The glitz and glamour of Broadway often overshadows the more modest production values and strong merits of off-Broadway and off-off-Broadway productions. The annual New York Musical Festival (NYMF) features original and often innovative shows, many driven by off-the-wall concepts, that create more with less. During this past run in July, PLSN caught two entertaining shows that featured creative use of video that helped to expand their scope without overwhelming them. We tracked down their digital creators who, despite experience with much larger productions, enjoyed the challenges that their more compact NYMF shows presented them.
Creating a Landscape
Icon tells a 1960s tale of a young man who seeks out a mysterious older woman in Venezuela who is, for reasons unknown to him, receiving some of his grandfather’s inheritance. He demands to know why. During his initially harsh interrogation of her, she tells him a story about an American woman named Constance whom his princely grandfather married in the 1920s and how their royal lives became tragically intertwined by power struggles, scandal and political upheaval in their European home country of Centolucci.
The production faced a big challenge at the outset: the stage at The Duke on 42nd Street is only 30 feet wide by at most 15 feet deep, creating a narrow space for the cast of 10 to act out the grand drama. That meant not a lot of props could be employed, and there was not much room or budget for the use of painted drops. Media designer Kevan Loney, who had just come from working on Showboat at the Shubert Theatre in Boston, downsized from a major production in a 1,500-seat venue to the 200-seat Duke venue. As with other NYFM shows, they did tech and dress rehearsal and opened on the same day. July 1 was the first read-through, and it played a few performances starting on July 20.
After Loney read the script and heard the score, the creative team (lighting designer, scenic designer, sound designer, director, and the writers) gathered for one meeting to discuss the fictional country of Centolucci, its people and values, and how it was being ruled by its royal family. “We started from scratch, creating this make-believe world that could be as believable as possible but with a little bit of fantasy,” says Loney. “It was a very quick process. I think in grand total I made it within two weeks.”
The media designer used a Barco RLM-W12, their 12,000-lumen projector, which he found to be surprisingly quiet, to present many still and moving images onto a cyc measuring 30 by 16 feet (HxW). The most impressive image in the show is the nighttime view of Centolucci from the balcony of the palace, with stars twinkling in the distance. Princess Constance and her music teacher, Alvaro, fall in love at that moment, sparking a passionate affair behind the back of Constance’s secretly gay husband.
Blending the Real and the Imagined
Loney created the view of the country’s lake and its mountainous surroundings by researching hundreds of different images from the mountainous landscapes of Germany, Monaco and Switzerland, “and basically created this full-on collage of it, this giant matte painting [that was like] an ode to the Alpine states,” he explains. “It was a collage made out of countries that already existed.”
The highly romantic moment was critical because it not only showed love blossoming but allowed the frustrated teacher to express the dashed hopes and dreams of himself and other economically deprived Centoluccian artists, a wrong that Constance vows to right. “The huge thing about Centolucci is that the lake plays an important role in it,” says Loney. “We wanted to create something awe-inspiring as possible to create this sense of raw emotion where they start dreaming themselves a little bit.”
Later in the show, when she gives a public speech and goes off script, Constance vows to raise up support for artists in her country and invites citizens to enter the royal palace, much to the dismay of her adopted family. The camera tracks into the palace and offers a view of the stately interior. Loney researched both Alpine architecture and European architecture with regards to what their palace interiors looked like.
“I took that and made it into 3D and tried to watch closely with what [director/choreographer] Paul [Stancato] was doing with the choreography,” says Loney. “It basically influenced how everything would be animated through these virtual environments. As the Centoluccians come onto the stage and into the Royal Hall, we wanted the camera to virtually zoom in and let us all [be] in his audience, like we’re all part of the Centoluccians coming in for the first time and looking around in awe and hope.”
Another key moment with visual motion occurs when the Prince and Princess look out their balcony and wave to their loyal citizens. Loney used “a combination of animated and found footage” — the balcony was 3D-created, and the people-in-the-crowd came from “stock footage of waving people that I found. I collaged them together to make it look like a huge crowd of people that would be cheering and waving them on, even though they never actually existed in real life.”
The Barco projector was placed above the second to last row of the audience, shooting in at as steep an angle as possible to avoid hitting the actors and avoid casting a lot of shadows. “That came out of the tech process with a program called Millumin, which was the mapping/video playback software that we used,” says Loney. “Millumin is an amazing program. Not only is it great for video playback and queuing, it makes it very quick and efficient to do masking on-the-fly.”
The biggest challenge that Loney faced with Icon was the very fast development process, but in the end, he found the whole experience rewarding. He liked the fact that because the tech process was only going to last three or four hours, he needed to have all the content created before he even walked into the theater, then it had to be preprogrammed and pre-queued.
