How To Make Re-Creation Reality: A Case Study

Announcer: Welcome to producing Unscripted with Joke and Biagio.

Angry Man: Is this some kind of joke?

Confused Woman: Biagio-WHO???

Announcer: This episode…

Biagio: It’s episode 35 and we’re talking about how to make re-creation reality with a full case study. Discovering and casting stories for episodes. What cameras we shoot at. Capturing re-creations quickly. Avoiding re-creations that are too literal. The right way to pitch re-creation shows. And Joke is so pregnant she might go into labor before even finish recording this.

Announcer: Music courtesy of Dave Pelman Music, davepelman.com

Biagio: Hey everybody, she’s Joke.

Joke: He’s Biagio.

Biagio: We’re married who make unscripted film and television and want to help you do the same.

Joke: Hopefully by teaming up with us.

Biagio: And here we are episode 35. Boy we have a lot going on right now. First of all for all of you who have been listening, you know that last time I said Joke was super pregnant. Now she is super-duper pregnant. How are you feeling, Joke?

Joke: Countdown mode has started. I wonder if this will be the last podcast before this baby comes out or if I’m stuck with one more.

Biagio: Maybe we could squeeze alright. I don’t know only time will tell. They say the second one comes faster, but we are in countdown mode and at some point we may miss a podcast episode, we hope you’ll all understand or who knows, maybe Joke will be like, “No Biagio. We need to do it from the hospital”, I don’t think she’ll be like that.

Joke: Or you could just do a short one yourself?

Biagio: We’ll figure it out when the time comes.

I just got back from a top secret location. We teamed up with some more of you I went in shot a pitch tape over the course of about four days and I’m really excited about this one. And that some more people we met through the podcast, it was a really great experience, great characters who were experts in their field, great shoots, you’ll be hearing more about that one down the line.

Today we wanted to talk about, for those of you who don’t know, we’re doing a television show called the Ghost Inside My Child. This again is a show that came from you, Suzanne Stratford in Cleveland, Ohio, an award winning journalist who discovered an honest to goodness phenomenon where hundreds of children were remembering living past lives.

They remembered living and dying in a past life and parents were bewildered about how to deal a child who says, “I love my other mommy more than I love you” or “I want to go home to my home,” or in one case even where a child had told the police that she thought she was kidnapped because she remembered her past life family so clearly.

So we’re in an amazing concept, Suzanne brought us the phenomenon with a bunch of families willing to tell their stories and that became a show on Bio which Bio channel when that still existed which was the highest rated TV series in the history of channel, and now we’ve moved over to LMN, season two premiers…

Joke: August 16th, so it’s a Saturday night, I believe at 9 o’clock?

Biagio: I think that’s 9 o’clock. We’ll put it in the show notes. But it’s back where an LMN which will be a lifetime movie network now LMN.

But we thought what’s really great is to sort of give you an absolute, like step by step, blow by blow of how the show gets made.

We haven’t been able to do a whole lot of these where we can point you to where listen, this is exactly how we made the show. These are the important things to think about when making a show like this.

In this case, Ghost Inside My Child is a re-creation show where it’s an interview driven where we’re capturing testimonies from real people sharing this amazing phenomenon they’re going through with us and then we basically do insane re-creations given the budget that we have. I’m not going to give exact numbers but our budget is on a low side.

We do re-creations that range from things we shoot on the field from things we shoot against green screen and even to complete 100% semi photo real CG which is sort of insane on a budget like this and that’s because I’m a geek and we have an awesome guy working with us.

Joke: But if you watch the show on August 16th, you’ll see exactly what we do.

Biagio: You’ll see exactly what we do. So we thought what we would start with today is talk a little bit about the process, beginning to end of making a recreation show like this; what it takes, how to do it, what to look out for, what to be ready for. So, Joke what would like to start with?

Joke: Well as in all these kinds of shows it starts with the story and the story here is really in the casting, right? So we have to find the families and our show is different in that, it really takes not the perspective of the police officer or an official investigator or a paranormal expert or anything like that. We absolutely document the testimony of the parents. So it starts with finding families.

And there’s usually two kinds of families that we come across. There are families who are in the middle of going through it and then there the families whose kids are already in their teen years or maybe early 20s and have either had closure or have come close to getting closure on the past life. And so we tell both stories.

