Edmund “Ted” Sydor is an old-school analog man working in a digital world. Originally a stop-motion animator, he is now the projections supervisor for the Metropolitan Opera, and he is applying his offline, old school know-how to a brave new digital realm for both himself and his employers. “It’s the new fancy tool in the toolbox,” he acknowledges. “Half of our new productions this season have a major video component in them.” Over the years, he has played a major role in shaping the Met’s video imperative, learning and growing on the job.
Sydor is very pleased with the system at the Met, which Barry Grossman and Randy Briggs of WorldStage, their primary source of rentals and additional technical support, helped him design, with Tony Giovannetti of the Met leading the actual construction. “It is now the most advanced and well equipped permanent video system of any opera house in the world, and most other theaters too. I’m quite proud of it,” declares Sydor. “This system, and the crew I have put together to manage it, have displaced a growing portion of rentals and outside technical labor, essentially paying for itself over time.”
He says that while the Met typically rents servers based on designer preference, their house system includes two MA VPU HD media servers and grandMA2 control consoles from MA Lighting. “It is the backbone of a system I use to update older effects, like hand-painted glass slides used on antiquated 10K projectors,” explains Sydor. “These archaic units were originally made by the Austrian company Pani. I once heard some reps from Pani came to visit here some years back and were amazed that we were still using those old projectors. They had one in their museum back in Vienna. With such old equipment, you can’t get new parts. They were all failing, so for the past three years, any show that comes back that used those projectors, we get the slides digitized. I then reprogram the content back into the show using our house system. We just modernize that particular effect. The rest of the show stays as it was.”
Although he and the Met try to keep the rep as true to what the original designer intended, he is often able to improve on issues including smoothness of animation, brightness and keystoning that were not possible previously. He cites Madame Butterfly as an example. For their 2008/9 production, a clip of giant Japanese script was used as an end title, but it looked like a DVD image that had been filmed off a cheap monitor. For the subsequent 2011/12 and 2013/14 season revivals, he improved the quality via the new VPU system and supporting network. “Using digital tools, I could import that clip, clean up all the noise, even it out and brighten it up a little bit and then put it into a video server,” says Sydor. “Now I have complete control over when it starts, stops, sizing, how it fades out; the whole nine yards. It’s real nice bag of tricks for the directors and designers that come here.”
Evolution of a Digital System
When Sydor began working on projections for the Met six years ago, they had only done one major video-based opera, Satyagraha, which was very successful. At that time, they had been preparing to work with Robert LePage on The Damnation of Faust, “which would act as a test bed for ambitious interactive video planned for our upcoming Ring Cycle,” he explains. “This was the first time we tried it. They had a system based on invisible low-red light bathing the stage and CCD cameras with IR filters on them feeding back positional heat ‘blobs’ to a computer. This computer would then refine and use the positional information to affect some type of video component in real time. In one case, a particle generated fog so people walking around could actually affect it and make it move and react similar to real fog. Another example would be to put your hand over a projected curtain and make it move as if you were actually brushing it. It’s a neat parlor trick that is getting used a lot nowadays. Good examples of that type of effect is in Michael Jackson One, the Cirque [du Soleil] show out in Las Vegas. It was pretty tough to sit through, but it is packed with almost every single technological video related advance that is going on right now.”
He says that the Met’s current season is a little lighter on video than recent seasons, but that the overall trend has been towards using more and more video in their productions. Last season they had approximately 100 performances that included some projected video component out of 240 total performances. Half of their six new productions have a major video component, and next season there will be two new productions utilizing major video effects.
The current Met season’s productions with video are The Death of Klinghoffer, BlueBeard/Iolanta (a double bill as one show), and Donna Delago. “All of them use straightforward projection as a set element,” says Sydor. “Klinghoffer had multiple projector positions to cover moving set pieces but static projections; no tracking shots. BlueBeard posed some issues with double projections on a downstage scrim, which we defeat by using a high angle projector position, so the second image hits mostly the floor and isn’t noticed. Otherwise it’s pretty straightforward front/rear projected elements this season.”
The Met now has a permanent video distribution system in the building, which includes a control position in the rear of the house with a full size grandMA2 console; MA on PC, which Sydor uses “as a hot backup and primary show archive;” Advocent KVM over IP access to servers, multiple single and multiviewer screens for output monitoring; and a Medialon Manager system with a touchscreen interface for monitoring projector, router, server and network status.
“Two stories beneath the control position is a dedicated server room that can allow simultaneous setup of four or more disparate shows with multiple servers, fed by a 100 amp UPS, a full backup control position — mirroring the main position above in the house — permanent networks for MA net, Art-Net and KVM net, our VPU media servers and workspace for visiting designers,” says Sydor. “Six pairs of multi-mode fiber and clean power are run to numerous points around the stage and house where we typically place projectors. We have a traveling setup, including another full size grandMA2, KVMs, monitors and networking with full access to our system that we use for rehearsals in the house.”
Analog Beginnings
Sydor joined the Met by happenstance. Upon visiting for a tour from a childhood friend who worked there, his boss, Tony Giovannetti, head of the electric shop, offered him a job. The two men had a similar background, and a day’s work blossomed into his decade-long tenure. Sydor also met his wife, a supervisor in the costume shop, through the Met. The couple now have two children.
