Director of photography Cucillo Consad and audio technician Matt Mickelson film Terrance, his daughter and brother — beneficiaries of Random 1 — on the streets of Akron, Ohio.
Broken — and Repaired
When Miller spied Jan hanging out on a Charleston, West Virginia, street, it didn’t take long to unspool his story. “We found out he’d been in a mental hospital,” relates Chester. “And then we discovered he was a keyboard player. He wanted to get back into it, but his keyboard was broken. So I said, ‘What if we help you get it working?’ Our RV crew made some calls and found a shop that said they’d fix it if they could — or replace it free.”
Continues Chester, “So we piled in the truck with Jan and went to his place to get the keyboard, and then we drove to the repair shop about 50 miles away, and all this time we’re learning more about his life. He’d had a nervous breakdown after both of his brothers were killed, and then he had problems with drugs and alcohol. We were able to open this guy up simply through helping him fix the one thing — music — that he feels is his creative contribution to the world.”
John Chester talks with chef of McMenamin’s Grill in New Rochelle, New York, who interviewed a random person that Random 1 helped.
Human Drama
As a filmmaker who started working in the industry in high school and later earned his chops as a production assistant on L.A. films and TV shows, Chester saw the dramatic potential in his “Random 1” experiment. Strangers were bowled over, unnerved, grateful and disbelieving — all of which made for intensely human theater. “These are genuinely random encounters,” he emphasizes, “and they can be pretty wild — especially at first, before they really get it. People have said, ‘Leave me alone or I’m calling the cops!’”
Chester doesn’t shy away from conflict. “Andre is pretty out there,” he says with a laugh. “And of course I want to do it my way, which is more linear: A-B-C. So we’d get into these huge fights — on camera, right in front of the person we’re trying to help. We’ve been friends for so long, I didn’t see any real weirdness in it. But then our cameraman said, ‘You know, it’s interesting how you two work through it.’ So we decided to include that in the documentary.”
An Editor’s Dream
The work of cutting thousands of hours of raw material into focused one-hour shows falls to a team of seven editors led by supervising producer-editor Mark DeVito. “This is a dream job,” says DeVito. “Since there’s no script, most of the decisions are made in the edit room, in an organic way.”
“The Xserve RAID on its fast Fibre network lets all seven of us be simultaneously digitizing, reviewing media, cutting sequences, rendering and finishing on our edit stations, every day — while sustaining the fast throughput.”
The engine powering this organic process is a powerhouse Final Cut Pro editing system. Ramy Katrib of L.A.-based Digital Film Tree, which designed the “Random 1” post-production system, calls it a breakthrough for TV. Digital Film Tree’s post engineer Sazeer Kader adds, “The ‘Random 1’ network is one of the largest Final Cut Studio Xsan networks we’ve built, and it uses all the latest stuff: Tiger, Xserve, Xserve RAID, Fibre Channel. They’ve got the speed to send footage to their production facility through iSight, and we can even monitor their entire system in Baltimore from our facility in L.A. using Apple Remote Desktop.”
Cutting Like Crazy
DeVito appreciates keeping his team one hundred percent productive. “The Xserve RAID on its fast Fibre network lets all seven of us be simultaneously digitizing, reviewing media, cutting sequences, rendering and finishing on our edit stations, every day — while sustaining the fast throughput.”
He also raves about the new multicam feature in Final Cut Pro. “Multicam clipping has been our savior,” states DeVito, “because this show always has six field cameras going. We sync the footage into quad splits, which I find much more intuitive and easier to execute than on Avid. Then we can easily rename the new multicam clips and use them in a sequence. We sync the playhead so the viewer showcases all options, run the clip in real-time and choose what we want by live-cutting between shots.”
Being able to use native-format media is another boon. “With DV and Apple’s FireWire we can incorporate fully-digitized online media without taking up a lot of space,” says DeVito. “In fact, for this whole season we haven’t incorporated any low-res footage into our process. And because it stays in native QuickTime, we don’t have to convert it.”
Continues DeVito, “We can transverse media from one project to another, and whether it’s show packaging graphics or animation we just import the QuickTime files and they’re instantly in the system. They don’t have to be turned into something else, and we don’t end up with double copies of primary files. Apple’s native QuickTime saves us so much time — and drive space.”
Next Page: A Quest for Connections
