MASCOT, NSW, Australia – Never Did Me Any Harm is a new dance theatre work that explores the complexities of contemporary family life. Set designer/LD Geoff Cobham collaborated on the project with Chris Petridis, video designer and assistant LD. A PC running Jands Vista v2 software with a Vista M1 wingboard was used to operate the show.
More details from Jands Vista (http://www.jandsvista.com):
MASCOT, NSW, Australia – Never Did Me Any Harm is a new dance theatre work by award-winning director and choreographer Kate Champion (Not in a Million Years, The Age I’m In), exploring the complexities of contemporary family life. It is a co-production between Sydney Theatre Company and Force Majeure.
Force Majeure is known for making work that transforms the familiar and domestic into the poetic. Drawing inspiration from Christos Tsiolkas’ bestselling novel The Slap, Champion and her company interviewed people of all ages and backgrounds for their opinions on what makes a good parent.
Using a distinctive language of dance and text, Force Majeure and Sydney Theatre Company give full dramatic voice to these real life stories. In an unsettling yet familiar Aussie backyard, the fears of parents are danced, voiced and unravelled.
Set and lighting designer Geoff Cobham collaborated with Chris Petridis, video designer and assistant lighting designer, on the project. A PC running Jands Vista v2 software with a Vista M1 wingboard was used to operate the show.
“Essentially I built the video system which included a Catalyst media server running ArtNet so that was an exciting factor in using the Vista for control,” Petridis commented. “I find that the Vista is compatible with ArtNet and networking.”
The production used five standard projectors plus a Robe Spot 3000DT digital moving head projector so Petridis was running two complete media server systems as well as a normal lighting rig.
The Vista console allows the user to build lighting designs visually. Rather than asking you to interpret your visual concepts into strings of commands and type them in, the Vista draws them for you, as the user selects fixtures and applies settings using Vista’s graphical user interface.
“Geoff and I are similar in our artistic approach to lighting and consequently we really favour the Vista because it’s very intuitive in creating the desired stage looks,” explained Petridis. “Other consoles can be all about numbers. With the Vista, instead of having to think about what you’re trying to create in a mathematical manner you can think about it in an artistic way. That’s the greatest thing about Vista and that comes across in the programming of it using features like the color picker and having all the gobos visible when you’re loading and programming them.”
Like modern video and audio software, the Vista displays designs as a series of ‘events’ laid out across the screen over time. This ‘timeline’ approach means the user can see everything that’s happening in relation to time: when lights come on, off, change color, move. Petridis is partial to Vista’s timeline as it uses the same shortcut keyboard commands as a PC or Mac.
“It makes it so simple to move attributes between cues,” he added. “Rather than having to constantly think about tracking and how to pull attributes out of certain cues to move them, you can just click on the attribute and cut and paste as you would with any other software. Just the other day I showed this feature to another lighting designer and he was blown away by it. Being able to scrub the timeline is handy – you can move to the point where you want a new attribute to start fading and just drag the attribute to that point. That’s fantastic.”
The Vista’s interface allows for easy patching. The user picks the fixture from a list, types the quantity, then drags it over to the DMX universe screen. The Vista also includes an extensive fixture library including profiles for the most popular and less well-known lights.
“I find the patching on a Vista to be incredibly simple and I like having the visual 512 channel universe and being able to move stuff around that way is really great,” added Petridis. “I like that you can have all the windows pop out and put them on a second monitor, it’s so nice having a large visual display of what you’re using.”
Never Did Me Any Harm will be playing at the Melbourne Festival later in the year.
Image Credit: Studio Channel 132 (Chris Petridis pictured)
