Video & Projection Design

Gotterdammerung - Rehearsals 8

Sun, 1 Jun 2008 18:16:29 +0200

The past few days of pre-dress rehearsals with the orchestra have been both inspiring and nerve-racking. There is still a lot to finish before the final dress rehearsal. I am spending today work through a long list of changes. Mostly they are small but important edits to make the videos better synch up with the actions on stage. There are of course a few corrections where there have been screw ups like a video appearing on the wrong screen. And then of course there is editing the last 4 minutes of video as the ending to the opera only received it’s final staging on Saturday. Tomorrow is a purely technical day. The first of what were suppose to be three. The condensed rehearsal schedule meant that previous tech days got taken up with rehearsal. So I will finally be able to go through cue by cue and make sure that all of the correct clips are playing in the correct screens. Better late than never.

Addicted to Bad ideas

Sun, 1 Jun 2008 16:48:49 +0200

I’m going to be designing video for Addicted to Bad Ideas, Peter Lorre’s 20th Century which is being directed by Jay Scheib and features World Inferno/Friendship Society. The project is being produced by Thomas Kriegsmann for Arktype. We begin rehearsals in mid June and then the show goes on tour in Europe this summer. It’s schedule for the nest Under-the Radar festival in NYC.

Gotterdammerung - Rehearsals 7

Fri, 30 May 2008 18:27:59 +0200

The screens have finally been color corrected which makes a huge difference. It was particularly noticeable during live camera sections. One of the big issues with using such a variety of screens is that they all have different frame rates, pixel reaction times and lag depending on where they are in the control chain. Normally it is not terribly noticeable but when there is content with a lot of movement I have had to restrict the video to the large central seamless screen.

The production chain for the full screen videos is quite laborious as well. After editing the video, it needs to be framed and rendered in the Motion template project. After that Fisheye’s cropping software cuts up the master into 64 separate videos (this takes quite awhile - about a frame a second). Then the individual videos are glued back together into the correct configuration for each Mac mini.

Gotterdammerung - Rehearsals 6

Wed, 28 May 2008 17:46:11 +0200

Second Life is featured a lot in the first act. Gunther and Gutrune are presented as bored, wealthy dilettantes who experience the world through Second Life. They go shopping, meet friends, etc and when Hagen suggests that they need to ensnare Siegfried with a magic potion, Second Life is that elixer by which they trick him in to falling in love with Gutrune and capturing Brunhilde as a bride for Gunther. Together with Keith Skretch, I created and captured a lot of Second Life video using our avatars for which we created outfits that match what they were on stage to some extent. I capture video from my laptop to the Mac Pro with a Black Magic Intensity HDMI capture card.

Gotterdammerung - Rehearsals 5

Sun, 25 May 2008 17:36:10 +0200

One of the most visually complicated scenes in the opera is when the big chorus gathers at the hall of the Gibichungen before Siegfried returns with Brunhilde who is destined to marry Gunther. Hagen who has hatched the plot to regain the ring (yes, the same ring that is in the Lord of the Ring) is joined on stage be 50 or so gamers who have gathered for competition. In addition to the video wall there are 30 screens on stage that need to work. Most of them are connected to DVD players, with a few controlled from the master control system.