When you watch a performance of Video Games Live, the touring orchestral show of music from video games, now in its third season, you get a bit of a history lesson. “They start out with the real classics, like Donkey Kong and Tetris, some of which had only two or three colors in the entire game,” says Heath Marrinan, LD for Video Games Live. “As it goes through the night, the lighting begins to blend more with the video. We choose color schemes that reflect those of the games themselves, and the cues follow the dynamics of the music and the action on the screen. It can be sweepy and soft as you watch a guy cruising in an airplane on screen; then he jumps out and starts shooting a machine gun. I’ve never lit a symphony orchestra shredding on Halo 3 before.”
But there is structure, says Marrinan. In laying out the show’s lighting design he had to keep the hardware compact and adhere to show co-developer Tommy Tallarico’s dictum that no one element overshadow another in the program. “Tommy’s very into production and he wants the show to be an overall experience, not a music experience with lights and video or a video experience with music and lights. Just like a video game, he wants it to be a total experience.”
The hardware is indeed compact. Marrinan laid out four 15-foot lighting towers, each with a Vari*Lite 3000 Spot, a PixelRange PixelPar 90 fixture, an ACL bar and a PixelLine 1044 LED ministrip. A pair of 40-foot trusses complements the towers. The upstage truss has six VL3000s, split three on the far ends of the truss to allow a 20-foot gap for the video screen and a set of PixelPar 90s to tone the truss. The downstage truss holds six more Vari*Lite 3000 Spots and two PixelPar 90 fixtures, seven Lekos (four to light the choir, two to illuminate conductor and Video Games Live co-founder Jack Wall’s podium, and one for a featured vocalist) and two 9-lamp omni-directional Mole Fays to light up the audience. There are four more ACL bars on the stage floor, and an MDG Atmosphere APS High-Output dual-output fogger adds haze.
The lighting design, worked out on ESP Vision software at Video Games Live’s lighting vendor Theatrical Media Services (TMS) in Omaha, hews closely to the music, though for the first two seasons the cues for each song were manually triggered using the video start as the signal. Within each song, Marrinan programmed an average of two dozen individual cues that he says were flawlessly synched with the music thanks to the click track fed to the orchestra through small earphones from a hard drive at the FOH position. The cues were programmed using the Learn Time feature on the Flying Pig Systems Wholehog 3 console that travels with the show. However, this year’s production will use SMPTE timecode generated by a Doremi media server newly added to the show’s technical complement.
“We get a ton of looks out of a relatively little amount of gear,” says Marrinan. “We’re playing mostly small and mid-sized, kind of cozy venues, and we’re able to use what we have to really shape the stage.”
Synchronizing via eyeball isn’t the only trick Video Games Live has used to stay on budget. When audience members are brought up on stage to play a round of Space Invaders on the projection screen — with the orchestra following Wall’s lead based on where the play is taking them — Tallarico hands them a remote-control firing button and a T-shirt with a luminescent green Space Invaders logo on the back and tells the contestant that he’ll be “tracking the game” as he moves about on stage. In reality, Tallarico has rigged a Sony PlayStation2 game console that video designer Mike Runice is operating; Runice follows the bright logo on the player’s back to keep the screen properly positioned. “I’ve had some very good players up there who can wipe out the entire first screen and get to the second level,” says Runice. “But in general it’s a lot more challenging to play a video game on a screen that’s 19 feet wide.” But the firing button — in the shape of a cartoonish explosives plunger (“Try getting that through airport security!” quips Tallarico) — is definitely under the player’s control, hard-wired with 100 feet of cable running to the master PS2 console.
Video Games Live’s video is front-projected, in pursuit of the brightest possible image to maintain the vid-game effect, says Runice, who has done video for Jack Johnson and is also the LD for Mannheim Steamroller. “We want to get it as bright as possible to make it work with the light rig,” he explains. “Rear projection wouldn’t have as good an off-axis brightness response and we don’t have to throw as many lumens at it to get a good image.”
Video Games Live uses a pair of Sanyo XF 46 12K LCD projectors showing on to Screen Works screens that range from 12 by 16 feet to 15 by 20 feet, depending upon the size and configuration of the venue’s stage area. A DVD player originally fed them, but the widely varying nature of the venues led Tallarico and Wall to burn new DVD content for each show to allow for changes in songs and sequences. The move to the Doremi hard drive system now lets them select from any song on the drive and sequence it internally. “It’s become our overall central engine for the show,” he says.
What’s less predictable is where the projectors will be rigged at each show. “That literally changes at every venue,” says Runice, who will sometimes fly them from a central truss or on the main floor. At times he has to co-opt space adjacent to the FOH position. “But I have to make sure the fan noise doesn’t interfere with the [FOH mixer] Matt Yelton’s ability to mix the show,” he says.
The Sanyo projectors are HD-capable and the Doremi has sufficient capacity to hold high-resolution content. However, the world of video games has been, until very recently, a decidedly low-res universe. “We have to get the video to match the audience’s expectations,” Runice says. “Frogger looks like Frogger did 20 years ago — only a lot bigger. The graphics aren’t fabulous but we don’t try to dress it up. But having the HD capability is necessary because the newer games that we include, like Halo 3, look pretty good on a video monitor and have to look that good on a big screen, too.” However, the Video Games Live videos will retain one other element common to most vid-games: they still utilize a 4:3 aspect ratio. “Space Invaders just doesn’t look right letterboxed,” he says.
One other video component to Video Games Live is a bagful of inexpensive Sony webcams that Runice attaches to various moving and stationary objects. “We tape them to everything — light towers, the backs of music stands, inside the podium facing up to Jack [Wall] and even on Tommy [Tallarico],” he says. “They’re low-res but that gritty look really works with the look of the classic games. The webcams are tiny so the audience can’t see them. I can punch up dissolves and cut shots from them using the basic Edirol V4 switcher we’ve been using.” Runice is auditioning a couple of HD-capable digital switchers, including the Sony Anycast, which Video Games Live tried out in Spain. “They come across as a total surprise for the audience because it’s not like there are hand-held cameras walking around the stage.” Best webcam shot? “Tommy head-banging with the viola player,” says Runice.
At a time when the emphasis in entertainment is shifting from prerecorded and packaged to live and in-person, Video Games Live is nicely positioned to benefit both from that trend and the burgeoning video game business itself, which is forecast to reach a global value of $104 billion by 2010. And with only $13 billion of that in the U.S., the world may well be an oyster for this kind of entertainment symmetry.
Not surprisingly, Video Games Live has company, if not outright competition. Last year the Eminence Symphony Orchestra performed its spring tour in Australia with its entire set list comprised of pieces from video games and featuring several of the world’s most famous game composers as special guests. Other touring companies have been organized, such as Play! A Video Game Symphony. And the Symphonic Game Music Concerts are a draw at the opening ceremonies of the GC Games Convention, an annual trading fair for video games in Germany. Still, Video Games Live is an original. “You can tell we all have a passion for the music and the games,” says Tallarico. “We put on a great show.”
