The idea for Wordplay was hatched by the husband and wife team of Director Patrick Creadon and Producer Christine O'Malley at the beginning of 2005. The pair had worked on many documentary films for others-Creadon as cameraman and O'Malley as producer-and decided the time had come to make their own film. As the project would be self-financed (with loans and credit cards), they gave themselves a hard and fast time frame of one year to produce and sell a documentary about the world of crossword puzzling, a pastime they both enjoyed.

Production began in January 2005, and by the end of July, the team was prepared to start cutting the 90 hours of footage they had amassed. Creadon, O'Malley, Graphic Designer Brian Oakes and Editor Doug Blush finished their cut in time for the Sundance 2006 submission deadline of Sept. 30, 2005. They managed to accomplish their goals by keeping the production pared down, working with trusted friends and familiar technology and innovating when necessary.

Creadon and O'Malley cold-called the man who they knew would be central to their film: Will Shortz, National Public Radio's "Puzzle Master" and editor of The New York Times crossword puzzle. He agreed, just as long as they did not take too long, which worked nicely with their schedule.

"From the beginning, the film was going to be about one man and his puzzle," Creadon notes. The original concept was to focus on Shortz and explore the world of crossword puzzling through the puzzles themselves and the people who construct them. Upon further reflection, Creadon and O'Malley suspected that ordinary filmgoers might find this approach overly cerebral and, in short, boring.

"What we ultimately decided to do was explore Will's work and the puzzles by looking at the puzzle through the eyes of many of its fans," says Creadon. "This was the best decision we made, as it introduced us to the amazing characters that make up the heart of the film." Because of his position, Shortz had knowledge of and some access to New York Times crossword puzzle fans, including The Daily Show's Jon Stewart, New York Yankees pitcher Mike Mussina, filmmaker Ken Burns and President Bill Clinton.

Though Shortz was not involved in the creation of the film, he had a valuable suggestion for Creadon, who was still unsure of how to structure his documentary. In addition to his work for the Times and NPR, Shortz is the founder and host of the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament, held annually at the Marriott Hotel in Stamford, Conn. Shortz suggested Creadon include footage of the competition in the film.

Creadon was initially hesitant to go the route of the relatively newly minted genre of the "competition doc," but he would find that the tournament would work out to be the framing element for the film and the source of its greatest drama.

About the production, Creadon notes, "As a documentary cameraman with 15 years of experience, I've assembled a small mountain of equipment. For Wordplay, however, we left almost everything at home. I shot most of the film myself [with a Panasonic AG-DVX100 camera at 24p], and more often than not I was alone with my subjects during the interviews. This is definitely my favorite way to shoot."

Devising a Narrative Structure
Once they got approval from Shortz, Creadon and O'Malley began building their team. Knowing that scenes of people writing letters in small boxes might not be the most scintillating filmmaking, Creadon's first call after Shortz was to the man who would give these puzzles a life on the screen: motion graphics artist Brian Oakes.

Creadon and Oakes had worked together several times in the past, but neither had tackled a feature before. Oakes' experience in print and motion graphics seemed well suited to the task, and experience showed that they would work well together. "It was Patrick's first attempt at a full feature film. It was my first attempt at doing graphics for a full feature film. We were both rookies," says Oakes.

Though an experienced editor in his own right, Creadon turned over the editorial duties to Doug Blush at the insistence of his producer. "He and I were talking for hours about the ideas of run-and-gun shooting and how to get more vérité with the new forms of video and smaller cameras that were coming out," Blush recalls. "Everything was changing then, which set the stage for what Wordplay would become."

Blush joined the team in July. They had just over two months to finish a cut to submit to Sundance. "It was edited on the Media 100," reveals the editor. "Pat had long ago adopted the Media 100 as the center of his production shop, and so had I. I started when Media 100 was the card you used with Premiere. My first professional digital work was with Premiere. Then I switched to over to Media 100 software, and it was great. It built the entire shop. It built everything we have here now. [By the time Creadon approached Blush about Wordplay,] I had already switched to Final Cut pretty much, but he said, 'Would you mind dusting off the Media 100 and bringing it out for one more battle?'"

Though newer technology was available to them, Creadon opted for the system he knew best. Hiring the man who taught him Media 100 at Moviola Digital was an easy choice and made for a comfortable, collaborative workflow. By combining the "older" technology in Media 100 with newer innovations including low-cost external hard drive storage and Apple's iChat software, the team was able to post the film in a thoroughly modern way.

Blush and Creadon put identical copies of all of the digitized media onto two FireWire drives: one for the director and one for the editor. They began to edit in parallel, Blush cutting bigger pieces of the movie and Creadon working on specific sequences for which he knew exactly what he wanted.

