All The World’s A Stage: Counting the Minutes
Venturing onto the soundstages for the sixth season of Xena: Warrior Princess, Kate Barker gets an insight into the complexities of shooting schedules from First Assistant Director Carmen Leonard.
Official Xena Magazine: Issue 12
A series on as large a scale and with as fast a turnaround as Xena: Warrior Princess, needs many, many people involved in its production, all working together to achieve their ultimate goal.
The main goal at the moment is, of course, to maintain the continuing quality and success of the series throughout its sixth season. But aside from that, there is also a goal to be achieved every eight days: to make sure that each individual episode's filming is completed within the time allocated, and that that episode is the very best that it can possibly be.
In the often hectic bustle of all the different onset departments, actors and crew, someone has to be responsible for holding it all together. The First Assistant Director (generally referred to as the AD) is the communications centre, the set manager and the person who keeps the production moving forward.
Carmen Leonard is one of two assistant directors for Xena's Main Unit. She works on alternate episodes with Axel Paton, who, while Leonard is on set for one episode, will be in the office preparing for the shooting of the next.
“There are two aspects to the job,” says Leonard of the role of assistant director. “The first is pre-production, which is putting together the schedule, deciding what we’re going to shoot when, where and how. And the second is the on-set side, which basically involves the running of the set.”
Leonard makes sure that each shooting day goes smoothly and that the next day is carefully planned by setting the schedule and making sure that schedule is achieved every day. She is the central point of communication for all departments, co-ordinating their activities in preparation for the moment when the director says “Action!” and the actors work their magic for the cameras.
“It’s like co-ordinating a ballet,” she remarks. “It’s bringing everyone together to do one thing.”
For the most part, the requirements of Leonard’s job stay more or less the same from one episode to the next. Every so often, however, a challenge comes up which is sure to keep everybody on their toes.
For one particular sixth season episode, for example, Leonard and her colleagues on Xena faced a weeklong “away shoot” out of town, as well as the logistics of filming a North African desert sandstorm in the confines of an Auckland studio.
This involved a trip north of Auckland to an isolated beach with white sand dunes, where exterior desert scenes had to be filmed. These scenes make up around a third of the episode. Filming was very successful, but it certainly wasn’t as easy as a 12-hour day in the studio.
“We did a lot of travelling,” says Leonard of the trip. “It was an hour to get from our accommodation to base camp, 45 minutes to get from there out to the set, and then we had to wrap by 4.45pm each day because it would start getting dark by then. So we really only had seven hours of light per day. That meant that in order to achieve what was on the schedule, we had to work a lot faster. I think it was probably the hardest week of my career!”
Leonard says all this with a smile on her face. “Actually, it was fantastic,” she admits. “It went really, really well.”
Sandstorms also had to be created for the episode's desert scenes, but these conditions had to be created artificially on the Xena soundstages. “We never would have achieved the sandstorms had we tried to shoot outside,” says Leonard. “There are the elements - the wind, the sun and the rain - and, of course, we can’t blow sand in the actors' faces!”
So how do you create a realistic sandstorm inside a studio? “We shot it in a confined studio environment,” Leonard explains. “We used smoke and coloured filters and wind machines, which looked great!”
Shooting three sandstorm scenes for this particular episode took the actors and crew a standard 12-hour day and made up the entire day's required screen time. All two minutes of it.
Knowing how much time every shot is going to take and scheduling the shooting days accordingly is a big part of the job, Leonard acknowledges. “For the sandstorm, we had 12 hours to shoot two minutes, but today we have 12 hours to shoot seven minutes. It just depends on the difficulty of what you’re shooting as to how long it takes.
“There are scenes like the sandstorm where you have wind machines and smoke machines and horses and uncomfortable conditions. The scene is only two minutes, but filming it is going to take the whole day. That’s opposed to something like an interior tent set, for example, where you’re in a relatively unchanging set for the whole day and it’s easier to get through the minutes.”
With 15 years experience in this fold, Leonard can explain her position very succinctly. “It's a jigsaw puzzle,” she says, smiling. “That's the best way to describe it!”