We do outreach, a lot of outreach online and either in form groups. We do a lot of outreach on podcasts and radio and hopefully some more mainstream press coming up soon. And then, obviously our show’s airing and it hasn’t call action at the end which means there’s a title card at the end of the show that says, “If you know of someone or if your child has these experiences, please contact us.”

And so we’ve had people who, you know have been going through this experience and contact us, who had no idea that their kids are going through this as well until they saw the show. So that’s really exciting.

The way that we’re staffed is we have two producers and an AP go through leads, talked to families, figure out if their stories is appropriate for our show. Sometimes it’s not always all there. Sometimes maybe the child’s much older now. And so because we want to tell it from the parent’s perspective, it’s important that it still feels fresh. So if it’s been too long then maybe that’s not quite right for us.

But we listen to everybody and we’ve made a lot of connections between people even if we don’t end up telling their story on the show, you know I would advise everyone to contact us because we’ve been able to put them in contact to experts and other families going through the same thing.

So once we’ve come through casting and please note that everybody in our show is thoroughly checked and made sure they’re not making up the story or they’re not in it for the wrong reasons or families don’t get paid. They’re not doing it for the money, they’re doing it for the experience of sharing the story and hopefully other families like them are out there, they can find help in hearing these stories.

Once we’ve kind of go through the process and we have gotten them network approved, we do like a Skype interview with them, show the network to Skype and then write up their story. There’s a lot of pre-interviews, so you know that interview podcast we did?

Biagio: Remember Peso? If you don’t remember Peso, go look a couple of episodes that go Peso, Peso pays off big time here.

Joke: Yes, so it’s really important on this show in particular to get all the pre-interviews out of the way with so when we show up in the field we really already kind of know what the testimony is going to be up until a certain point, up until present day if this family does not have a resolution yet.

So we show up in the field, again, small crew we have a producer, a supervising producer with DP obviously and audio and then we usually pick up a local PA to help out.

Biagio: And I’m still going to back up for those of you who are brand new to the business to the podcast, we’ve been trying a lot around just little initials, so earlier we’re talking about two producers and an AP and an AP is an appropriate producer, DP is of course Director of Photography also known as Cinematographer, PA is production assistant. Most of you probably know that already but in case some of you are new to the podcast, those are some of the positions on the show.

Joke: So our show is an hour long and it consists of two families. So really each families shows about a half hour shows worth which ultimately when it’s all edited it’s about 20 minutes, 20 to 22 minutes. We shoot that in 2 days, so 2 days per family, so that will be about 4 shoot days per hour episode with a possible fifth day for like a life resolution if the story requires it.

So again our small team shows up, we have about a day of interviews where we interview our main story teller which could be the mom or the dad. We interview the child if the child’s old enough and it makes sense. We interview a second voice whether that’s again the other spouse or the other parent or whether that’s a family member or grandmother, a neighbor, somebody who can bear witness to the stories our main story teller is telling.

And sometimes we do more especially if there’s a lot of siblings involved. It’s always great to get their perspective of it and so it’s a day of interviews and we a day of recreations. And Biagio can talk a little bit more what our goal is with them.

But the way we always seen it is this show is not a show about some paranormal phenomenon, it’s a show about families in crisis and so the families will tell us these stories of things that happened or questions that emerged or, “Hey I didn’t know what that meant.” Crisis being obviously a broad term here where it could be a crisis of not knowing what’s happening, the crisis of night terrors, not knowing how to stop them, the crisis of feeling alone in this because you don’t know other families going through it.

So there’s different aspects to it, so the recreation a certain specific events that happened along these journeys of figuring out what is going with this child, we try and do it a non-literal way.

So we’ve coined the term, the kind of impressionistic recreations, the De Monet recreations, you kind of think it’s a water lily but it’s just look like a couple of flecks, right?

So there’s a lot of creativity that goes into it and it’s a process that starts in the field and that really gets heightened in post and then obviously and ultimately in our color correction at the very end of it. So Biagio talk a little bit about some of the toys and tools our very small crew works with while they are out there.

Biagio: Yeah, I mean this goes back to the pilot. For the pilot I was personally out there, I’m always out there for the first step of the new seasons. But you need to figure out how to make these recreations work with no time and no money because it’s a very, very small budget. And you can’t really do traditional recreations.