Describing both the dangers and advantages of their system, the editor says, "We didn't have any drive failures or media disappearing. We weren't using some kind of fancy, backed up, RAIDed system or Unity or anything like that. These were just off-the-shelf FireWire drives. I had a few backups, but we were flying by the seat of our pants, one drive away from the system crashing-not a good idea. If it had gone down, we would have been in big trouble. The one safety we had was that we each had a total copy of the movie. If one of us tanked, we were half a day away from being back up and running."

iChat Networking
Oakes suggested using a low-cost networking tool to link the two editorial suites in Los Angeles and the motion graphics artist in Brooklyn. "I'd used iChat on a previous job, so I told Patrick, 'You've got to sign up for iChat. At 1 or 2 a.m., when I get all my files done, we'll just start a big transfer.' We'd transfer these huge files overnight, and by morning they'd be done. It's a great way to save money, and with iChat, there's no file size limit. I would create a graphic and render out a rough animatic, do a Sorensen compression on it. So the file might be 125MB to 200MB, but compressed it could get down to around 30MB or 40MB, and we would just transfer that file. It's a great little trick."

While iChat was used for more traditional file transfer between graphics artist and director, it was iChat's capacity to streamline the editorial process-specifically, submitting cuts for approval-that really impressed the editor.

"It's been done by other post houses and probably in more sophisticated ways, but we came up with the poor man's Unity," Blush explains. "We had two copies of the media, so we could just send the program files back and forth over iChat. A little comment from Pat would pop up, and I'd say, 'Oh, I have a scene I gotta show you.' I'd send not the entire QuickTime of the movie but just the digital cut. He'd be able to sync it up to the digital media on his end. It was miraculous because we could have cuts showing five seconds after I'd sent it.

"I credit that workflow with getting this movie done. Having that two-way communication that used to be, you know, James Cameron with his six T1 lines going back and forth. Now it's as easy as putting it on iChat."

Tying the Elements Together
In much the same way that a simple Internet chat program was able to draw people together over large distances and involve them in a process that is largely solitary, Oakes' creative motion graphics work was built to draw in audiences to participate in the largely solitary world of crossword puzzle solving. For the introductory scene of tournament contestant Al Sanders, who finishes a puzzle onscreen in two minutes and two seconds, Oakes worked in Adobe Photoshop, After Effects and Illustrator.

"The first thing we wanted to do was show how fast Al was solving this puzzle." Creadon positioned the camera to give a bird's-eye perspective of Sanders solving the puzzle in near-record time. "Most importantly, we wanted to give the audience a chance to solve along with Al. To accomplish all these things, I came up with the idea of doing a split-screen composition.

"In the top left, you see the video of Al solving the puzzle with a timer. In the lower left, you see a bird's-eye view of the puzzle with the letters filling in as Al fills them in. Then, on the right side of the screen, you get this puzzle in Z space, which is turning and you're zooming around the puzzle as he solves it. Then there's an area where you can read the clue. As the clue pops up, you see the puzzle highlight. It gives the audience a chance to play along with Al."

Wordplay Heads to Theaters
Against the odds, the team was able to finish a cut in time for the September Sundance deadline. Around Thanksgiving, they learned that Wordplay been accepted into the competition. That announcement would raise a new set of hurdles. The film wasn't on DigiBeta and wasn't set up for theatrical projection.

They exported their elements to DigiBeta and took the tapes to MAX Post in Burbank, where they were able to perform color correction on an Avid with capabilities beyond that of the Media 100. The film was up-resed and output to HD. The HD version then traveled to Sundance, where it sold out every screening and was acquired by IFC Films and The Weinstein Company.

Good news is not all good news, though. "We hadn't planned for film resolution," says Oakes. "We did the entire movie and all the graphics at 720x486 interlaced. When the movie was bought and we realized that it was going to have to be transferred for the theaters, we encountered a huge technical problem. I had to take all my graphics, which I'd already built at 720x486, and upconvert them to film resolution. Luckily, I create all my artwork very, very large. It wasn't a matter of rescanning and re-creating all the artwork at all. It was a matter of fitting the artwork into film resolution. The other issue we ran into was the aspect ratio. Not only did I have to up-res a lot of the graphics, I had to rearrange the composition as well."

"We had to take this whole thing and create a film-out with it," Blush elaborates. "We took the original DigiBeta to EFILM. We remastered it to DigiBeta with no graphics in it. They up-resed that to film resolution and put it onto D5-HD. They had it to the point where they were ready for the graphics."

After Sundance, co-distributor Harvey Weinstein gave his notes and added more hurdles for the coming months. Weinstein wanted more graphics during the tournament segments. Between February and April of 2006, Oakes doubled the number of graphics in the film. The results turn scenes of a hotel banquet room full of average folks solving crossword puzzles into the film's crescendo, with Olympian-style drama.

Blush credits much of the film's pre-release success to Oakes, whom he describes as a genius. The editor is also keen to recognize the contributions of his crack assistant editor, Jeff Garcia. Without Garcia's organizational work, the task of parallel editing between editor and director at remote locations could have been a nightmare.

The team also knows for the future that it is not crazy to aim high. Oakes admits, "Biggest lesson learned: Ask yourself, 'Maybe we ought to design for film. We could always make stuff smaller.'"

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