You know you’re not in Kansas the moment you enter Toronto’s Panasonic theater. An electronic sign encourages you to offer birthday greetings to perfect strangers. Someone hands you crepe paper to wrap around your head. Front row patrons get plastic ponchos to protect them from flying paint.

You’re about to experience Blue Man Group’s “Bluephoria” — the quirky, avant-garde hit theatrical show headlined by a few bald guys with a few gallons of paint. It’s a sort of 21st century Mad Hatter’s tea party, and it’s captured the affection of enthusiastic crowds in New York, Las Vegas, Boston, Chicago, London — and now Toronto.

When Kevin Rhoades, senior director and producer for Tourdesign, Blue Man Group’s creative agency, was asked to make a video of the Toronto show for the group’s use, the goal seemed straightforward: create a visually dynamic video that captures the show’s energy and humor.

“The beauty of Final Cut Pro is that, as you’re editing, you’re looking at 12 HD clips running simultaneously and you’re editing live, physically, in HD.”

But synchronizing 12 cameras, shooting in a dark theater, and reducing 40 hours of raw footage to a 90-minute high-definition video in a month — on a tight budget, naturally — proved a tall order.

His solution was to turn to Axel Ericson of Digital Arts, one of New York’s leading HD production companies.

Strategy in HD

“It’s a very dark show with a lot of blacks and very bright colors,” says Rhoades. “HD gave us the latitude we needed to capture the strong contrasts.”

Rhoades’s strategy involved using four Panasonic VariCam HD cameras to shoot Blue Man Group’s three opening performances. He would then finish in HD using Final Cut Pro 5, which allows editors to simultaneously view and cut from multiple sources in real time.

But there was a small problem: Tourdesign didn’t have HD post-production capabilities. And the client wanted post-production to be handled in New York.

Multicam HD Editing in Final Cut Pro 5

“My original thought was to rent a Final Cut HD system and a room in New York and ghetto it together,” says Rhoades. Then he learned about Ericson and Digital Arts and its new, built-from-the-ground-up HD production facility.

“It was a much better situation to go into a company that had already been set up to do HD,” Rhoades says. “It had everything in place, plus Axel’s HD experience. I’d used Final Cut, so the learning curve was not very deep.”

Blown Away

“Kevin had to come up with 90 minutes of material that was 12-camera multishot,” Axel Ericson says. “This is where Final Cut Pro was an amazing solution. Kevin had to synchronize 12 cameras with very tight deadlines. He was amazed how smoothly things went. He could lock the cameras with the time-of-day code, and they all would lock perfectly.”

Rhoades says, “With 12 cameras, you have the coverage you need — your close-ups, your long shots, your crane shots. I’ve done multicam with other systems and you’re forced to bring it in at low resolution. We brought this one in all in high definition — and it was very easy. I was pretty blown away.”

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