It’s very important for us to realize that we’re never going to shooting fore line Hollywood blockbuster scenes. We don’t have the time, we don’t have the gear, we don’t have the crew, and we don’t have the ability to spend a lot of time and casting.

So for us it was really important to make sure that all the recreations supported the story without the distracting from the story. You know, any of you who have watched a recreation show at any point at your lives, you know that sometimes recreations can be really cheesy. There’s good recreation shows, there are bad recreation shows.

And so working within the budget of our limits, we wanted to make sure that our recreations never came off as cheesy. And for me when I was creating the original styles for the recreations from the pilot, I felt like the best way to do that was as Joke said, to make things a little bit more impressionistic. Let’s really get inside the moment, let’s get inside the parent’s brain and see things in a sort of like hyper realistic way.

Joke: Part of what makes it so impressionistic is that the parent today also plays the parent from then, so it’s almost like they’re looking in on their own memory.

Biagio: Time is slowed down and you’re seeing extreme detailed close-ups of really interesting elements in the scene and things in the move out of different pace. I was also interested in the whole idea of re-incarnation and playing with the idea of time as sort of a – to sort of support the team of reincarnation, so playing with speeding up time and slowing down time and things that looked really cool and were easy to do impose but wouldn’t necessarily causes a lot of time in the field.

The other thing about the recreations we do is because our show is sort of a flashy show and to be quite honest because a lot of times the families themselves are sitting to do the recreations and it’s not something that they’re comfortable with, we want to be able to caught around quickly and hide the parts that aren’t working.

Because of that, the sheer number of shots is crucial. Coming in and shooting on a tripod, or a dolly or a jib, it’s simply not feasible. Because the way these recreations to move is shot. So literally these will be like, I’m framing this beautiful shot for three seconds and now I’m moving and getting another shot for three seconds. I need to get wide, I need to get close-ups, I need to get moving shots, I need to get detailed shots, I need to get gimmick shots all those things in a very short period of time.

Joke: And crucial to all of that while this is happening and this is why it takes a very kind of seasoned little team to go out there and do that, is you’re working with everyday people who is not necessarily been on camera. And so, it’s still about making them feel comfortable. It’s still about making sure that they are the best that they can be.

Biagio: So once we shoot that recreation, we’ll talk a little bit about post later but a few other things that we used out there in the field both for the look and style and for the recreation as well as the interviews which I want to mention here because style has come into play, we shoot on a Canon C300 which is a camera I’m in love with. It shoots a very shallow depth of the field but it shoots at a bit depth and essentially a file size that’s very production friendly. It looks terrific on television, it’s very easy to push around through edit base and that camera works great for us.

We cross shoot with a SONY EX1 or SONY PMW200 and we’re able to max those color correction-wise and post but for the most part in our recreations, we’re using that C300.

We’re taking advantage of the shallow depth of field, to make things a little bit more cinematic and we also use a Lensbaby. A Lensbaby is a $300 lens that you can get off from Amazon and it does this cool little tilt shift effect which in certain circumstances can be very cheesy and in our show it just works. It’s splashy for some of the more stylized recreations. I love using a lensbaby. It works great, it will also effect that you can recreate and post. It just looks so great and organic and it’s such an inexpensive little lens. It’s a great add on for I think any type of show like this.

And when we do our interviews we share our – main camera is the C300 and that shooting is kind of like our main angle but we cross shoot with the EX1. And what we do is we sort of like do extreme close-up where the camera is just like floating the whole time, it floats from eyes to lips and it pants it on the face. It gets an extreme close-up on the eyes. It gets full reactions in between takes, a little punctuation camera and it just helps especially when pacing like this impose to have those extra angles. It comes in very, very handy.

And I do want to point out that by the way, like one day for interviews and one day for recreations is extraordinarily short. You know ideally we would have double, we don’t.

Joke: And that’s why it’s very important to really pre-produce these stories and have done lots of the Skype interviews and the pre-interviews with the family so that when the producer gets out there we know what’s the story’s going to be.

Now before I move on to post, some of our stories have a live resolution. And what that means is that you know we follow them through something in present day, whether it’s them visiting a part of that past life or meeting with an expert or something. And so those are usually like an extra shoot day and those are shot more verite style documentary style where we do is just follow the family.

