier this summer, we had experimented with live streaming when we had to move all of our ten year anniversary programming online. We figured out how to live stream then and it was a proof of concept to figure out how we would adapt a live feature length show for that format.
In your typical live performances, your puppeteers, actors and musicians all have to be physically near each other. The energy of a live show is great! What adjustments did you have to make for COVID? And what ways did you consider retaining that great energy?
There was a major reworking of how we usually perform to mitigate risk during the pandemic. We had to create our own COVID safety protocols for the cast and staff before we even started making the show. We created performance pods that paired performers in their own performance space that only they worked in and was across the warehouse from the other performance pods.
We had a music pod, puppetry pod, and live action pod. The sound engineer was in a different room and our stage manager was in her own solo pod running the video and sound cues. It was a wild experience rehearsing far apart in this giant space for weeks.
Then, when the show “opened” it was the same thing because we were just performing for the camera and not in front of a live audience. It was like, “OK, hey guys! here we are, just like we’ve been for the last few weeks, but this time someone is on the other side, watching from their home.” As performers, we still got that pre-show energy and excitement knowing folks were out there watching. We also created a post show Q&A where we gave a behind the scenes look at the set-up and answered questions from the audience via the live chat. That was a really nice way to engage with our audiences in real time.
The show has been getting exciting coverage, having been written up in New York Times and here in Chicago. Where are your audiences coming from? And how many “viewers” have you typically had for a performance?
We had viewers all over the world which is really exciting! We worked with our manager Laura Colby at Elsie Management to create a new model for presenting theaters to be able to book the show, as well us producing our own virtual run. Presenters who had booked us to bring shows this year who had to cancel, or who had booked our work in the past, or who hadn’t worked with us before could present the show to their audiences while they were unable to curate live performance.
You could buy tickets from Manual Cinema online or your local theatre. Those presenters were all over, from Seattle to Chile. It’s been a silver lining in a way because streaming the show online has made it accessible to such a broader audience. We had approximately 200-300 streams per show but we could only track streams, not how many folks were in the room watching. Closing weekend we were selling over 500 tickets to our last shows which really nuts and exceeded all of our expectations.
In live theater, something unplanned always happens and the skilled performers have to know how to respond without upsetting the story. Has something like that happened during this run of “Christmas Carol”?
Yes! But luckily nothing that ever stopped the show or altered the story. With all the tech we use, there are five camera runs, live video and audio mixing, lots of high voltage lighting equipment, so losing signal or power could be a major issue. Luckily, that was never a problem during the live run. It was more human error because, you know, we’re humans and we do things differently or make mistakes sometimes. It was more a puppet slip up here and there, a slightly different video or lighting cue, but only something we would notice, not something the audience would probably pick up on.
It’s a very team oriented process so there is a lot of grabbing the prop or puppet someone forgot, passing it to them off camera, holding or filling because someone is a little late. That kind of thing happens a lot, but since we all know the show so well we can usually help cover for each other.
How was the story and script writing process for “Christmas Carol” created?
The five Co-Artistic Directors worked collectively on the script. We knew we would be streaming the show live to our audiences each night, and many of them would be viewing the show via their computer screens. Framing the show in a Zoom call seemed like a great way to embrace this new format. We also wanted our narrator to be living in 2020 and experiencing the Holidays during the pandemic.
It was important to us to create our adaptation in these current circumstances and acknowledge how challenging they are. Framing the show during the pandemic when families have to be apart was a way for us to update the story while also using the amazing language from the book. We were able to combine the original text with a modern twist while also telling a parallel story about Aunt Trudy celebrating Christmas without her family and her own Scrooge like narrative arc.
Tell us the numbers! How many puppets in the production? How many hours of rehearsal did it take to get to opening night?
Gosh, hundred of puppets? We haven’t actually counted them because some were shot and edited into video sequences that we layered with live puppetry. But there are definitely A LOT. We had a really short rehearsal process for this show, about four weeks which included building and filming the puppet animations, creating the sound design and the score. So yeah, it came together VERY quickly.
The cinematic part of the production was certainly an important element. In which part of the process does the camera work and camera cuts get determined? And what’s the philosophy in determining them?
We created storyboards of all the puppetry sequences and animatics of those storyboards that went to sound and music design. Each step of the way we’re tightening and getting more specific with the visual storytelling. The video editing and camera transitions were loaded into the rehearsal process as we figured out how best to cut between cameras and create the visual language for those transitions.
The camera work was a challenge because we were working so quickly and filming everything ourselves. We were able to experiment with layering more complicated puppets for the pre-recorded sections because we only had to get one good take, and also had to figure out how to create really economical puppets that were very expressive but could be manipulated easily in real time to the narration. It was very much a hybrid of our live theatrical work and the puppet animation we’ve been developing over the last couple of years.
Are there common elements to a Manual Cinema story you try to always include?
The origin of the company was in overhead projector shadow puppetry, but our visual vocabulary has expanded a lot since then. We always feature some sort of shadow puppetry or silhouette style in our work, but we love to experiment with staging different styles of cinematic puppetry and incorporating multiple cameras and actors in front of the camera. It’s important to us that there always be a hand made quality to the work, and as we work more in video we really try to push into that so it doesn’t just look like digital animation.
Does Manual Cinema have a next project coming up you can tell us about?
We are working on adapting another live performance we had slated for next year to video. We’re collaborating with children’s book author and illustrator Mo Willems to create a new touring show, “Leonardo & Sam”, inspired by Willems’ “Leonardo, The Terrible Monster” and “Sam, The Most Scaredy-Cat Kid in the Whole World”. We are creating a film version to premiere at the Kennedy Center in 2021, and then plan to adapt it for live performance when that is possible again. We also have a short film we’re going to start production on next year!
Watch Manual Cinema‘s highly successful adaptation of Charles Dickens’s holiday classic A Christmas Carol virtually until December 31 here. Use discount code MANUAL5 at checkout to redeem $5 off your virtual ticket.