Surprise! It's holiday time!

As posted last time, Fall has been a constant flow and no days off. I figured I would finally get to have a break just after Thanksgiving - finish my corporate gig, come back to Fairfield U for the second show of the season for a week and a half, and then rest. 

70 days straight with no days off...that's rough no matter how you slice it. 

(That second show at FU was a success, and was the first show the program ever took out to another theatre for a bit of a road show! Not a real tour, but I love touring so I was happy to guide them through the process.)

But then Fairfield Ludlow high school called me, needing a lighting designer for their holiday concert!  So I have been trucking along, still without a break, doing lighting for this show as well as some light video projection. I figured my January 3rd date with Power of Love is coming up fast, so why not use this as a chance to test out some new technology. OSC control over VDMX is what I'm currently playing with.

I've been bouncing back and forth between here and FU, which are mercifully only a half mile away from each other, and 15 minutes from my home. Just gotta hold on until Christmas. THEN I can sleep! 

-brian

Putting on our dancing shoes

This fall is...insane is the only word to sum it up. Mary and I have never been booked so solidly.

Fairfield University called when their Technical Director, my longtime friend Kevin, had to leave for a wonderful opportunity out of state. I had some pending contracts coming up, and wasn't going to be able to fulfill the whole role, so I have been tag-teaming it with Mary this semester.

September was filled with a video shoot, a rotation of shows my friend Alex was designing, corporate AV gigs in NYC, and a last minute sound/light design job for me with Rocky Hill Community Theatre's "Blythe Spirit." The latter show was so last minute, I wasn't going to be available for one of the performances, so I had to make sure my notes and cues were extremely tight so that I could hand them off to my replacement board op. I also finished tracking and mixing Evan Wahlquist's album, "Seven Years in Constructive Oblivion."

Listen to it here on Bandcamp.

In October, I leapt into the world of "Dancing at Lughnasa" as co-technical director with Mary for Theatre Fairfield. The set and effects have come along beautifully.  It has been a great honor to step into the shoes of one of my mentors. I'm working with the student sound designer, and will be teaching her Qlab, so that we can create a more immersive world to compliment the beautiful scenic design - stereo output just isn't enough and chasing aux faders is more work than it has to be. We'll already be chasing faders with the mic I've hidden on the narrator, so that we can push just the reverb return out the PA, giving his monologues a dream-like quality rather than traditional reinforcement.

The next month will see me switching gears back to NYC for a corporate AV gig for the entire month, while I use the commute to edit a wedding video with Chris Scalzi of Distilled Minds Studios. I'll also be compiling footage for a video wall project - next year, Boston's The Power of Love (a Huey Lewis tribute act) will be playing a string of shows around the Northeast.  My job will be to do lighting and video for the run.  This means I need to gather a few hours of clips of '80s movies to mashup and project behind the band. This is the next step from the live video feeds I designed for Talking to Walls.

Somewhere in all of this, I also start a contract with Naugatuck Valley Community College for the rest of the semester.

I should be getting a break around Thanksgiving....

-brian

First print design in a couple of years

I spent a lot of time doing print design in my career. Even when I wasn't working in show production full time, I was generating all kinds of content for marketing and advertising. Haven't had to do print in some time; an old friend of mine called me up asking if I'd be up for working on a project with him. It would be quick, and a chance to work with a friend, so I said why not.

Came together fast, and this was the result.

DePaul University Study

-brian

There and back again

Not much rest here...  After the super intense spring season, I had 3-4 days off, and then Mary and I jumped in the car and drove across the country with our friend Steph and her 2 year old.  Did a little bit of work from the car, designing some digital scenery for Rocky Hill Community Theatre's "Whistle Down The Wind."

Being stuck in Seattle for almost a week with car problems meant that Mary and I had to drive back ASAP for gigs back on the east coast.  San Jose, CA to Bridgeport, CT in 70 hours - sleep/drive/switch.  Truly a Cannonball Run.  I was home for about four hours, and then dashed off to NYC for a video shoot that I was Technical Director for.  (Mary was home for a few more hours, and then headed to New London for a couple of weeks of shooting a Lifetime movie.) Special thanks to my buddy RJ Van Deusen of Rodney Productions for covering my absence the first day, as we were still racing through Oklahoma. My good friend Chris Scalzi from Distilled Minds (who has shot Talking to Walls countless times) came in to help us with the videography...and gave me a spot to crash that didn't involve a 2-hour commute for the rest of the shoot!

Mary and I started buying Christmas lights when they were on sale, in prep for our future wedding. Which means I have a pallet of them! This video shoot was really working off the cuff, so between using dozens of string lights for a diffused lighting effect, we also used my short throw projector to throw up some video and text effects.

Got home from that shoot in time to start Fairfield Teen Theatre's production of "Shrek, the Musical." Being stuck in Seattle meant that the week I was to spend designing the lighting in the show and figuring out the rigging of flats was lost, so it felt like the whole production was in catch-up mode. Taught myself Qlab's custom geometry features for projection hurdles, besides for the preshow look. We had an amazing Darla puppet, and for the final scene where she busts through the window, we went with a video projection instead of her coming back on stage with the puppeteers, due to blocking and cast issues.  So I took the video that had been used for the director's prior run of the show, and re-cut the audio (I'm a sound guy who just can't leave well enough alone!) To make up for the loss of the puppet, I really wanted to rumble the subwoofers. My friend Joe was the sound engineer, so he happily gave me a feed, and we were off!

