By Jon Silberg, December 11, 2008
In today's busy world, who has time for Dr. Phil-style psychology that can take a patient as long as 20 minutes or more with a therapist to set their lives on the right track? In Web Therapy, a new comedic made-for-the-Internet series, Friends favorite Lisa Kudrow plays online shrink Fiona Wallace, who promises a three-minute cure via Web chat. The three-to-four-minute Webisodes, viewable at carmaker Lexus's new online entertainment site, (LStudio.Lexus.com), brings Wallace together with a series of guest stars playing troubled patients seeking advice. The conflict and humor comes out of the readily apparent fact that the narcissistic Wallace is just about the world's worst therapist.
The format of a Web series allowed Kudrow, director Don Roos and producer/actor Dan Bucatinsky to try something that interested them without the kind of massive investment in money and time that a feature or series entails. ''With affordable HD and the Webisode format,'' says UPM/Producer Jodi Binstock, ''Lisa, Don and Dan had more freedom to experiment and try new creative ideas they might not have been able to pursue in the past.''
The idea for Web Therapy came out of discussions Kudrow had with Roos and Bucatinsky who were looking to get involved in original Internet content and to use the medium for the kind of project that would be conducive to allowing actors to improvise with one another. Web Therapy was designed specifically along these lines, though it could theoretically be used the way some other Web originals -- such as Jenny McCarthy's In the Motherhood -- have migrated to network television.
Michael Goi, ASC, who shot both Web Therapy and In the Motherhood, sees Web-original content as a naturally outcropping of the recent Writers Guild of America strike. The situation, he notes, ''motivated producers to find new way of programming. In some ways they're the new pilots. They're less expensive to produce and you can get a sense of completed show.'' But Goi stresses that the project that stand out from the clutter still must be conceived, performed and executed by talented and experienced professionals and, toward that end, Web Therapy was a union show all the way.
Goi, with nearly 30 years of experience as a cinematographer, an Emmy nomination for his work on My Name is Earl and two previous Outstanding Achievement Award nominations from the American Society of Cinematographers, attests that experience can be as important on a project like this as on a larger feature. ''Access to all kinds of technology is great but it doesn't make you an artist,'' he says. ''Nobody picks up a camera and accidentally does something fantastic. Not consistently. It doesn't work that way.''
While Web Therapy was designed for Web viewing, Goi shot in 24p HD with two Panasonic VariCams to give him more creative options than he'd have with consumer- or prosumer-grade equipment. ''It gives you more control over the image,'' Goi explains about the choice. ''You've got more room in over exposure and focus and color space and things that would make the image look better
. There's another upside in that if this gets promoted through other media like DVD or Blu-ray, or broadcast or if it's re-used at a point when there's better quality streaming the original material will be of a quality for that kind of use. It won't look all boxy and digitized and compressed when it gets transferred to other formats.''
Shooting takes place at the West Hollywood headquarters of Is or Isn't Entertainment. One camera is trained on Kudrow in a set dressed by production designer Lorin Flemming to look like a rather upscale psychologist's office and the other on another part of the floor in which Flemming creates the environment of the patient. Goi uses Bodelin Teleprompters on each of the VariCams to bring in the image of the other camera so each actor can look right into the lens and see their counterpart. Director Roos is in a third location watching the feed from each camera simultaneously. Sound mixer Donald Zenz has audio from each actor going into ear buds on the other performer and Roos has two microphones that can allow him to say something in mid take to just one actor through their ear buds.
''It's so important with improv for the actors to be able to look right at each other and just keep going,'' says Binstock, who notes that editor David Codron culls each Webisode from nearly 90 minutes of material. ''The slightest movement or twinge of an eyebrow can say so much and it just wouldn't work if they had to work to a monitor off to the side or something like that.''
Goi notes that he uses a simple but professional lighting setup. ''We want to present Lisa's character as very upscale,'' he says, ''so we used a number of HMIs and Kino Flos in there. Something like this is about faces, of course, but you also need a sense of the characters' environments in the background to flesh out their story. We lit to preserve a sense of the time of day.''
The cinematographer worked with the VariCam in 24p ''with basic settings,'' he says. ''There was no sharpening or edge enhancement. I wasn't trying to stretch the toe or crush the blacks or any of those kinds of things. I'd light to the monitor and any kind of contrast and color accents came from the lighting. I used the scopes to make sure there were no problems with brightness and chroma, and, when I liked what it looked like in the monitor, we shot.''
''Lisa and Don started with character sketches,'' says Binstock. ''They'd set up the attributes of the people and what points they had to hit and where they had to end up. And then they would improvise and Don was able to steer things in a particular direction by talking to each actor separately. It looks very simple, but it was a very efficient set.''
''It doesn't really come down to equipment,'' Goi says. ''It comes down to content. I know the common misconception is that now anybody can be a filmmaker and I think the glut of unwatchable stuff out there shows it's not true. If you have strong content like what Lisa and Don and Dan came up with, it's going to propel you and keep viewers wanting more.''
.
|