During college, Sydor studied sculpture and was preparing to pursue a mechanical engineering degree when he saw a documentary film on the late Ji?í Trnka, the most famous of Czech puppet animation directors. Sydor aspired to work at the famed Trnka Studio near Prague, and through a chance encounter with the studio’s current director secured a position as “an apprentice in the machine shop, learning to build the armatures/skeletons for stop motion puppets. Today, I would still list that as my primary specialty, although I don’t get to use it much now, sadly.”
Sydor later studied film at the School Of Visual Arts. While working in the repair department, he learned about gear while taking it apart and reassembling it. By his sophomore year, he had also secured a job at nearby Liberty Studios on 26th Street, accruing professional animation and commercial experience. Post-film school, Sydor worked extensively in the animation industry as a Technical Director, mainly at now-defunct Olive Jar Animation in Boston, helping produce more than 25 commercials and short films. His varied backgrounds have frequently come in handy at his current job.
“There’s always something weird going on,” he remarks, “like, ‘How are we going to fly this projector,’ or ‘Is there some way to make a replacement door for this parterre booth antechamber so we can turn it into a sound proof projection booth without marring the wood?’’ I figured out a way to make a baffle for a projector that could to cut the sound down 15 to 20 percent without overheating by redirecting the exhaust sound upwards towards the center of the proscenium. Always stuff like that.”
A large portion of Sydor’s job centers around what transpires during down time, particularly maintenance, upgrading gear and learning new software and techniques. It has been interesting for him to dive deep into digital, given his original resistance to computers. “I’m far more comfortable manipulating video servers using the lighting board than a software timeline,” admits Sydor. “The board is a tactile, real object with real buttons. It made it a bit easier for me to wrap my mind around things. I think I still look like at networking more like plumbing than a packet based electron stream.”
Baptism by Fire
Upon starting at the Met, Sydor was a shop electrician before soon being transferred to the automation department, where he could apply his motion control and automation skills. He later worked in the hydraulics department before being asked, three years in, to tackle video, which lead to his Projection Supervisor position.
Sydor recalls that, when he first started, nobody at the Met really understood video projections nor wanted to learn about them. He teases that being relatively new, expendable and wearing glasses, he became the optimal candidate for the job. “My new reality was much less of joke, however,” he concedes. “In the first couple of weeks, I had to learn the basic concepts of networking, serial control, server maintenance, troubleshooting; the whole shebang.” He operated a grandMA with Hippotizers and custom servers on one show and a Hog 2 with Catalysts on another. It was the first time in his life he had seen either.
“It was all I could do to memorize the few buttons that I needed to hit, and God help me if I hit a wrong button and brought up the wrong view,” recollects Sydor. “I would be completely lost. That’s how I started up the first season of doing video. It was a really nauseating experience for me to go from never having ever operated a show in my life to operating shows in front of 3,000 people or more when I barely had any grasp of what I was doing. I can’t recommend it.”
Given the wide range of disciplines he needed to learn about, he focused on the core basics necessary to operate shows. As his comfort grew over time and different shows came in, Sydor spent more time with the designers and programmers of the various productions to better understand what they were doing and how they were doing it. By his second year, he was emboldened to ask questions and offer his own perspective on things.
“I had a lot of experience with various disasters, with shows crashing here and there,” he says. “It was most important to me to figure out ways to register projectors, stabilize the networks and have safeguards built into show files. Eventually, when I started programming conversions of the old glass slide media, I was able to do that in an environment where there was no rehearsal going on, no stress, nobody breathing down my neck or some looming deadline. I could just sit there, make mistakes, and figure it all out. That’s when I really started to learn how things work. I did very simple cues in shows here and there to the point where last season was the first time I stepped up and took on an entire new production, Eugene Onegin. It was the first time I programmed and engineered a whole show on my own.”
Despite many years in his role, Sydor feels that he is constantly learning and still feels like a toddler within his new discipline. “Perhaps I’m being hard on myself,” he ponders. “I took doing animation very seriously and was determined to be the best I possibly could. I went really far with it and I know what it’s like to master something; I still have a way to go when it comes to video. I suppose the most important aspect of my job, which is certainly important to the Met, is that when I’m operating a show I don’t fall apart when things break. You simply can’t.”
He has weathered many high pressure situations — “two different radios going off, my phone ringing, the general manager tapping me on the shoulder and a stage manager trying to talk to me on headset all at the same time” — and acknowledges that the hardest thing to master is keeping calm enough to be able to take charge of and analyze situations when something crashes.
“I have my control station set up sometimes with 13 different monitors looking at up to 22 computers, trying to, as quickly as humanly possible, figure out where the break in the chain occurred, get it fixed, and get an image back on stage as quickly as possible,” he says. “It’s not for the timid. As I grow professionally doing this, what I’ve gotten better at is boiling down the methods, user interfaces and protocols and get them as robust and simplified as possible.”
Focusing a show these days takes Sydor a fraction of the time that it used to, and his adept skills come from cumulative experience and improving technology. “I have graphic, clear user interfaces in the layout view of my MA2 tied in with simple, rapid, and clear preset updating,” he says. “Top of show preset cues automatically reset all projector and server parameters to desired states; secondary watchdog systems like Medialon Manager help monitor the system; very clear and quick-acting backup switching. These are all things that are learned through experience. There aren’t that many classes or programs you can take in school for doing this kind of work. It’s an emerging and rapidly evolving technology. Often, you have to be the one making the map.”