-brian

Video editing highlight reel

Driving across the country!  Yeah!  That's my summer.  Mary and I are trying to hit all 50 states (or finish hitting them) in the next couple of years.  Which means I have 9 left after this trip, and she will have 11.  (Helps that we are hitting 26 or so on this trip alone.)

While riding in the back seat, I finally built an editing reel of some of the projects I have worked on over the years.  Bit long, still sorting through and cutting down. I'd rather spend time editing YOUR video. :)

Watch my video reel here. (YouTube hasn't propagated yet, so only a link is available.)

-brian

Wizard of Oz Highlight reel

Here it is!  The project I worked so hard on earlier this summer, straining to teach myself more about Qlab and MIDI.  Made the best of a situation with very little gear, and I think we did some fine work as a result.  Special thanks to director John Regis for bringing me in and letting me loose, and to my student crew who did a fantastic job.

When I was first approached about doing this show, it was very vague and I was asked (by a third party) to come in and meet with the Lighting Designer. Before I got there, they then followed up with "you said you do sound...they need that, too." At my first meeting with John, I learned I WAS the Lighting Designer! But we hit it off so well, I was fine with overcommitting my talents to this show (Oz is a favorite).

So I needed to figure out how to run my lighting cues as well as my sound cues, without making myself crazy. Because John and I got on so well and riffed off each other, I ended up doing projection design as well. The only way I could do two of these things, never mind three, was to learn an integrated automation system like Qlab.

-brian

Teaching Special Effects Class

I was right.  What was supposed to be a short show run at Bankstreet School for Children has turned into a long show run, and then getting into all of the other shows that were happening at the end of the school year. After the Wizard of Oz, there was A Midsummer Night's Dream (with 5th graders!) and a series of student-written history plays, and a slew of concerts.  Lots of design time spent on the train, delivering them much more intricate work than they would normally have received.

On one of the last days of the semester, someone came up to me an said "You have worked in film, right?  You did really well with the kids here...want to teach a class in film special effects to our summer camp?  It starts next week."

This has been an exhausting but rewarding school semester, and looks like it will continue on just a little longer. Two hour commute into NYC is getting to me and I need a break, but we're leaving for vacation soon, so here we go! Speaking of breaks, this is how I spend my lunch - doing demos for class...

-brian

New theatre (for me) in NYC

Got a call to do a run of Wizard of Oz in NYC.  It sounded like a crummy warehouse show, but when I got there it turned out to be a nice little theatre at a prestigious school on the Upper West Side. Everyone is super nice, and I'm being given carte blanche to do whatever I want on the show.  I have a feeling I'm going to be here a lot.

Doing a lot of digital scenery in this show.  We don't have enough instruments to do a gobo wash, so here is one of my three projectors creating a "Summer Leaves" breakup using the actual Rosco pattern.  I'm also firing midi commands to the lightboard. Pretty fun learning!

I've also been bouncing up to New Haven to work at University Theatre space with my friend Alex Zinovenko for the opera that is there this spring. No pictures of that.  But it was neat breaking my fear of extreme heights, so that I was able to opt to work 87 feet off the ground in the grid. Yeah, that was a time...

-brian

Pat Metheny's sick MIDI rig

Got to work for Pat Metheny this weekend.  His stage setup is pretty complex.  He has all of these percussion instruments set up, with sticks being held by motors which are triggered via MIDI.

On top of that, we loaded in these massive cabinets, that had jugs filled with water and laundry detergent. Why would someone do this?

Turns out this was another MIDI instrument, an air organ that blew air across the bottles, creating the required pitches.  Here it is in action:

-brian

Pushing the envelope with video and backing tracks

As usual, Talking to Walls did our annual Black Hearts Parade tour for the month of March to celebrate St. Patrick's Day.  Was another success.  This year, instead of playing a set with bagpipers and dancers, we just played as the three of us, with a regular show that also happened to have a video wall.

For the past year or so, we have been playing with backing tracks as a way to fly in samples, keyboards, and percussion that we a) don't use enough of to add another person to our payroll, and b) are boring parts that we don't want to ask someone to play! We use an iOS app designed for the purpose of playing backing tracks.

So we stepped it up a notch, and went from having backing tracks to synced video playing behind us. No video engineer - just running off of our stage laptop via Qlab.  It was a LOT of work, and left no room for error.  But luckily we are used to playing tight shows, so we just came roaring out the gate and barely stopped until the end!

The Irish portion was the second half of our set, played in the middle of the crowd, completely unplugged and singing at the top of our lungs surrounded by our fans.  Great memories.

-brian

Rosco video editing project

I've been working in theatre for 20 years, so I am very familiar with Rosco Labs' products.  This month I was privileged to work on a marketing video of theirs, which made its debut at a big trade show in Germany last week.  Here is the booth, with the video looping on a screen on the back wall:

And here is the video! I did all of the editing in Final Cut, while Mary did all of the motion graphics in After Effects. We just kept swapping video files back and forth, working on our own dedicated bits, until it was done.

Because of some delays and changes, we had to do one final overnight push to render all the parts and upload it. If you work in video, you know that rendering involves a lot of waiting. So I wrote some Applescripts that would trigger and send me a text message to my phone when the render was done, thereby letting us catch some sleep in that time.

-brian

New piano for the studio!

Happy New Year!

Echostation Recording now has a baby grand piano available for your recording needs!  Thanks to Steve Detroy and Marco Scott for introducing me to this beauty, and helping us bring her into playing shape.  If you're not recording on it, Mary's playing it.  So it will get plenty of love.

I also used this as an opportunity to put in a new floor in the control room, before the piano rolled in. Been meaning to do that. Sound has greatly improved!

-brian