We also are fortunate enough that we live in an age where the home videos are around the wall. And so we get some whole videos of this from some family and some pictures and some stuff like that really help us in telling the whole story.

Biagio: When we get back to post, obviously footage are captured, sorted, multi-group together all that good stuff, it’s basically prepared for our story producers to work with.

Joke: And so just a quick overview, our post department functions with our post supervisor. And he has a lead AE and usually at least one or two other AE’s depending how many episodes we’re dealing with, post PA to help in terms of deliverables and all of that stuff.

But we also have a supervising producer in post, whose job is to oversee and make sure that these stories make sense and are truthful and all come together. And what that means is, we don’t use voice over, we don’t use writing, we literally use what the family has given us. So it’s their testimony, it’s their story but it’s our job to give them their best story teller performance, right?

So that means we have to make sure we have the right hour type footage. We have to make sure we have all the pieces together. If we don’t have a [00:18:29] for it and we need to do a pick up shoot in LA, we will do that. If we need to license some archival footage to help kind of illustrate what the family’s been saying, this is where the supervising producer imposes, kind of keeping track of the story telling of the show from the moment the footage gets back all the way until the episode is locked and they also deal with network notes etcetera, etcetera

So we have a supervising post producer and we usually have another story producer or story assistant that they work with to help divide and conquer what’s going on.

We have about, I would say a week for the story to produce the episode and what that means our producers will go through it and pick you know – and listen we do a ton of pre-interviews right and so there might be stories that they don’t seem that important anymore or when the families were telling it, it didn’t seem to be as relevant as we thought when we went out there.

So they’ll go through the whole interview and figure out the pieces that actually work and string them all together. And so they’ll take a day interviews and turn it into, I don’t know, for 22 minutes or probably a 30-40 minutes string out.

And then after that week it goes to the editor. We have one editor per episode so that editor will end up cutting over a course of five weeks; one entire hour episode which means two stories. Okay.

And then we also have our V effects editor who will take some of – sometimes we do a little green screen stuff in the field which we didn’t mention…

Biagio: I guess we forgot to mention the green screen; I’ll back up on that.

Joke: Yeah, it’s a simple portable green screen that we carry with us and it’s for stylized shots and Biagio will get into it. He will take those shots and do something cool with them or some of our weekly shots may need a little help and so we have a V effects editor that does that for all of our shows.

So that’s our post department until the episode gets locked and then our post supervisor will get the episode to our mix house and to our colorist, to make sure everything is up to snuff with network standards before everything is locked and sent off.

Biagio: Yeah I want you to know that Andy Hurst is our V effects editor, he’s terrific, and actually we met him to our blog a while ago when I was looking for someone to kind of do what I did in the Pilot. It’s pretty easy for me to just to stay up around the clock and make V effects and push all that stuff in. But I’m kind of a weird bird because I grew up learning to edit and do visual effects and do graphics and do titles.

And so when it came time to do a whole lot of these episodes and I knew I wouldn’t be able to do them in every single one I had to find somebody who could really be the jack of all trades when it came to V effects and Andy is amazing.

But to give a sort of an overview of the V effects process if a lot of time and Andy has told me several times I’m not going to do his British accent he always says, “Biagio, I’m not IOM” and I’m like, “I know, I know but you’re doing great”. He does an amazing work.

But basically and practically no time and with no budget, Andy has to do everything from create complete 100% CG Virtual sets to add explosions, make buildings crumble, put in ghost or phantom images. And basically the main programs that Andy used to do that are also the main programs I used which are Cinema 40 and After Effects.

Someday I’ll do an entire episode and we’ll do an entire episode on the software we use. But I really believe in today’s day and age and in our business where you need to do a graphics as well as computer photo realistic CG, there’s no better combo than Cinema 40 and After Effects to be able to do all of it. That’s what we use and Andy will turn around sometime shots as quick as an hour. Anyway I’d also say thanks to Andy, like hey is there any way we do an entire marching army and he’ll be like, “Argh let me figure it out,” and then he does.

It’s a lot of fun, I kind of feel like this must have been like where I want to be in the early days of V effects where you really don’t know how you’re going to do something because you don’t have the money so you just figure out some crazy way to get it done.

