While the recent revival of the classic Broadway musical Guys and Dolls starring Oliver Platt, Craig Bierko and Lauren Graham lasted only 149 performances (including previews), it will likely stand out for a more important reason: its use of 3D video animation to extend the sets and give the show a more cinematic feeling. CG Meets Broadway
“It was definitely an attractive project because there had never been a production like this,” declares co-video designer Ari Novak, who created the animation for the show and who is also creative director for Oracle Film Group. “No one had ever tried to marry computer generated imagery and things you do on a movie on this scale into a Broadway show. Typically projections have always been this 2D element. They weren’t trying to give you this rabbit hole where you could go further and deeper and create a different type of illusion, and I think we’re really at the tip of the iceberg on what can be done. I think it can go much, much further and can be much more experiential. There are a lot of technologies out there that we’re getting involved with that can really marry what’s film and what’s real and give you something new and special.”
The co-video designers for the show, Novak and veteran set designer Dustin O’Neill, came from two different backgrounds but had worked in somewhat similar ways. Novak has worked on special effects teams for movies like Borat and Live Free or Die Hard, Sci Fi Channel films and various commercials. O’Neill has worked with 3D modeling and pre-visualization for Broadway shows and had a previous history of working with director Des McAnuff. The duo worked on the research and sketches. Novak did the modeling and created the set pieces (and the plane sequence), and O’Neill would animate them in the theatre and then tweak them back and forth with his collaborator. While Novak was toiling at his studio facilities, O’Neill worked at the Nederlander Theatre with McAnuff and the lighting team to make sure everything coordinated properly between the video and scenic design aspects.
This incarnation of Guys and Dolls featured all the singing and dancing that has made it popular over the last 50 years, and many of the street scenes featured flashy signs that jutted forth from the wings, imbuing the stage with an urban feeling that was enhanced by the street scenes projected on a 32-foot-by-20-foot Toshiba LED screen at the back of the stage. The animated video work added cinematic imagery to the show by virtually pushing the sets deeper into the background, akin to the digital set extension work that is surfacing in more and more Hollywood films. The idea for the video wall came about because director Des McAnuff wanted to try something different, something more cinematic and to find ways to extend the set.
50 Blocks Long
“Physically you have this limited piece of real estate onstage,” notes Novak, “and he wanted to take it much further. Essentially we sat down and talked about this idea of extending the scenery design out further. What would it be like if you could open that window and it went for 50 blocks? There are times in the show where you’ll see — let’s say in the mission, which is essentially a static piece — the mission door comes in and lines up with the molding that’s in our CG wall just perfectly. When you look at the door and you look at the brownstone that it connects to in the background, the video wall, the scale, the molding and the paint job was identical. That’s the way we set it up and designed it. The approach was that we used the same technology you would use at Pixar [by] using Maya, which is software with which you create 3D movies and special effects for film, but creating this wall and creating content in there that would be to the proper scale for things that were onstage. It was an extension, not some sort of separate piece.”
Novak says that the video was created in layers. The process involved the duo going back and researching New York City by literally using insurance maps from 1935. “We built a New York City in CG using Maya virtually,” he reveals. “We knew we were going to be in Times Square, we knew we were going to be in Hell’s Kitchen, and each piece, each building was a separate layer. Using the (Green Hippo Hippotizer media server) system we were able to control every building, every tress leg, and every car as separate layers, so as Des wanted something to move we could move it. If he wanted to move up a street, we would be able to create that using our 3D camera and our layers to be able to create that sense of movement. The major moving pieces are the opening number and a lot of our transitions; then we tried to settle into static pieces so they wouldn’t take away from any of the performances.”
They also had to ensure that the LED wall would not be too distracting. “We had to make a lot of creative adjustments so it didn’t look like they were standing in front of a big TV,” says Novak. They flew in a gray RP screen approximately one-fifth of an inch thick in front of the LED wall to avoid getting the “nasty outline” that usually forms around actors when they stand before one. They also placed a black bobbinette downstage to cut down on glare and bounce light away from the screen. “By putting in an RP screen it gave a little bit of a softer look [to the LED] which isn’t ideal when you’re doing a movie, but it softened it up so it was a lot easier on the eye,” adds Novak.
