Christmas Carol & Ming Cho Lee

I am master electrician for a production of Christmas Carol this season. It falls just between a few of my other shows, so I have had to take it on in an extremely organized manner - the days I have allotted to it are all I can give them, with very little room for extra time. Luckily the LD is also the Production Manager, so he's got a handle on what else is happening in the space and knows what he needs.  Spreadsheets and Vectorworks files are the order of the day, as is the coffee machine that sits outside the hall.

This show had it's original 12+ year run at the McCarter Theatre in Princeton, NJ, and the set was designed by Yale's legendary Ming Cho Lee - his last, as it turns out, before he retired. It is now being put on by New Arts, an organization that came about in the wake of the Sandy Hook tragedy, here in CT.

The bedroom wagon, in particular, is loaded with all kinds of practicals and clever bits to make the ghostly apparitions more believable. Lighting is a thing I do, but normally doesn't excite me as much as other departments. But I LOVE practicals and making all of the little bits work in this show! Lot of work to crawl around in small spaces with a headlamp and wire things together. The result is beautiful.

I work on a LOT of shows, and often don't get to see them. This is one show I am going to be sad about missing. At least Mary and a friend of ours can take my tickets, and tell me about it afterwards.

-brian

I learned more about what kinds of heights I don't mind and what kinds I hate.

Come to the Cabaret

After last Spring's insanity, we escaped to backpack in Europe for a bunch of the Summer. This Fall found me working on, among other things, NVCC's production of Cabaret. I won't get into how timely this show was with the political climate here in the US, but it was definitely the grounds for a lot of conversations.

In any event, I was the Sound Designer, and worked with our tech director on the video end of things. After "Godspell" in April, he designed the set to include projection, so I engineered the video production and designed the motion parts while he made up the stills. For the train scenes, I ended up using stock footage, but I really wanted to coordinate a video shoot with some friends we made over the summer while we were backpacking in Europe, who were from Czech Republic and could give us genuine Central/Eastern European footage. But, alas, the timing and the budget wouldn't allow for it.

I did manage to use a bunch of period musical recordings for house music, that I'd been saving for a while. Cylinders.library.ucsb.edu/ is an amazing project - the sounds might have been a bit older than the period, but they were from the geographical area and might have reasonably been listened to at this time - certainly the songs would have been, if not re-recorded. In any event, the noise and warping inherent in the digital transfers of these old Central European songs was a great mood-setter. Any extra, non-period noise in the recordings added to what the audience would expect from period music - much like how a gunshot on TV doesn't sound like real life but adds to the drama and expectations.

On the orchestra side, we finally figured out how to improve the sound in our space - the classic battle of the orchestra being too loud and installed systems with only left and right speaker matrixes being underpowered. By far the best sounding show we have done in the space. Very proud of my students and how they have become self-empowered to build the systems I've been specing out.

This week, I'm master electrician for a run of Christmas Carol, with the set designed by Ming Cho Lee. That's pretty exciting. Then I'm designing video and lighting for some Christmas performances because, you know, December....

Luckily I've been keeping copious notes on that latter show from previous years, with drafting and spreadsheets, so I can turn it around faster in the limited time I have. And, because of Qlab, I can sync lights and video with the same Go button, and use the lighting board for manual/dynamic flash and trash. They have an old ETC Express board there, which I don't mind at all - I can make it work with moving lights with some planning, and it is the perfect compliment to MIDI triggers. So the fact that they stopped updating it in, like, 1996, is not a hurdle at all! It is actually my favorite board to work on.

-brian

Yet another Wizard of Oz projection production

I love working on the play Wizard of Oz, which is great, because productions keep finding me!  This time, Mary and I were both asked to work on some footage that was already shot (some green screen some...not), but the director didn't have the time or know-how to make his vision work.  So we did it for him.

We ended up having three days before the show opened last week to work on it. No pressure! So we spent a lot of time in After Effects and taking nice long walks when rendering, since the weather had finally turned around and Spring actually felt like...Spring! Between one Mac and one PC both running After Effects and Dropbox, we've been able to meet any challenge and keep in sync.