But we do take a green screen as Joke mentioned in the field and gets sort of interesting shots of the kids and some of the family members if we think that we’re going to do a sort of stylized recreation. And then back at the office we have a green screen set up full time and then we’ll bring in all sorts of friends, and anyone who happens to be working here and standing to create crowd scene or all types of interesting shots that really makes the show look a lot more expensive than it is.

Joke: Yeah and again this goes back to our being more impressionistic and the fact that a lot of times we’re using shadows of people and senses of people and that kind of stuff so it’s not like you’ll be able to necessarily recognize our crew in the show. You’ll just get a sense of a silhouette or something and that may end up being one of us.

Biagio: Yeah, and one thing Joke said earlier and I think this is really important for me personally about recreations not being too literal. Here’s what you don’t want to do. You don’t want to have a mom go, “I was shocked” and then cut her face going, “Ah, oh my gosh!” Like that, we’ve all seen that type of recreation, I mean it’s so literal, it’s so on the nose. It’s not good film making, it’s hard to watch and it feels cheesy.

So we worked really hard, we don’t always exceed. But we work really hard to try to make things just a little bit more subtle, a little bit more dramatic. It’s [00:24:19] so on the head. And I think that in season 2 we’ve accomplished it even better than we did in season 1. So I’m really excited about this season. Anything else you want to touch on Joke?

Joke: Sure, I mean people always ask what the network process is like. We have great network executives on the show. We do about three rounds of notes so that there’s a rough cut that goes out that they’ll know. There’s a fine cut that goes out that they’ll know and then we send them a locked cut which is kind of a misnomer because it’s not locked. They usually have 5 or less little things that they notice and then we’ll do those and then it’s officially locked, locked right? And then it goes through the online process and then the mix and the color.

I just want to point out because when people start with this business they get very frustrated with notes and all of that stuff. And I tell the notes process show is so important because we do so much pre-interviews from the beginning and it’s not just our producers. I’m involved in terms of hearing the story over and over again, it’s like, “Okay, do we have this”, “Does this make sense?” or like do we have all of our arches because we break each of the story up to kind of 5 pods and we have to make sure that you know there are enough memories and enough things that kind of tell a story. It can’t be just like, “I woke up one day and realized I was Abraham Lincoln.” That’s not going to be a story we do.

So it’s very important that once we go through the process of the casting and then shooting it and then editing it, to have that outside set of eyes on it that network provides is so helpful in the sense that from a story’s telling perspective it’s very easy for us as producers or as writers or whoever to start filling in the blanks because we know the whole story and maybe for a time we had to cut a little piece out because you know we had to hid a certain time for the network.

And it’s not until they see that they go, “Wait this jump doesn’t make any sense” or “Hey, what going on with this thing here?” or simple “I think you’ve misspelled that word.” So sometimes you look at it so many times and those words start looking okay. So I want people to understand that the notes process in television because it such a collaborative medium can be very helpful and you should embrace it for that.

Biagio: I absolutely agree. I think that second set of eyes is crucial. You know unfortunately a lot of newbies for the industry who are like, “Well, I’m the artist it’s my vision. You don’t tell me how the show should be. I’ve made it perfect.” And it’s a tough attitude to have in television where really it’s a collaborative medium. I mean it’s really tough attitude to have anyone who wants to work with people like that but there’s plenty of people like that.

Joke: Well, they should be painters or poets.

Biagio: Yeah, they shouldn’t be working in a medium where you have to have hundreds of people come in together and make a show work. Well, not hundreds on this show. We’ve had other shows that’s hundreds this is more like tens of people.

But one thing I want to point out about a show like this, first of all it’s a lot of fun, right? Because we consider ourselves story tellers and film makers, you know TV producers, it’s a show where we get to do recreations and we get to shoot pretty images. We get to do visual effects. You know, we get to really go through the whole film making process so it’s a lot of fun to make.

Joke: Yeah and more than anything we get to tell these amazing stories that you know either one we have meetings and people say, “Oh what are you working on?” and we tell them, “My god we’re working on process family that went through this.”

You know that’s what we love about unscripted, is the fact that there are already these amazing stories out there that you know that you wouldn’t make up, so I think that’s what so exciting to meet these families and to see what they’ve gone through or going through and then to help them get to a happier place with their child or within a family gets some kind of peace that a resolution a lot of times provides, it’s very satisfying.