Hitting the Sweet Spot
Even though Novak and O’Neill tried to make the video experience equally satisfying for everyone attending Guys and Dolls, they did acknowledge that theatergoers sitting in different spots would inevitably view their work differently. “When you’re in the center in that ideal seat that lines up, there are moments, because our horizon line is just 6 inches off the deck, that it really looks like you can really walk into that wall,” states O’Neill. “Then you go into the balcony and it looks like a flat plane. There were other [scenes] where we far more abstracted. The scene where we go to the docks at the end of the first act was more abstracted and looked more like a painting from the orchestra. Meanwhile you’d go to the balcony and because of the skewed perspective it really looked seamless.”
“We had to make some choices on where the majority of the audience was going to sit and where we wanted the sweet spot to be,” adds Novak. “Obviously, depending upon where you’re sitting, it’s not going to be as perfect. So we determined where the majority of the audience would be sitting and what the angle would be and try to place them to give the most people the best experience and the best perspective, and then make some adjustments here and there so that people who were setting off on the wings and up higher wouldn’t be completely sacrificed. There was a little bit of a give-and-take to get an overall good view for everybody.”
While they say all of their projections featured movement, some were more dynamic than others. There were street scenes with plenty of background action, and during the scene where two characters fly to Havana the set pieces and actors leave the stage to spotlight an animated scene of a plane flying away, which segues into a restaurant scene that features only subtly moving water in the background.
“Havana was a triumph for it and was a great tool in the fact that New York had a very distinct style and a sense of motion about it, and Havana was very still,” says O’Neill. “Other than getting there and coming back there was one basic look and three different light setups so that we could just support time of day and really let it be about this little romance story that happens in the midst of the larger story. [With] some of the larger scenic elements that were onstage at any point, we really just receded into the background. There was slight movement to the water. We really just filled in the gaps there.”
Gimmicks Be Gone
Both Novak and O’Neill feel that video projections and any other technology must be used in service to the story, not as a flashy effect to woo audiences. Theatre is about storytelling and emotion, not gimmickry. “I think Des did a phenomenal job in picking his moments when the video was moving around and doing things to bring people into the story, and then letting it fade back and letting the story play out,” says Novak.
O’Neill feels that biggest challenges in working on Guys and Dolls were the time constraints they had and being able to deliver everything in the smallest space possible. “Once you got into tech and into the space, no matter how well you storyboard it, or no matter what you show people during what step of the process, inevitably in a theatre environment when you walk into a rehearsal with an actor under lights and in costume, sometimes it just doesn’t work anymore,” admits O’Neill. “We had to be as flexible and as quick as possible and really not work ourselves into a corner, and I think we were extremely successful with Ari’s crew and myself and our programmer [Tommy Hague] at really never having to say, ‘No, we can’t do that. That doesn’t work. Somebody else needs to make this work or make this moment better because we’re locked in.’ I don’t think we ever had a moment like that.”
“We had two weeks in a rehearsal to see things live in the space and make adjustments with light,” adds O’Neill. “We needed to keep things flexible on certain parameters to be able to adjust to lighting changes. Lighting the actors always wins out over something pretty, so we need to be flexible to match that. It was a real merging of the two technologies as far as taking this ultra-realistic 3D environment and breaking it into the smallest piece possible and delivering it in a way that the Hippotizer could allow us to be as flexible as possible in real time.”
Novak says they wanted to add something to the visual language that would help paint the picture but still letting the audience add in their own details with their imaginations. “I think it’s striking a certain balance,” he believes. “The style of animation we went for was inspired by Edward Hopper paintings, which has a certain amount of detail that’s not there. You see enough to know what it is, but if you really take a look at a Hopper painting there’s not a lot there. It really lets your eye do the magic. That’s a lot of what we were going for with Guys and Dolls.”
