Felipe Barral elevates the art of opera on film for the streaming age

The switcher operator, Barral’s 25-year-old son Felipe Barral-Secchi, sat next to his father, fingers hovering over glowing, color-coded keys.

“Cue camera two. And go,” Barral said. “Cue camera five. And go.”

Credit: Danielle Charbonneau

Credit: Danielle Charbonneau

Barral looked like a conductor, cuing each camera feed as if it were a section of a cinematic orchestra. With each command, Barral-Secchi triggered the button to change the feed.

Barral scribbled on a notepad to help himself remember which shots were working, and which shots needed to change. On this night, there was still margin for error.

But soon Barral’s camera orchestrations would need to be perfectly coordinated with the score. The production would be livestreamed days later to roughly 35,000 people on Georgia Public Broadcasting and to more than 8,300 online subscribers in 48 states and 94 countries across six continents.

What sets the Atlanta Opera Film Studio apart

Filming opera is not new. PBS has broadcast opera productions going back to the ’70s, and the Metropolitan Opera launched “The Met: Live in HD” series in 2006, initially screening live recordings of its productions in movie theaters worldwide, then later expanding to television broadcasts and streaming on digital platforms.

The Atlanta Opera Film Studio is different, though, said Tomer Zvulun, the opera’s general and artistic director, who has firsthand knowledge. He previously worked at the Met for seven seasons as part of its directing staff.

“The Metropolitan Opera has a really large portfolio of excellent productions that they do. Some of them I worked on,” he said, “But what we’re doing is very different … Felipe’s style is very cinematic.”

Credit: Olivia Bowdoin

Credit: Olivia Bowdoin

For the opera livestreams, Barral does not merely record a wide-shot perspective of the stage to mimic the live viewing experience. Instead, he uses up to a dozen cameras at once to change perspectives throughout.

“The films we are doing are very immersive,” Barral said. “They are not traditional opera at all … We want (our films) to be their own cinematic art form that‘s completely independent of the show itself.”

Having a film studio embedded in an opera company is rare. Most opera companies outsource their film content. The only other operas The Atlanta Journal-Constitution could find with a similar setup was the Met and Opera San José, which runs Heiman Digital Media Studio.

What also sets the Atlanta Opera Film Studio apart is that, after the livestream airs, Barral takes that content and edits it into a highly stylized film using additional footage he shot both on- and offstage that the live audience might never see.

Credit: Olivia Bowdoin

Credit: Olivia Bowdoin

For Macbeth, Barral shot footage on a green screen to intercut the film with a close-up of a knife slashing a poster. He also filmed from onstage, circling the actors with his camera, panning and zooming, sometimes stopping to give the actors direction and a visual peek at themselves on camera.

Being on stage allows Barral to capture the details — the anguish in Macduff’s eyes as he learns Macbeth has murdered his wife and children, or the shapes of the shadows cast by the sinister witches.

“I always say to anybody that is working with me … this is not about you performing for the camera, and this is not about me capturing your performances. It is about what we can do when we blend them together,” Barral said.

Credit: Olivia Bowdoin

Credit: Olivia Bowdoin

The birth of a creative twin

The idea for the Atlanta Opera Film Studio was seeded when Barral and Zvulun first met in 2018, but it blossomed during the pandemic and kept growing.

They met when Zvulun was interviewed by Barral for Arts ATL. At that time, Barral was a contractor and freelancer producing film content under his own production company, IGNI Productions.

“It was an instant connection. Instant friendship and creative partnership,” Barral said.

“It was just like a twin: a cinema twin to my opera self,” Zvulun said. “We completely understood each other in our love for music and cinema and storytelling.”

Credit: Olivia Bowdoin

Credit: Olivia Bowdoin

The creative duo started out with some small, contracted projects like opera trailers and marketing videos. But when the pandemic hit in 2020, they catapulted to new heights.

At that time opera companies around the world were forced to cancel in-person performances. Rather than go dark, Zvulun saw an opportunity to think outside the traditional opera house. He proposed a bold plan: erect a circus tent in a parking lot at Oglethorpe University and stage fully produced operas outdoors, where audiences could safely gather under pandemic restrictions.

Dubbed the “Big Tent Series,” the performances included “Pagliacci” by Leoncavallo and “The Kaiser of Atlantis” by Viktor Ullmann.

Credit: KenHoward

Credit: KenHoward

Even with the tent, Zvulun knew many audience members would not come in person to the performances. And he wanted to expand the opera’s global reach, so he hired Barral to film everything.