Here is what we ended up with:

-brian

Dance Ensemble performance - #6 of 6

Just as we were nearing the end of our over-the-top busy season at NVCC, disaster struck. Our electrical system for the main stage went DOWN. The short version is that the transformer on the roof had some serious issues and we had no reliable power for stage lighting. House lights and standard electrical wall outlets were unaffected. My carefully-laid plans to do new and creative video projections were tossed aside to deal with the crisis.

We ran a ton of cable through the scene shop and down the hall to our other theatre, which had power. The lighting design had to become minimal, as we rushed to pull some LED fixtures out of one theatre to the next (while not as bright, they use standard wall power).

We also had two concerts in three days before tech for this show began... 

As time consuming as this was, I managed to get some live video capture effects up for the show. I used VDMX for the camera and effects, controlled and run through syphon and projection mapping laid out in QLab. Timecoded MIDI triggers meant my operator, who was new to this part of stagecraft, only had to work within one application and push "Go." The extra bit of flash helped us compensate for the lack of lighting.

We made it, despite the odds! Video is below, followed by some photos.

-brian

"Rumors" & "Into the Woods" - Shows #4 & #5 of 6!

Today we close on the 5th and final drama production of our academic year at NVCC - Neil Simon's "Rumors." I was the sound designer. Because of all of the other shows in this crazy month and a half, I had this one pretty much designed and programmed right out of the gate back in February/March, so come tech weekend, it was spot on, more or less.

I brought in my Digi003 from the studio at home so that we could run eight audio zones, in an attempt to make the set as believable of a house for the actors as possible. Toilets that flush in bathrooms, stereos and phones that make noise, kitchen disasters you can hear coming from the actual kitchen...that sort of thing. Brought in a spare stereo system I had, and learned to profile a lighting dimmer so that it would power up properly, not burn out the electronics, and turn off when the stage went to black.

You use the tools you have available, and that meant a lot of our playback was on small computer speakers hidden around the set, which was built in our black box theatre. Unfortunately, I had my show #4 (Into the Woods) in NYC overlap, so everything was really buttoned up tight before I left. My students had a really strong grasp on what was going on and troubleshooting, so I only had to remote into the show computer once to fix and demonstrate. I had created a script cue in Qlab to launch my screen sharing application, that they could run just in case this came up. (The sound op, never having used Qlab before this show, is going to get it for a show he has this summer. Yay!). Other than a solder joint blowing out during a dress rehearsal, everything went pretty smoothly.

Luckily it ran smoothly, because for "Into the Woods" in NYC, all of our color scrollers, which had been sent out for repairs and are the only viable means by which we can get color in our tiny theatre, came back on my hang & focus day, and didn't immediately come online! Plus, we were short crew members, which eventually led to us bringing in a board op for the shows so that I could stage manage the show.

We are almost through! Strike "Rumors" at NVCC and start load into the other theatre across the hall for the end of the year dance show. We left a bunch of our networking in place after "Godspell", so running the camera and projection feeds won't be starting from scratch, and we'll be re-using some of the audio plot that I developed, as I slowly re-design some of our main stage sound system.

-brian

"Godspell" - Show 3 of 6

This semester at NVCC, we are doing three theatre shows, when we normally only do one. Without getting into details and politics, one of these shows, the musical, was initially dreamed up to be more of a revue, overseen by the music department. It has since changed shows and treatments, substantially.

But this is exciting for me. We have ended up with a "gutter punk" version of "Godspell." The set design was left as just a couple of arches upstage, and a platform with steps in the middle. Just two false prosceniums with clouds painted on them, left over from some show maaaaaany years ago that are to be flown, then cut up and trashed at strike. This saves on work for the shop, since they have to build a big set for "Rumors" as well as the bits they built for "Complete Works of Shakespeare-Abridged" and the detailed painting that went with it.

