WYPR's Maryland Morning Screen Test

Aaron Henkin, co-producer of WYPR's The Signal, prerecorded an interview Tuesday with filmmaker Josh Slates in front of a live audience at The Wind Up Space. The interview is part of an ongoing monthly series called Maryland Morning Screen Test in which various filmmakers are interviewed and their works screened. The interviews are prerecorded and aired at later date on WYPR.

Seeing radio recorded live is an odd experience. You're basically looking in on something that was never meant to be seen. It generates an eerie effect.

For instance, everyone is aware that editing and retakes happen. It's an essential part of a quality production. Without editing, radio would be messy and awkward. By the time it gets to us, though, all the editing has been taken care of and we're not confronted with the fact that it's happened. So to sit in as a member of a live audience and actually see the retakes being done is a little strange. A few such live edits were made during the interview. Henkin mispronounced a word (“Otakan”) and was corrected by Slates. In the retake they carried out the same conversation again as if the first never even occurred. It seemed unnatural, weird.

The audience, too, underwent a kind of deviation from the norm. Being an audience member usually means the comfort of having nothing expected of you. More or less passively, you just sit there, watching whatever happens to be on stage. But at a recording such as this various things are asked and expected of an audience. We were directed, for instance, to provide 30 seconds of recorded “room-feel,”which was really just the sound of the room without our talking, moving or making noise to be edited into the show later.

“Find your comfort space and hold it for 30 seconds,” we were told.

Aside from such curiosities, the initial interview lasted for 15 minutes and focused on Slates' experiences in the film industry and his own independent projects.

Slates has worked both on large Hollywood productions and on low-budget films here in Baltimore and elsewhere. The films shown Tuesday night featured actors who were Slates' friends, random acquaintances and total strangers.

Three short films were shown. They were heavy on irony and slim on plot. Like most low-budget films, they appeared to be more experimental than traditional narratives.

Between the films, shorter interviews were staged. A few actors appearing in the films joined Slates on stage to be interviewed. Slates drank Schlitz from a can and made broad connections to the themes of his films to large political movements, mused on lessons learned from Hollywood and applied to his smaller productions.

You can hear the interview with Slates this Friday morning on WYPR 881.FM at 9:30. Future Maryland Morning Screen Test recordings can be seen at the Wind Up Space on a monthly basis. Specific times and dates will appear on their blog.