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