Stage Directions: This is a cool story about how designers push the limits, and the companies that help them. Projection designer William Cusick needed a special camera effect for the current Off-Broadway production of Bare. Cusick was asked to create an effect where a live-feed from a camera-phone would get projected on set, and a still picture would be taken from the feed, then used later in the show. For this not-inconsiderable technical challenge, he turned to WorldStage. Michael Kohler at WorldStage wrote a custom live-streaming app that could accomplish the effect.
5 comments:
A little extreme, but nonetheless, a very good instance of theatre at its finest. Using a camera phone seems almost silly, because the image quality is terrible, especially in large format. But obviously there is some aspect of it that the designer wants, and I think that building an app to accomplish that is a cool idea. Also a camera phone and a custom app is very cheap, and is a very good example of theatre's resourcefulness.
I agree with rmarkowi, making a custom app to get a photo on stage seems a little extreme. A much simpler solution would be to just have a pre filmed video that gets projected. The audience will never be able to tell the diffidence between the live and pre recorded shots. After all the goal of the actors is to make every nights performance as similar as they can.
At the same time I think that this is an important step forward toward getting more technological and theatre seamlessly interwoven. And that may lead to some amazing works of theatrical art.
If anything, this example of using the iPhone app to solve a video effect challenge, displays the accessibility of program development. The existence of iPhone apps and apple developer licenses places more power in the hands of consumers and developers to create software to solve smaller problems. If everyone didn't have an iPhone, and the creation of apps wasn't so easy (granted I couldn't imagine trying to create an app...) then this solution wouldn't have been as affordable or, probably, fun for the designer.
This does show how easy it must be to create an application, but it probably was not so necessary for the show. If it is done well enough the audience will not be able to tell that this app was used as opposed to a video Cue in like, QLab. Then again, big shows like that like to come up with ideas like these for the publicity, so they can say they were the first to pull something like this, which is honestly, a part of our business.
Just like akiva, ruben, and simone I think it would have been much simpler to just pre-record a video of what would be taken with the phone and then time the acting to the video. However it is much cooler to write a custom app just for the performance. Also depending on the lag it could look more or less realistic than a video. But at the very least this is a very cool integration of technology into live performance.
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