Having just come off of "Having Our Say" at Long Wharf, I decided that this was too good of an opportunity to pass up and grow my projection mapping skills, while reveling in a punk treatment that I could really enjoy (aside of designing the audio). So, I took point on this, realizing that we'd be pushing the limits of the gear and resources we possess, for this show that was supposed to be a low-key production but clearly was now anything but. I need to deliver and support what the actors have been busting themselves to put on.

So, first up was audio. This show is being put on in our main stage auditorium space, and I remembered all of the work that went into "Hairspray" a year ago. That laid the plan for what I did and did not want to do this time around. I've also decided to try and fix some overall sound issues we have in this space, as I am able with what we have. I learned some documentation procedures over the past couple of shows I did at Yale, and I'm looking forward to what the extra legwork will pay back in detail and organization.

Quiet time to tune the new system was last week, which saw me blasting the new Soul Asylum album. :) All of the house music will be a journey through the history of punk rock and themes of change, self identity and realizing potential. I'll have to publish the song list at some point. It goes pretty deep, and I'm sure some stereotypical older theatre-going folks may not care for it. But I've never gone quite this far in assembling playlists for house music before, and I think I've established strong moods and foreshadowing as the show shifts.

Now for the set...I've been working around the clock to get this thing done. I've got everything mapped, and we're running both front and rear projections. The shop painted the set a light concrete faux finish for me, and we're projecting onto that and a white scrim. It's up to me to set the locations, and Jon, my boss and the lighting designer, shot a lot of photography that will be used as textures and scenes. Because of deadlines moving and other things slowing the initial design phase down (and my own running around between shows), I'm designing a lot of the show on the fly. Qlab to the rescue! Instead of rendering a lot of composite videos, I'm really pushing our Mac Pro to do a lot of the work for me on the fly, with text effects and animations. The photo below shows the set covered in many instances of Qlab's Titling cues, which of course are all animated. In other scenes, flowers bloom out of the brick work, using motion captures I found that I changed into transparent backgrounds.

We open tomorrow night, and it looks like we have 1100 cues in Qlab, spread across two computers that are slaved together.

Luckily, I can photoshop like the wind, so I can create spaces for the actors to work in!  All those years in art departments is really paying off this week. One of the locations is a stereotypical punk rock club, where the back wall is photoshopped with around one hundred stickers of punk rock bands and related brands. In the space of a few weeks, we went from a production that was orphaned to a major production.

-brian

Six shows to design in six weeks!

The rest of this season is going to get very interesting. I have three schools that I will be working with, that, between them, have six shows all opening in a six week window of time! This is a new challenge, but with some planning and workflow choices, I can do it. Some are bigger and some are smaller, which helps them fit together. In order, they will be:

#1 - "Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Abridged" (sound programming, since we don't have a board op, and slaving all cues to lighting)
#2 - "Music Man" (lighting design & some projection)

#3 - "Godspell" (sound design and video/scenic design)

#4 - "Into the Woods" (lighting and sound design, maybe some video)

#5 - "Rumors" (sound design)

#6 - Dance Program's final performance (video design)

I'd better stop updating my blog and start working on paperwork!

-brian

"Having Our Say" at Long Wharf Theatre

As anyone who has worked with me in the past couple of years knows, I am a fanatic about Qlab. That program has really changed what is possible, especially on the shows where I am allowed to run rampant, creatively - I can output, or control, all of the elements I come up with for live performance. 

So when I got the call from Long Wharf Theatre in New Haven to work on their upcoming revival of "Having Our Say" because they needed a Qlab guy, I was beside myself. I was told what they were looking to do, and asked if Qlab would handle it.  I said "Yes" emphatically.  It would most certainly do all of that. I was also looking forward to working on this show because I worked at Long Wharf back in college - a long time ago - and hadn't been back, since I went off to do corporate and tours and stuff. I was glad I did this - this is one cool space, with nice people and it's cleverly worked out, like a boat builder designed the shop. Love it. I've been here a lot, making this and that work and building things like baffle boxes for the projectors.

