Our Artistic Director, Joe Strickland, is running a digital theatre workshop as part of UK New Artists' take over of the city of Leicester at the end of February. If you'd like tickets for the event, either in person or via Zoom, please click here!
However, if you don't have the time or can't face another Zoom workshop then here are some quick digital theatre tips for you instead:
Video quality is normally something that creatives care about more than audiences do, and most modern smartphones have a good enough camera for filming digital theatre. I use a Google Pixel 2 XL cos it has a good quality camera, films in low light reasonably well, and has a decent internal microphone. This phone can also be bought off eBay, with a broken screen but perfectly functioning apart from that, for around £50, so if you don't have a decent camera for filming already, even on your current phone, acquiring one can be much cheaper than buying a camera might otherwise seem.
Audio quality is much more important, and an external mic will usually get you better quality audio than the internal mic on a device. However, this can be because the microphone on your camera is far away from the performer in order to film them, so a second phone placed closer to the performer, such as in a shirt pocket, can work very well as another microphone. Just make sure to clap in the frame of the video while recording both audio and video to easily synch the two different recordings up when editing. If you want a dedicated external mic, I'd recommend the Zoom H1n, as it can be used with batteries or plugged into a computer, is very portable, and costs under £100, which is impressive given how good a microphone it is.
For sound editing, I use Audacity for trimming clips or reducing background noise, and GarageBand or Ableton for music or audio production, though most software does the basics you'll need very well. For video editing, I use Davinci Resolve, but have used iMovie in the past without much complaint. I think most of this software is free to use and has a great deal of functions given its non-existent price tag.
Consider whether your story would be best told as a digital theatre production. Some stories are about the digital world, so might suit being staged in a digital space very well. Other's might be being staged digitally from lack of ability to stage them in person, and there's nothing wrong with that if you have no other option, but I would recommend thinking carefully about how to adapt it to fit an online space. Online spaces and in person spaces are (obviously) different spaces, and stories set in one require proper adaptation to fit the other. Much like how an adaptation of a book to the big screen is not just footage of someone reading the book, think about how the script or story, possibly intended originally for an in person audience, might be best altered and augmented to fit an online space. Is there anything you can now do with the story or for your audience given the tools a digital production might offer you?
Making money with digital theatre can be very hard, however, it is much more affordable to create given the lack of fees for things such as travel or accommodation for creatives, or rehearsal/performance space hire (depending on the production needs). I would recommend choosing the story you tell so that it appeals to a particular online audience. Is your audience made up of traditional theatre goers who are still uncertain about attending productions in person or who can't afford the tickets or travel at the moment? Is your audience an internet savvy group who want to see culture about the spaces they occupy and the stories that take place within them. Both of these audience groups actively seek digital theatre but both require different productions and marketing plans.
Making digital theatre is much more sustainable than traditional, in person theatre. This is mainly through a lack of audience travel, but also from the lack of having to heat and power a full venue, and for countless other reasons. Our Carbon Impact report from 2021 goes into some more detail about this.
It is much easier to build accessibility into your work if it's a digital production. All artists should be making their digital work as accessible as possible, considering captions and audio description as standard. BSL (British Sign Language) is also useful to include, but it is best to include it if you can anticipate members of the Deaf community being in your audience. Captioning pre-recorded video is very simple and easy, using tools such as Otter.ai to auto-caption a finished film, then editing the transcript to make sure it auto-captioned it correctly and adding in references to sound and music. You can then export it as an SRT file and upload it directly to YouTube, Vimeo, or another video hosting website with timings for he captions automatically sorted for you. Recording an audio description track is great because someone who isn't able to watch your production will miss out on important visual elements in the design and performances. Including this audio track in a version of the footage, or uploading it to Soundcloud to listen to alongside the footage, works well. A good tip for recording audio description is to imagine your filmed production as a radio play and describe anything that might be necessary to include for that audio only audience. Access is very much something that can be creatively included into a production, and should be considered from as early on in the process as possible. There really are very few justifications for its absence given how easy and free a lot of the software to create it is, but normally it gets ignored because it's left to the last minute and there isn't time to include it, or to include it properly. This can be overcome by making it a priority, and considering it throughout the production process. The more you do it the easier including it into your creative practice becomes. However, it's not something that you should be scared of attempting, and trying to do it right but not quite hitting the mark is better than not trying to do it at all.
That's all for now, I may add more to this blog over the coming days if I think of anything else important, or if anyone has any questions and I feel the answers might be useful to include here.
Happy digital theatre making everyone, let us know what you come up with!