Biagio: It really is and I mean that’s what we love about unscripted in general. Every show we work out and we feel like has a little bit about Joke just mentioned. I think what makes recreation shows a little bit different and where you get to stretch different muscles is in doing the graphics and visual effects in a more cinematic style shooting.

And so you might be listening to this thinking, “Man that sounds like a lot of fun! I would really like to pitch some recreation shows.” Well, hold your horses there before we start getting flooded with recreation shows because I want to point out again going all the way back to our first eight episodes now available on YouTube at YouTube.com/jokeandbiagio including a clickable table of contents in case you miss our first eight episodes, one of the most important thing we say is, “make yourself valuable”.

If Susan Stratford would have walked in and said, “We need to do a show of kids who remembered dying in a past life.” I would have been like, “Does these kids even exist?” And that’s just an idea, that’s not enough and what’s and how’s the show going to work and have you done any research?

We get pitch show all the time where it’s one line and the person has brought nothing of the project to make their selves valuable. In Susan’s case not only that she walked in and having discovered the phenomenon, she already had tape one real family that had gone through it plus she’s reached out and gotten other families on board who wanted to tell their stories. She came not just with the idea but with the proof and the pudding and families ready to go.

And when we walked in to networks and their first question was like, “Where are you going to do to find these families?” And we can tell you, “well, let me tell you who we already have,” it blew their minds.

So I just want to point out, just like anything else when we talk about pitching a show and making yourself valuable before you say recreations are amazing and fun, always remember you need to find a way to make yourself valuable.

How did Susan do that? She came with real people ready to go. She came in with tape on a real family, she discovered the phenomenon. She nursed it, she mined it. She did the research and we had a handful and amazing stories to go out and say, “No, this is ready right now to be filmed.”

So by all means if you have a recreation show and it’s more than just an idea, you know please you know what to do. You can learn how to pitch to us completely top to bottom by checking out episode 30 of this podcast which is producingunscripted.com/030.

And as you know we have been teaming up with a lot of you and it’s really working out. It’s been great for everybody involved, I think. So you know hopefully we’ll be teaming with you soon and I hope this gave you a real insight on this recreation shows come together.

Joke: And I’d like to take this opportunity to thank our incredible, incredible team and our most amazing families who are willing to share their story and they have my admiration for that.

Biagio: Not easy to go on TV for free and say, “My family is going through something that might make you think we’re a little different.” But yet these families are doing it because they want to share the stories to help out other families, so absolutely major props to them.

And I think you guys are going to love the show. If you haven’t seen it definitely check out again, so it’s August 16 on LMN. LMN just Google that on your local station, you probably have LMN and you just don’t know it. It used to be lifetime movie network and now it’s just LMN.

So we’re going to go and have a baby, maybe not on this exact moment.

Joke: Oh my god, right now?

Biagio: Maybe within the next two weeks or maybe not so we might be back in two weeks for another podcast episode, we might not. If we’re not then we’ll be back in a month. But in the mean time I just want to thank everybody who’s been listening and tuning in and hopefully we’ll get to work together soon.

Joke: Yes and I mean you’re going to like announce it or something, right? We’re not just not going to drop off the map?

Biagio: No we’re not just going to drop off the map, people get our newsletter. You do get our newsletter right? If you don’t know how to get our newsletter you can sign up at producingunscripted.com.

We’ll tweet about it, there’ll be a newsletter, there’ll be an update, although last time when we announced that we had a baby in the newsletter like 25 people unsubscribed. I was like, “Wow, they really don’t care about us talking about personal stuff.” But that’s too bad. It’s our podcast, we can talk about what we want.

Joke: But we gave them the blow by blow.

Biagio: I know I thought there was like this big like, “Hey everybody, we had a baby!” And then it was like 25 unsubscribed, it’s like “Wow”. That was kind of hilarious” anyways.

Joke: I’m sorry if us having a baby offends you, if so bye, bye.

Biagio: Either way we’ll see you hopefully in a couple of weeks then if not then in a month. Take care everybody. We look forward to working together soon and peace out!

Joke: Bye.

Announcer: Producing Unscripted, with Joke and Biagio.