(Is it a doll house or a baffle box? You decide...)

Over the course of the tech process, the entire design changed. Like, a lot. The show was opening in New Haven, and then moving on to Hartford Stage. So change was inevitable. However, part of this meant going places I hadn't taken Qlab before (and using advanced features I didn't know were available). In the end, we delivered a great looking show and the audiences responded. There were glitches throughout the tech process, some big and some smaller, and in the end we had to watch for those - but the little nagging things that remained were things that 99% of the audience would never notice. Just those of us working on the show, day in and day out, knew they were there. Qlab's technical support was on the line with me throughout the tech process, and in the end we ended up maxing out our Mac Pro's GPU.

The story is a biography about two women, both over 100. They are sisters, who grew up in the segregated South. Going through their family photos and stories, they have seen a lot, and it is a much more engaging show than you might initially think. 

To help tell their stories and make the photos come alive for the audience, we projected images onto the walls of the set. Eventually, those images became videos, to provide effects and transitions. Moreover, we slaved video and audio playback computers together and then triggered them from the light board, so that the audio engineer could just focus on mixing the show. I also built a network to connect the projectors to, so that we would have LAN access to their power, focus, color correction, and shutter controls. All of this was controlled during the show, as needed, via Qlab with Applescript, MIDI and OSC. No need for IR remote controls or getting up on ladders once they were hung.

My wife will be involved with the show when it heads up to Hartford Stage. Yay! 

As a side note, this show really focused on realism. Not only did the set dressings get very extensive, but since the characters are making dinner during the play and the entire script breaks the fourth wall, they spent a lot of time developing ways to fill the theatre with cooking smells!  Combined with the amazing props department at LWT, it was very impressive. My technical intern at Fairfield U, Logan, now works at LWT, and it was her job to cook.  :)

 I call this one "Two Men Discussing Roast Chicken"

-brian

First time mixing at Yale - ("Music Man" #1)

I'm back at Yale this week, mixing an alumni performance of "Music Man" (I will be doing this same show with 8th graders later this Spring...might be a little different...) This is exciting, as I've not mixed FoH here before.

It was supposed to be a staged reading of the play, with just some mics at music stands. But of course, being Yale, it became so much more than that. There are foley sound effects coming from a couple of places, and a 30 piece orchestra that the sound designer has thoughtfully close-miked and used Y-combiners, so there are almost double the number of mics on stage. It's been...interesting.

Anyway, I was told by the Stage Manager that this was the clearest mixed show that she's heard in a long time. So that's good!

Because this is Yale, I had a lot of cool toys at my disposal. I've worked with Galileo units in my drive rack before, but never had to configure them (the problem of being a tour mixing guy - while everything is already done for you as requested, there are some things you can end up not ever having to do yourself). Having now programmed a Galileo (via the much easier LAN interface) I love them and want to buy like five of them…if I had the $7500 sitting around for each one!  Anyway, with thirteen audio zones, soundcheck is more than just "does it work?" So I built a cascading set of cues to automate my sound checks, which is a great thing computers are good at - duplicating repetitive tasks. The scripts (Applescript & OSC) turn on and off different channels in the Galileo, use text to voice features in OSX to announce what zone was being tested, and then play a wav file of white noise that I had cued up. So I can hit go, and listen to "Zone One, Orchestra Left" followed by white noise, and it continues through the rest of the positions. (Actually, for speed, I don't have the labels detailed - if there is a problem, like when I first set it up and had an error, I just go back and check that missing zone number manually.) This helps remove the chance that I'll miss something, while double-checking the computer's work by running sequentially.

Bonus: they're feeding us dinner this week in the dining halls. Combined with the snow, it's like we're at Hogwarts.

Bigger Bonus: my friend Alex (lighting op) pointed out that the role of Mayor Shin, who had a very familiar voice, was being played by Mark Linn Baker, who played Larry on Perfect Strangers in the '80s!

-brian