What started as simple documentation quickly evolved when Barral and Zvulun realized they could use cinematic tools — camera movement, editing, lighting, sound design — to tell opera stories in new ways. They weren’t just filming performances, they were making films out of opera.

“There’s a difference,” Barral said.

The success of this endeavor led to the official founding of the Atlanta Opera Film Studio in 2021. The studio produces full-length filmed operas, behind-the-scenes documentaries, artist interviews and educational content.

By the end of this opera season, the studio will have a library of 30 filmed operas, a short feature film and 10 documentaries.

The studio has its own digital streaming platform. It offers both a free membership and a paid subscription. With a free account, members can see recorded livestreams of select productions, mini documentaries, previews and some behind-the-scenes content. With a paid subscription, members can see Barral’s full-length, high-definition film adaptations, access exclusive digital premieres, enjoy unlimited streaming of past and current livestreams and watch bonus commentaries.

Credit: Danielle Charbonneau

Credit: Danielle Charbonneau

“Right now we are doing it really to increase our brand and to connect with audiences everywhere,” Zvulun said. “ … But I think that in the future, as we create that critical mass, there will be a world where it could be monetized in a more aggressive way.”

Barral and Zvulun also have plans to enter some of the studio’s films into independent festivals.

“If you’re not willing to understand that you need to adopt a more audiovisual centric culture like we live in … maybe you’re not going to be successful,” Barral said.

The man behind the studio

For Barral, launching the Atlanta Opera Film Studio has felt “like a step in the long road of all my life,” he said.

Since he was a child, growing up on the southern tip of Chile, he demonstrated a savant-like talent for fusing multiple art forms, with an eye for the cinematic.

“My first memories are very cinematic,” he said. “(Chile) was a magical place to grow up … Nature understands how to put you in your place … Look at this gorgeous Milky Way on top of you. Look at the wind, how it blows these trees and makes them grow like that. Look at the Pacific Ocean.”

Attempting to digest the intangible sense of awe and wonder he felt growing up fueled his creativity.

“I discovered that I could express myself through different disciplines of art,” he said.

He started painting, then writing poetry, short stories and musical compositions on the guitar. He even created his own language, which snowballed into a series of related projects that included photography, film, a book and an orchestrated song.

“That is when I understood: I can be a painter, I can be a photographer, I can be a musician, I can be a filmmaker, but if I combine them all in audiovisual language, that’s what I can do,” he said. “I am an audiovisual poet.”

Credit: Olivia Bowdoin

Credit: Olivia Bowdoin

Barral’s parents didn’t want him to become an artist.

“You’re going to starve,” he remembers them saying. “Be a doctor. Be a lawyer.”

He studied medicine for two years. Still his mind zeroed in on the philosophical and artistic.

“It was really amazing to look at the human body and understand the beauty of the bones and what it means to be alive or dead,” he said.

He eventually switched his focus of study to journalism. He saw it as a way to create audiovisual poetry with real-world impact.

He landed a job with CNN, first as a freelance field producer in Chile in 1997, then progressed through several roles, including supervising features producer, and eventually moved to Atlanta in 2001. After almost two decades with CNN, Barral left in 2017 to focus on IGNI Productions.

At CNN, Barral learned how to capture humanity in an authentic way. Now he applies those lessons to all his films, including opera.

“I try to go for that sort of immediacy … I always talk about how the camera needs to feel human. The motion of the camera needs to feel human,” he said. “It’s all about the story. It’s all about the emotion. And really, it is about making people feel the story.”

Credit: Olivia Bowdoin

Credit: Olivia Bowdoin

Barral’s talent and philosophy is harmonious with the Atlanta Opera’s new mission, Zvulun said.

“Our previous mission was about bringing Atlanta the opera company that it deserves. It’s a major international city and it deserves a major international opera company,” he said

In 2022, the opera changed its mission statement. The new mission was inspired by the company’s innovation during the pandemic, and by one of Zvulun‘s heroes, composer Kurt Weill.

“Weill said, ‘If the boundaries of opera cannot accommodate the theater of our times, then these boundaries must be broken.’”

The Atlanta Opera’s new mission statement reads: “To break the boundaries of opera to create exceptional experiences for audiences everywhere.”

Barral fits the bill.

EVENT PREVIEW

Atlanta Opera Film Studio. Upcoming livestreams include “Semele” on June 13, “Steele Roots” on June 20 and the 96-Hour Opera Project Showcase on June 21. Free, $25 a year, all-access pass. atlantaopera.org/filmstudio