If COVID-19 hadn’t shuttered all the theaters in town about a month ago, Scott Silberstein estimates that his company, HMS Media, “would have been in ten different theaters over five or six days, capturing everything possible.” Par for the course for HMS, which has recorded live performances of everything from small dance companies to touring Broadway productions over the years, as well as creating original documentaries about Second City and John Kander and Fred Ebb, the legendary songwriting team behind Cabaret and Chicago, for WTTW.
“You just can’t get a better mentor,” says Silberstein. “John was all about collaboration and all about not knowing, but going for discovery and humility and ensemble. Which is remarkable for a man in the Broadway world, because that’s not necessarily an environment that Broadway fosters.”
“Think about this big musical I just shot for you. There’s stuff happening around the stage all the time. If I cut wide, that shot is meaningful. You can actually make that look really good with two cameras. Now the play that we’re about to shoot, there’s a scene where someone is all the way stage left, someone’s center, and someone’s all the way stage right. You want close-ups of everybody at any given time. Our editors know that sometimes you don’t want to edit that shot too soon, because part of the joy of the moment is popping your head over to catch them a half second after they started speaking, as opposed to half a second before. In that split-second difference, all your energy is gone, because your element of surprise is gone.”
