What I learned doing a Zoom reading

I thought it might be helpful to someone out there if I share what I learned making a Zoom recording of our reading of On Account of Sex.

• Don't do it live. It's tempting to do a live reading to make it more like a theater event, but you're putting yourself at the mercy of everyone's internet connection. Things will go wrong. And there's no good reason to do it live. Make a recording of the reading and stream it, or do what I did and just put it on Youtube for people to watch. (We only made the video publicly available for one evening so it was more of an event, since we plan to do a full production post-pandemic). Plus if you record it, the actors can give you their best take, or at least one they feel good about. That won't happen live.
• It's a reading, not a production. If you think of it that way it makes it much easier. You can still do costumes or have actors off book, but the presentation is more like a reading than anything else. You can't fight it.
• Zoom is great... for video. It sucks for audio though, mostly because two people can't talk at the same time, and you're stuck with computer microphones if the actors don't have good microphones, so the quality (and volume) varies with each reader. Also, any Zoom reading an hour long is going to have audio glitches. Video glitches don't matter too much, but audio glitches will kill your reading. You have to be able to hear every word the actors say. You don't necessarily have to see them say it.
• For audio, we recorded the zoom reading of course so we had the zoom audio as backup. Zoom will also let you make a separate audio recording of each microphone, which gives you an even better backup. But what worked best for us is having each actor record their own audio with their phones. The audio came out much cleaner than the zoom audio. Most of the actors did video on their phone, which meant big file transfers, so it will help if they all download a voice recording app. And phones seem to record better audio than computers. Maybe just because it's closer to the actor? Of course, you have go back in and sync up their phone audio with the video, which takes a bit of video editing skill, but it wasn't too bad once I got the hang of it. And you can control the audio volume so that each actor is at the same level, which is critical. There's nothing more annoying than one actor that's really loud and another that's really quiet. The audio was the part that took the most experimenting for us to figure out.
• Be wary of background noise in your audio, esp. hums and persistent noise that might be a refrigerator or air conditioning or fan. It's something that's easy to overlook, but can be incredibly annoying to people watching the video. There's ways to remove or minimize those noises in Premiere or Audition or Audacity so you get good clean sound. One of our actors had a high pitched clicking sound in their audio that we figured out was probably caused by their neighbor's satellite dish. That was hard to remove but I managed. I also edited about 30 videos for the Fringe Festival in July and background noise was a consistent problem in a lot of them. Even live theatre recordings had that background air sound that was distracting over an hour but pretty easy to remove.
• Our reading was more difficult because it was a musical. The way it worked best was to have the actors play the music themselves and sing to Zoom while recording the audio with their phones. Then I added the music track to the voice recording to balance the volume. We simplified the songs from multiple singers to one singer, and cut out a couple of songs that just wouldn't work with one person. We also shortened all the songs, because they were pretty boring without choreography.
• Zoom doesn't let you control who appears where on the screen, so I isolated each actor and put them where I wanted them in Premiere by making multiple copies of the Zoom video. The actors knew where they were all supposed to be on the screen even if they weren't arranged that way during the recording. This allowed them to look at each other when they were speaking and interact, which I think did a lot to make it feel more natural and less like a Zoom meeting.
• One hard part of recording with Zoom is that you can't save and look at the recording until the meeting ends, so you don't really know what you've got until afterwards. Something to be wary of. I didn't bother turning the zoom recording off and on. I just recorded the entire session and clipped out the bits I needed later. That way I only had a few master video files to deal with - one for each night. Seemed easier that way, and you can make a blooper reel for the cast.
• Make sure you can see your actors. They need to record in a quiet place with good lighting. Avoid backlighting or any source lights on screen since they can be distracting. We got lucky that most of our actors found a similar neutral background to work with which helped tie things together. The main thing is lighting though, and people on their computers often seem strangely unaware of how they look to others or how they're lit. They're often in a room with the computer against a wall, and the lighting is so they can see their computer, not so the computer can see them. Also, natural lighting seems like a great idea - actors look great sitting next to a sunlit window - but consider that you may not be recording at the same time every day, or light changes from day to day, or you may need to record at night. You don't want to be rushing things because the sun is setting.
  
• I saw another reading where they used Zoom's green screen option and had still photos for sets and it worked pretty good, although Zoom's green screen is sketchy and can be distracting. I also saw one that was in black and white, and the black and white really evened things out and helped make everyone look like they were part of the same show - so that's something worth considering.
• You can do blocking! You aren't stuck with having people sit staring a computer screen. They can enter and exit, walk around, move back and forth, use props, etc. You have to think about sound of course, but think about space as well and use what the actors have available. Of course, we did entrances and exits just by fading in the video, which worked fine, but you can get creative.
• It took us six days to record and edit our video, and I was pretty much spending all my free time on it. It was far more work than I expected, for me as editor and for the actors who had to manage their own tech, with lots of files flying back and forth that needed to be sorted out. We had an online reading beforehand, and a couple of test sessions before we really plunged into it. There are parts of the video I would have liked to redo once we figured out what we were doing, but there was no time, although we did manage to redo a couple of scenes and songs.