“I had to get about 95 percent of the content phased the week prior to going into tech,” he recalls. “So I could actually bring my laptop with Millumin on it, with all the content loaded and programmed during the rehearsals, and during the dress rehearsal, I could pre-time different things and see how times different timings and phase could actually help each other with the choreography that they were doing in the dress run. So by the time we got into the theater, it was basically plug-and-play and ready to go.”
Going Back in Time
Like Kevan Loney, Dan Scully, the video designer for A Scythe Of Time, a satirical take on the work of Edgar Allen Poe, scaled back from a larger project (the national tour of If/Then at various performing arts centers) to a very limited run at the 98-seat June Havoc Theatre at the Abingdon Theatre Company. Scully also worked previously on the Broadway production of Rocky.
A Scythe Of Time transports us to London in 1881. A media magnate has gobbled up all the local newspapers except for the modest paper of Signore Zenobia, an independent woman who refuses to sell out to him. But his infamous and scandalous Blackwood Articles, written by desperate authors who seek posthumous fame by chronicling their own suicides, have taken the city by storm. Zenobia seeks to crank her own, faking her own death, but through a twist of fate is accidentally decapitated by the minute hand of a clock tower through which she is peering out over the city. Things get weirder from there.
Scully reports that the genesis for the video work was that critical moment in the show. “When you read the script, her head is cut off by the hand of the clock, and that’s not something you were going to be able to load in three hours in a NYMF setting,” he concedes. “Director David Alpert and I have worked on a couple of projects together. [He said], ‘Help me solve this problem. How do we stage this?’ It was the focus where we spent the precious, limited rehearsal and tech we had to make sure we nailed that sequence.”
Alpert and Scully acted out the comically tragic sequence over numerous Skype video calls. In the rehearsal room, they staged the scene by pretending the clock was there, and the video designer storyboarded it with placeholders for people so the director could envision how it was all going to play out. As Scully points out, given the limited tech time on the show — one could arrive at the theatre at 9 a.m. and be giving their first performance that night — problem solving had to be worked out ahead of time. He credits lighting designer Nick Solyom with being very cooperative and working things out. “Lighting and projection can have different needs, and Nick was great in helping us,” says Scully.
Simulating a Beheading
How does one stage a decapitation without a head rolling off and without an actual clock hand? An existing seam, attached with a modest amount of Velcro, was stitched into the 12-by-8-foot (WxH) screen that allowed Lesli Margherita (the actress playing Zenobia) to pop her head through, around which was projected the cropped image of the clock with the slowly descending minute hand. Solyom avoiding casting light on the screen, and the predominately black and white imagery helped mask the appearance of the seam, even at close range in a small theater.
The video designer praises Margherita for her performance during this key moment in the musical. “She had to keep her head up [while] bent over from behind, hit the light without knocking her hat or wig off, and still be funny,” recalls Scully. “She had to do all these physical contortions and land jokes and land the moment, and she did a great job. It was great to see something you built with computer screens and in phone calls all come together with flesh and blood people.”
A self-admitted sucker for good blood splatter, Scully restrained the color palette of the morbidly funny musical, which made the red of the blood stand out even more. For the actual decapitation, actors playing deceased characters rolled the screen around to reveal Zenobia from the back. When the clock hand cut her head off, a video splash of red exploded near the opening where her head was stuck.
Other imagery that was implemented throughout the show included map work, office and parlor interiors and other static imagery that was done in the style of paper and ink to keep the literary metaphor of the story going. Scully eschewed laziness in his approach. “It’s easy with these types of projects…we are in front of a clock tower, let’s go find a picture of a clock tower,” he states. “It starts becoming a family vacation slideshow, and it was important to me that it maintained a texture that made sense within the world of the show.”
There was also “pseudo-shadowplay.” Some moving imagery was shot against a green screen in the rehearsal room, most notably a hanging sequence that takes place at the start of the show. “We shot [the actor] in the rehearsal room against a green screen, but his feet were on the ground,” explains Scully. “We worked out to get a harness and rig him and do it safely and properly, and within the time constraints. His tippy-toe acting of being strangled was amazing. It didn’t require that much. I was able to take his acting and apply a little bit more motion to it, for swinging and dropping and blur it a little bit to get a sense of the paper. That was a great combination of shot footage and animation work.” Other shadowplay involved the descriptions of the different author’s deaths, such as being buried alive. “The buried alive sequence of dirt falling on him was ink being dropped into water to try to keep the literary print metaphor going through the deaths.”
The projector used was a Panasonic PT-DZ6710. Playback was on QLab, and the animation was mostly done with Adobe After Effects. The projector was placed about five rows back and angled fairly steep down to the stage. There was not a lot of wiggle room in the venue.
“The thing for me that was personally useful on this project was simulating a lot of the ink and drawing technique,” explains Scully. “With the repertoire of animation knowledge that I have, how do you watercolor in the background of this? Just learning the vocabulary was interesting. And working with great people. David was great. NYMF was great. The NYMF people were so kind. It was fun.”
