On Oct 24, 2009, Las Vegas icon Wayne Newton opened his latest, and possibly last, long term engagement in a Las Vegas showroom – Once Before I Go, staged at the Tropicana Hotel's Tiffany Theater. From the beginning, "Mr. Las Vegas" promised something different. Although the show is an autobiographical recap of songs and monologues from the entertainer's 50-year career, the audience doesn't have to rely on memory alone to put the entertainer's long career in a visual context. For that, there's video.
I was asked to work on this project, both as a lighting and video designer. For me, it was a project of a lifetime, not just for the chance to work closely with an entertainer of Wayne Newton's stature, but also for the chance to wear both lighting and video hats on a production that relied so heavily on video for its narrative flow.
The majority of the show has some type of video element in play, so it was important to find a perfect balance between lighting, projection and LED. The new technology I used to portray the many memories from Wayne Newton's years in Las Vegas included 14 Elation EVLED 1024SMD 20mm LED video panels, two Catalyst v3 and v4 media servers, three Barco 9k projectors, one Sanyo 6.5k projector and four video screens ranging in sizes from 9 feet by 12 feet and 10 feet by 15 feet.
Tool Selection
Once Before I Go features a multi-tiered band cart that measures about 40 feet in length by 30 feet high. It travels up and down stage at various points in the show. From the beginning, we planned that all of the fascias of the band cart would be uplit by some sort of LED product. In addition to the impact of color, I really wanted to add video to the fascias of the bottom level to better tie in the video elements being shown on the larger projection screens above the band. This added energy as well as a sense of mixing traditional theatrical equipment with current technology and completed the "look" of the show.
The Elation LED panels proved well-suited for this project. The size and resolution of the panels were a good match for the area we had to work with on the cart, and the scenery artists specifically designed mounting hardware for this to work. After mounting the panels to the cart, all we needed to do was run the signal wire and create a pixel map for the panels. Working with the staff at Elation, we were up and running in just a few days once the panels arrived.
With so many options to choose from, it seemed a little overwhelming at first to try to narrow down to one product. Some representatives from Elation happened to be in Las Vegas a week or so before we began scenic construction, and we were able to preview these panels. That effectively planted the seed in my mind to use them.
Other factors behind my choice include the panels' resolution and pixel pitch; features like power consumption, color temperature, weight, transparency, construction materials; ease of use; and, of course, cost.
Projection
Each musical number in Once Before I Go is framed by video elements, ranging from one to three screens, in addition to the LED panels. Almost all songs contain video clips and/or still images ranging from early performances in Wayne Newton's career to more recent appearances on the USO tour as well as personal photos, letters and videos.
Recording the clips into lighting cues meant that I needed to edit each video clip if needed and arrange them into sections similar to how I break a song into sections: verse, chorus, solo, etc. Then it was very easy to use layers and crossfade between images using scale, position and rotate to provide more interesting transitions.
While much of this could have been accomplished in several ways, using media servers and controlling them via a lighting console was by far the smartest choice. Not only did it simplify the number of pieces of equipment needed, it simplified the operation of the show as well, making the playback of both lighting and video cues consistent from night to night.
Content
From the beginning, I was given access to hard-to-come-by videos and photos of Wayne Newton's career. In many cases, the video footage was on VHS, and thus had to be converted to digital format.
Along with the need to convert the clips, most required editing for length as well. For which I used Apple's Final Cut Pro. In all cases of video, I needed to convert the format to the proper codecs and file type needed for Catalyst. So there were many hours spent chopping, rendering and exporting.
As for the still images, there were hundreds of images to scan, size, clean up, crop, and optimize for Catalyst. At one point I found myself actually sitting in Mr. Newton's dining room with my scanner and computer going through the many photos we selected to use in the show.
Once the still images were digitized, I then had to work on creative ways to feature them in the show, without making the audience feel like they are watching a slideshow. To do that, I worked with many effects plug-ins for Final Cut as well as the built-in Visual FX found in Catalyst in order to make the photos come alive.
I also worked with footage from Mr. Newton's television guest appearances on the The Lucy Show, The Dean Martin Show and The Sammy Davis Jr. Show. All of these TV clips contained audio that needed to play, so I chose a media server that I knew could handle audio.
Based on local availability, I decided to use Catalyst v4 (for me, an easy choice, considering I cut my teeth on this product). The Catalyst v4 system made working with the audio portion of these clips relatively simple; just select the clip and choose PLAYMODE>play audio. This eliminated the need for using SMPTE or external DVD players to sync the audio and video.
These moments are an important part of the show, and it was important that the technical portion of the production work consistently well, night after night. In one example, Wayne Newton sings live along with a recorded clip. Because the live band is also playing along, a click track was needed. But this is not a problem for the media server setup. Catalyst simply sends out the click track on the left channel and the recorded audio in mono on the right channel. The sound guys do the rest.
Lessons Learned
There were several useful things I learned about using media servers with image-specific content. For instance, if you have a video that needs to run the entire length of the song, it is definitely better to cut it into sections and start each clip at an appropriate point in the song (verse, chorus, etc,) than to try to play one video or use Inframes and Outframes.
Why? One reason, really. If you need to jump to a specific part of the song, the video will always be at the right part of the video. And if you need to restart that section, it works every time. But if you really need a second reason, it would be tempo. The band will inevitably speed up or slow down on any given night, and there is no way to get a video back in sync if it's all one clip.
Another important tip is that you always need an emergency stop cue to reset a video clip, especially those that contain audio, because unless you release the whole fader, the clip will just keep playing, even when you want it to stop. I found that the simplest way was just to create a cue on a different fader with playmode set to Inframe and Inframe set to 0. That's all it really took, and it worked with any video, if we needed to restart for some reason.
Our mission was to choose technical elements of the show that could handle the demands of this production and give an updated feel to the memories of the glamour of Las Vegas lounge shows from years ago. In my opinion, these tools helped us achieve a fitting tribute to the career highlights of one of the greatest Las Vegas entertainers ever.
