Going from Cuckoo's Nest to Medea/media was like going from riding a tricycle to hurtling down the highway at 70 miles per hour on a Harley. It was an incredibly complicated setup (the most complicated one we've done to date) using two computers, live video from offstage, live video from onstage, and taped video. In Cuckoo's Nest we had six cues to produce. In Medea/media we had over sixty.
First, the setup:
Not too complicated, huh? Basically, it can be broken down into a computer subsystem and a video subsystem. The computer subsystem was composed of two 166 MHz Pentiums. The original plan was to use one to run all the cues made in Quake (yes, we moved from Duke Nukem 3D to Quake, more on that later), and one to run all the Powerpoint cues. In practice, we found that switching between the cues so that Computer 1 ran all the even cues and Computer 2 ran all the odd cues (that were non-video cues) worked much better. Since both computers were basically the same in terms of power, having both run both software packages wasn't a big deal. It also provided redundancy, in case one of the computers crashed during a performance we could basically limp along on the second computer if we needed to. In fact, during the preview we had an unexplained BSOD (blue screen of death), but a reboot solved the problem. The second computer saved that show.
The video subsystem was composed of three cameras and two VCR's. The first camera was backstage in a room we converted into a studio. We draped an entire room in black, and actors would stand in that room and interact with actors onstage. In order for them to see the actors onstage, we had a second video camera in the back of the house which fed a monitor in the studio. The actor onstage could see the projected offstage actor, and the actor offstage could see and hear the onstage actor on the monitor. The third camera was onstage and controlled by a camera woman character. This was fed directly to the projector, giving us a great feedback of the actor live onstage simultaneously being projected onscreen.
Here
you can clearly see an offstage actor being projected behind the onstage actor.
Note the line at mid-chest on the projection. That's where the back wall ended
and we relied on scrim alone. We learned a lot about surface reflectivity and
how it impacts an image. It became a tradeoff, because making the projection
surface uniform caused a flatness to the set when there weren't any projections.
The added layers and textures to the set were worth the lines in the projections.
We also did pre-taped video. Believe it or not, this was probably one of the most amazing effects of the show. The scene: Medea contacts Aegeus and tries to get him to come to her aid. He appears projected and speaks with her about her predicament. She transports him from his kingdom to her chamber, and the actor steps through the screen as his video image disappears. We just pre-taped his half of the conversation with the appropriate pauses. Since the tape was always the same, the actress playing Medea (Jessica Sands) soon got the rhythm of the conversation and could make her lines fit the pauses quite well, making it look like a live conversation. At the end of the conversation, the actor steps through a slit in the screen as the sound op plays a tinkle-tinkle fairy bell sound, and voila! A video becomes live!
Finally, we went to Quake as our environment builder. Quake made use of the then nascent 3D accelerator video technology (then represented in the Voodoo1 accelerator cards). Duke Nukem had a cartoony quality to it's environments, and that was fine for Chief Bromden's dream worlds. Medea worked in the clash between the Apollonian Greek world and the Dionysian barbarian world. During our texture hunt we captured a whole bunch of different marbles around campus, and all sorts of rock textures were already availble. Additionally, we could make environments that would animate or deform. Lava pools could shoot fire, as the Apollonian world collapes metaphorically onstage, we could collapse it literally in our environments. In the final moments of the play, we programmed a virtual earthquake where a greek temple collapsed, at the same time, the physical set onstage collapsed.
Here
Medea enters the virtual Temple of Hecate. One of the great things about the
virtual environments is that we can whisk the onstage character along, making
them travel and go places they don't want to go. Simple movements on the part
of the actors go a long way in creating this effect. You can also see the physical
set juxtaposed nicely on the virtual set. In order to see the actor onstage,
we had to wash out the image a bit, otherwise the actor would disappear as the
image is projected on them too.
The final element we used was Powerpoint slides. I can see worldwide cringing already, but a significant aspect of the show was frequent CNN-like news reports. Powerpoint was perfect for preparing all that glossy media for the newscasts. I'm sure we've all seen too many boring Powerpoint presentations, but it does have a number of things to recommend it: it's everywhere, it's easy to learn, and it's adaptable to much more than what it was designed for. Not only could we use it for logos in the newscasts, but we could get it to look like a number of computer screens, so when we needed to project an email exchange, it was quite simple to prepare slides that looked like simple unix screens.
One
other significant thing that we don't have a still picture of, is the use of
pre-recorded video of an actor in conversation with the actress onstage. Basically,
the actor was taped saying his lines and leaving pauses for the actress onstage
to say her lines. The correct timing was done by someone off-camera mouthing
the lines and cueing the onscreen actor when it was time to say the next line.
In performance this didn't pose much of a problem for the actress onstage, because
the onscreen actor was the same every night. What this allowed us to do was
"conjure" the projected actor using a slit in the screen. At the appropriate
moment, the actual actor stepped through the screen where he was projected.
The projection was then quickly turned off and voila! We have gone from a 2D
projection to a living breathing human in the blink of an eye. Add a little
magical sound effect and you dazzle the audience.
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