Behind The Scenes: Taking The Magic Flute From The Main Stage To The Big Screen

Standby, conductor on. House lights out. Go, thank you. Good luck, everybody. David McVicker, the original director, and Ruth Knight, what they've created is amazing in the first place. And actually, our job is to think of how that is best done on screen, on camera. Every moment, every decision we make, we take very seriously. Each conductor puts their own stamp on something. We'll be definitely paying attention to what the conductor's doing, and the speeding up and the slowing down. You want to replicate that feeling, that excitement, or what that conductor is bringing to this performance. We're not trying to translate this literally, because otherwise we'll have lots of wide shots. What we try to do is capture the spirit of it. And it's just thinking always about what they're trying to tell us, and recreating that in a language that suits film better. For Magic Ruby, we've got just over a thousand shots. So every one of those shots is marked on the music, where the cut's going to be, which camera's going to be, and a description of what's going to be. We have a lot of characters here, we have a lot of movement, we have a lot of complex stage lighting, lots of details we're trying to get. And so, as we can't have a camera rehearsal per se, we then spend around five hours on the day with a camera team, going through every single shot. So the Magic Fluid, we have seven cameras, so they've all got between 100 and 200 shots each. And each one is an individual thing. They have to be incredibly quick in learning characters, story, because it's all about storytelling. They also have to be able to think on their feet. My direction might be Mitchell Pamina. They might see the shot and go, well, actually, if I go a little bit wider, I will get Tamino in the background. So I think I, as much as possible, encourage them to be creative. So there's a lot of, this is what's happening, this is what you're doing, this is who you're following. But the art is in them finding something a little bit special on the moment. Our cinema broadcasts are what we call event cinema, so we try and make this as much of an event as possible. Broadcast to your front corner. I'm just checking still good for 1932. Great, thanks so much. As producer, you are the bridge between the stage and the screen. You're there to make sure that everything is running on both sides as it should and that everyone's vision is realised from the screen director to the stage director. As well as making sure the performance itself on stage looks as it should, your job is also making sure that the audiences within cinema are getting a completely different kind of experience. We will spend several days interviewing different members of the cast as well as the director. You really want to bring an in-depth look at the rehearsal process to everyone within the cinema, and that then also helps the multi-camera director if they want to come into rehearsals, if they want to have any conversations with the stage director, you're there as a facilitator for that and to make sure that they are happy as well. So for the overture then, we just need to place the women, the ladies with the lamps, so they suit the cameras. You get to know the people working on it, so the stage director, the choreographer, the stage management. And for me, more importantly, what you get in the rehearsal room is an understanding of the characters who are singing the parts you're going to see. So it's one thing seeing it on the paper, it's another thing seeing it in a wide shot from a recording. It's another thing altogether being within 10 feet or less. So you get to understand where you might get some really great stuff. Calling for Digital Beflutter. Good evening, this is your half-hour call for this evening's performance. You have 30 minutes. On the day of the record, my job is to make sure that everything is happening on stage that it should be. So I will liaise with stage management, I will go down ahead of the show and make sure that the timings are running as they should, that we agree what we call a conductor start time, so that we are running to clockwork. For a live opera production, I would say there's anywhere between 50 and 100 microphones is what we normally use, depends on the size of the cast. Because ultimately this is going out into cinema, so I think the aim should be that we're telling a story. It should feel exciting, it should be immersive, it should feel like you're in a cinema sound world. At some point in the afternoon, we're all on hands-on deck to go and rig the pit. The staff here are really brilliant, so it's very organised to be as quick as possible, so you can have quite a lot of people putting mics out. It's not just the pit, we have mics across the front of the stage as well, there's mics also at the side of the proscenium arch, and a few sort of hanging off towards the back. That's a lot of microphones to be chasing around the mixing desk. It is a technical feat, there is a lot of worrying, but it is all about the music ultimately, and it is all about making that speaker, making it sound as good as we can make it sound. It doesn't happen with just the producer or just the director. There are so many people that it takes to make something like this come to life. What we call the front row team is myself directing, then we have the vision mixer, and she presses all the eight buttons, the eight cameras at the right time, if that's for action or for music, depending on where we're going from. We then have a script supervisor, and what she does is she tells you what shot we're on, what camera we're on, what camera comes next. Eighteen A, seven next. Behind us then we have what we call engineering, and what they do is they look with the lighting director on making sure the shots for the cameras look great. You know, it's quite difficult to translate some of this theatre kind of lighting to TV lighting. I think the important thing for all of us, the front row team, is that we're looking at the pictures. So while obviously we all read music very naturally, what we want to be doing most of the time is looking at the screen, looking at the shot, and therefore we have Jonathan who comes in and basically does a score reading for us. So he keeps a check and he points to where we are in the music. Three next. For me, this is all about sort of sharing what is something really amazing. When you come to the Royal Opera House, it's an incredible place, and when you see opera live, it's incredible. We can't really create that. However, what we can do is sort of convey that as an incredible way on camera. I'm very proud to be able to make it happen. Just for more people to be able to experience these productions sort of first-hand, I think it's wonderful. For me, this job's really important because so many people can't get to Covent Garden, they can't get to London. So whether you are in Tokyo watching this or in Saragossa or in the far-flung Shetlands or in Cornwall, it's not meant to be a replica or a replacement of what's on stage here in the theatre. It's an experience of its own, and it's my job and the rest of the team that I work with to make sure that that is represented on screen to the best it can possibly be.