The Bekolo Film/Web Project worked with the film Remote being directed by Jean-Pierre Bekolo and produced by the Theater Arts department. Helping to implement a web-site that would aid project management and publicity was a major objective of our project. Another objective was to document the filmmaking process using video so that we could produce video clips for the web-site that would publicize the Bekolo film and help educate people about the filmmaking process. The production of a comprehensive documentary about the film project is a project objective that we will be working on over the summer. The process of working on the web-site and the documentary has been a learning experience in terms of multi-media production, digital filmmaking, and project management in general.

Our project involved two parts. One was the construction of a web-site and the other was the shooting of a documentary. For both of these parts we worked with people on the Bekolo project web team (Ed McPherson, Chris Baugh, and Liz McMahon).

There are two primary purposes for the web-site we worked on. First, it is the co-ordinating web-site for the students and faculty who are working on Jean-Pierre Bekolo’s film project. Second, it is also meant to provide publicity and information for the film project. Each of these purposes will be elaborated in turn.

When the film was in the filming phase the site was used to help co-ordinate the daily activities of shooting. Quick communication to a large group of people was required since the film project was operating on a very tight schedule (trying to do most of the shooting in a two-week period, so that students’ time was not unduly taxed). Also, filming schedules could not be established definitely since the number of takes required to successfully complete a particular scene was highly variable. Hence, actors and production personnel had to be informed daily about the next day’s schedule. Using the web-site seemed like the optimal solution to solving this communication problem. Initially the assistant directors contacted project members by telephone, which was a time-consuming task. Since many of the personnel had limited computer experience, it took some time before they were willing to use the web-site.

Since the assistant directors were insistent upon posting schedule information in a specific format, we posted their Call Sheets in pdf format. We also established a NetForum to allow for communication among project participants. A web page was also established for the production staff so that project members would be able to contact them even if they didn’t have access to Eudora (especially if they were on campus for classes). For the post-production phase of the project (which it is currently in) a Virtual Office was established on the web-site to allow editors to co-ordinate their work from remote locations, especially when the director is in France for a while over the summer. The virtual production office uses FTP to send digital video files between the director and the editors. NetForum is used to communicate to the group about the flow of files.

Since the second purpose of the web-site is to provide information and publicity for the Bekolo film project, an informational page about Jean-Pierre Bekolo was set up, along with links to other sites about his work. Also, video clips of the film-in-progress as well as video clips showing the production of the film were placed on the web-site. The purpose of these clips was to show interested people who might be outside of Blacksburg the kind of work that was happening on the project. Since the film has been shot entirely in digital video, it seemed important to showcase this work on the web.

The other aspect of our project is the production of a video documentary about the Bekolo film project. Along with other members of the web-team, we attempted to document various aspects of the filmmaking process, as well as to provide a video record of the shooting of the film. Some of this footage has been used on the web-site, as in the QuickTime movie we produced that showcases issues of lighting in the film. The Technical Roughcut, a combination of film project footage with its corresponding documentary footage, also makes use of video shot for the documentary. Over the summer we plan to produce a few more QuickTime movie with this footage. We are also planning to produce a fairly comprehensive documentary about the shooting of the film. The director, Jean-Pierre Bekolo, has expressed interest in helping edit the documentary once he has finished post-production work on his film.

The home page provides links to the Virtual Production Office, Biography and Filmography for Jean-Pierre Bekolo, Production Staff contact page, Multi-media Clips, Project Newsgroup, and Production Call Sheets. Check the home page for notices about any changes to the web-site. The Virtual Production Office is currently used to co-ordinate editing work on the Bekolo film project. The Biography and Filmography page provides information about the director, Jean-Pierre Bekolo, and about his award-winning work. The Production Staff contact page has email links to contact key people involved in the production of the Bekolo film project. Multi-media Clips provides links to QuickTime movies that show parts of the film project, as well as the shooting of the film (eventually this site will also provide streaming video). The Project Newsgroup allows project members to communicate with each other, but it also lets people outside the project ask questions or give their input about the film. Production Call Sheets are Adobe Acrobat pdf files that show an example of the call sheets that were posted to the web-site during the shooting of the film. This is the standard format call sheet that is used in major film productions. Please send any questions or feedback about the site to jswami@vt.edu or jgraffam@vt.edu.

We used an S-VHS camera and a Hi-8 camera to film the documentary footage. In total, we filmed 10 2-hour S-VHS tapes, 8 2-hour Hi-8 tapes, and 1 1-hour Hi-8 tape of documentary footage, for a total of 37 hours of film. The footage includes film of the auditions, the audition reviews, script meetings, rehearsals, audio and video equipment setup on location, location filming, technical meetings, and editing. The tapes are stored in a locked cabinet in McBryde 110.

We used the Radius system in McBryde 110 to digitize the video clips. We used Adobe Premiere to capture the video from the S-VHS and Hi-8 tapes and store in the Premiere format on the DV 11 disk of the Radius system in the Bekolo subdirectory. The digitized clips of the auditions are stored in the main Bekolo directory, while the digitized clips of the lighting equipment are stored in the Lights subdirectory. The clips used in the movie rough cut clip are stored in the Roughcut subdirectory. The clips used in the technical rough cut of the movie are stored in the roughtech subdirectory.

We used Premiere to assemble the digitized clips into Quicktime movies that could be exported to other platforms and accessed through the World Wide Web. We used the primary video track to assemble the clips in the sequential order desired and used the superimpose video track to insert quick cuts away from the main clips to achieve a smoother flow to the resulting movie segments. The primary audio track was used for the source audio from the primary video clip. The superimpose audio track was used to insert voiceovers, including advice to the documentary crew from the film’s director, Jean-Pierre Bekolo. Once the video and audio clips were inserted on the proper track, we used Premiere to compile the various clips into a flattened Quicktime movie. The movies have to be flattened so they can be exported to a Windows based machine.

The Quicktime movies were transported via Jaz disk to the Educational Technology Labs and loaded onto a Windows NT 4.0 server. The project team also wrote the website used by the film crew as an organizational tool. The website included a Microsoft NetMeeting newsgroup which was created for the film. The production staff used the newsgroup to communicate with the cast and crew. The production staff also used the online production sheet to communicate filming information with the cast and crew. The production sheet was added to the website because it was identical to the production sheets used by most films and provided a degree of familiarity to members of the production staff who were uncomfortable with the World Wide Web. The HTML pages for the website were developed using Microsoft FrontPage 98, allowing the pages to be modified quickly with the results being shown immediately. The address of the website is http://128.173.118.49/bekolo/. The Quicktime movies created by the project team are on the Multimedia Clips link from the menu.