What box does this go in? (Part One)

One of the most significant and complicated hurdles we had to jump to make our video for Airport Security is related to the unions and associations that govern actor participation in theatre and film/TV work.

As I have said before, we are living in a world where the realms of film, media, and live performance are rapidly converging.  Theatre companies want to incorporate footage into their work; multimedia companies want to incorporate live performance elements into their work; everyone wants to do neat things in the lead-up to projects that span the gaps between all forms of media.

Looking at Airport Security from the theatrical perspective — which is governed by Canadian Actor’s Equity — we have an agreement in place that lets us use a certain number of non-union actors in our production.  As part of the whole package deal, Equity has worked out clauses in agreements that permit us, as producers, to use our actors in filmed material as long as that material is only used for promotional purposes.  Basically speaking, we have a great deal of latitude as long as we don’t create anything that is more than two minutes long.  In 95% of cases, this covers everything a theatre company needs: footage of a play that is filmed at a media call, fun promo videos or teasers, and anything else the marketing and publicity people can cook up.

The “problem” with our scenario is that we wanted to film three scenes that aren’t even in the play anymore, three months before that start of the Equity contract; and the scenes added up to fifteen minutes of screen time.  Equity’s clauses don’t cover it.

The simple solution, then, was to treat the fifteen minutes of video as a totally separate project, and work with ACTRA — the Alliance of Cinema, Television, and Radio Artists — to find out what we can do to be able to use our theatre cast in front of the camera… but the problem is not that simple.  ACTRA’s agreements are not the same as Equity’s; the quotas and methods for non-union participation are different.  So even though we have an Equity-approved cast for the play, and we wanted to use all of the same actors in the video, there is no guarantee that this is actually possible under ACTRA’s jurisdiction.  We could produce a video called Airport Security and a play called Airport Security, and work with both unions independently to make it all happen — but when we want to use the same people in both projects, we can’t just do whatever we want.

It gets even more complicated in our case, because the whole point of filming these three scenes was to create video that could be posted online.  That’s an area that ACTRA is still wrestling with a bit.  Technically speaking, ACTRA’s jurisdiction covers the Internet, perhaps because putting live performance on the web involves the use of a camera, and because film and TV producers salivate at the prospects and profitability of Internet distribution.  The issues around Internet exhibition and distribution are still being worked on because they is complex (involving everything from copyright issues to compensation for performers and many things in between), and as of now there is no “Internet Production Agreement” that handily covers our project idea.  The only real digital media provisions that exist now, as far as I know, are in the Independent Production Agreement, which applies to big boys like feature film producers and television networks.  The rates for “Internet use”, then, are commensurate with that level of budget.  There is a terrific low-budget production agreement that is used by ACTRA members to produce their own work: the rates are very affordable, but the stipulation is that everyone who appears on camera has to be an ACTRA member or apprentice… and there is no explicit coverage of Internet use as part of the agreement.

You may be beginning to see the quagmire we were in: we had non-union members in our theatre cast, and wanted to use them in our video; but no low-budget agreement exists that allowed us to use non-union members, and in any case we didn’t even know if what we shot could be put on the web.

We wanted very much to be able to set up this project as officially and properly as possible.  The quagmire I just described is one that will arise more and more in the coming years, and it’s only by going through the proper channels that we can let both ACTRA and Equity know that their members are interested in and are doing this kind of work.

Of course, we’re also on a timeline. Airport Security (the live theatre version) opens in June. I’m in Winnipeg for the month of February.  And we want to post one scene per month on our web site in the lead-up to the theatre opening.  So we had to get all the prinicipal photography done early.

We contacted the local ACTRA office and posed the question.  Options were explored, but there was nothing on the table that immediately satisfied our desired outcome AND our budget constraints.  The question was bounced up the chain, but we didn’t know how long it would take to get an answer, OR if the answer we’d get would be one we could work with.  So we were faced with two options:

1. Pray for a deal of some kind, and make it work with our existing people
2. Recast the whole video with entirely non-union talent and bypass ACTRA altogether

As union members ourselves, we weren’t big fans of option two.  But with four days to our first day of shooting, we were running out of time to make a choice.