Sven Ortel gets projectors to serve up an ace
When he speaks with PLSN, video designer Sven Ortel is adjusting to life in Denver, Colorado, home to his latest gig. “It’s nice and sunny here,” he reports contentedly. “It’s very high. You don’t realize it’s a mile high, and you’re sort of huffing and puffing the first two weeks.” His ears haven’t popped yet, “but I went jogging the first morning. I was like an old man. I had a beer and almost fell over.” Ironically, the show he is designing there is Disney’s The Little Mermaid, which is going through a test-run in late August before being tweaked for its Broadway debut on December 6. One can imagine how much worse his ears would be if he literally had to swoop down under the sea from high in the sky.
Today his thoughts shift from “mermaid land” to a different area located between those two extreme points: the tennis court that is center stage for the Broadway production of Deuce. The five-person show stars Angela Lansbury and Marian Seldes as retired women’s tennis pros who made a stellar doubles team back in the day, and they are the guests of honor at a modern match between two new stars. But as their verbal interplay and the jibes and quips from the two commentators behind them prove, the game has become much more about achieving stardom and nabbing endorsements than the love of the sport.
The 90-minute drama engages audiences, not only because of its strong script and stellar leading ladies, but also because of Paul Charlier’s dynamic sound design, which creates the illusion of a live tennis match, and Ortel’s striking video design, which includes large projections of digitized audience members that help to create the illusion of a live stadium audience. Ortel has worked with video design and projection for seven years on such productions as Faith Healer and The Woman in White at the National Theatre in London, and he has five years experience previously as an electrician and gaffer on music videos and small features films.
Projecting a Full House
The director of Deuce, Michael Blakemore, is a 56-year veteran of the theatre, and he made it very clear to Ortel from the start that he wanted an “audience” present in the play. To accomplish this, Ortel used video projections in a way that allegedly has never been done before: two sets of spectators are projected onto a giant mesh scrim to the side of and behind the ladies, and another set is projected in front of the two television commentators who occasionally make comments about the ladies and the game. The two sportscasters also have their images projected elsewhere on the scrim to show how they appear on television.
“The set designer Peter Davison came to me and asked me what would be possible,” Ortel recollects. “I’ve worked with him before, and I told him anything he wanted, but somehow we had to get the audience in the stadium without upstaging the two actresses. Eventually he came up with the diagonal gauze idea and splitting the perspective.” (Specifically, the lower seats face forward, and the upper seats are viewed from the side.) I was scratching my head quite a bit. The Music Box is a lovely theatre, but in terms of angles for projectors, none of these buildings were designed with that in mind. I did a bit of calculating. I looked at it and knew what had to be done because I knew I had to project the audience from the actual audience point of view. There were people in those seats, and the challenge was how I was going to be able to project them there. I thought you could do it with extra-wide lenses, and later on the guy from Scharff Weisberg worked out a different solution, which was from a projectionist’s perspective. We put a big, bulky projector on the circle rail, which I thought no one would agree to, but they did. So we have one big projector that covered the entire screen from the circle front at a right angle to the screen. It was well sound-proofed, and then it worked well.”
Forty-Loop
That was only part of the solution. For the digital spectators to have a regular presence, except in moments when the focus was on the sportscasters, they had to be looped smoothly, especially as the loops only last 45 seconds or so when there are no specific reactions shown relating to the game within the story. “The tricky bit was actually working out whether it’s possible to place them correctly and to manipulate them and crossfade and all these things, and that was done using media servers,” explains Ortel. He has worked with High End Systems Catalyst and Green Hippo Hippotizer for a few years, so he has close relationships to both developers. I’m aware of the tools that these products offer and what you can do at what stage of the process. I was confident that I could move my audience members around and distort them accordingly. I needed to make sure that I could cover the right area and have the right kind of content. It all ties together for me. When I did this show, I found out that most people on Broadway don’t work like that. They come up with the content and let someone else sort it out. They’re a bit like content creators.”
The footage of the audience was shot at a soundstage in lower Manhattan. Ortel says that the producers rallied friends and relatives to the location and cast some of them as digital extras for the show. A tennis expert even came in to offer advice, and director Blakemore largely handled the direction “because the scenes that we are projecting are actually described in the script,” explains Ortel. “He obviously had to take control of that to make sure it matched what he envisioned the audience would do. So he directed the crowd that was to be projected in the same way that he would direct actors. Obviously I directed the loops. I told them to look very slowly from left to right in this and that rhythm. From a technical point of view, the challenge was to get the head movement synchronized to the sound design. We had sound clips from the sound designer to make sure that they were at the right speed.”
Placing the Projectors
There are four projectors used for Deuce: a large Digital Projection Highlight 12000SX and three Barco R6s. The 12000SX projects the audience on the main scrim. Two of the R6s project the commentators at two different positions on the main scrim, while the remaining R6 is rear projected on an RP screen in the commentator booth. “The large projector was on the circle rail at a right angle to the screen, and there are two inserts for the commentators on the large gauze,” clarifies Ortel. “Again, they are at right angles to the surface they are projected on. One is on the circle rail, and one is behind the proscenium projecting onto to the gauze, and there is another one upstage doing a back projection on a piece of RP.”
The projectors are triggered and the console is a MA Lighting grandMA, whichcontrols the Hippotizer media server. “In some instances, the media server is triggered by the sound stuff, and those are the instances when the heads of the audience have to be moving in sync with the sound of the ball,” states Ortel. “It’s triggered by MIDI from the sound software. In the same instances, the grandMA also controls two cue lights that tell the two actresses on which side the ball is. It switches on and off, so they know where to look. It’s quite a tricky set up, and it took a while to work out and get in sync.”
The large scrim used for the audience projections is an Oberon by Gerriets International, which Ortel notes has been discontinued. “We did some tests for it to get the right level of translucency and have enough reflectivity,” he recalls. “We didn’t want the commentators upstage to be too separated. On the other hand, I needed something that I could project well on, and we ended up with this discontinued scrim.”
For Ortel, the biggest challenge of working on Deuce was mapping the audience members to the scenes. “There is distance between the seats and the scrim, so they would look like they’re sitting in different seats depending upon where you sit in the auditorium,” explains Ortel. “Even though I filmed the people based on the technical drawings of how the seats are configured, that actually didn’t work out because of that distance. I had to cheat and do stretching and squashing and also composite people in seats where they aren’t actually sitting. If you are sitting in the center of the auditorium, there would be empty seats if I hadn’t added extra people. It’s a very peculiar effect.” Ortel did end up repeating some audience members by copying them into other seat locations in order to fill out the virtual crowd.
“These theatres also have tiers, which means there is a difference between the surface you are projecting on and the object behind it,” continues Ortel. “If there is a person sitting there, suddenly they are floating in midair when they are sitting too low or too high. That took a lot of trial and error and squeezing and pushing to get to a level where actually it’s not reality we’re trying to convey here. I think that’s the trick, to make it look like something theatrical. The moment you’ve achieved that, people are not too focused on the fact that it’s absolutely correct. It just needs to convey the idea so there are more people than there are actually seats. But it works from every angle, and you don’t really notice.”
Ortel certainly succeeded in fleshing out the virtual audience without causing them to distract from the main characters, and they helped create the illusion that an actual game was taking place and being watched by real people. That comment certainly pleases Ortel. “That was the idea,” he declares modestly, “and I’m glad to hear it worked.”
