Thursday, September 15, 2011
Automation - The Technology Behind Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark
prglive's Channel: PRG presents a series of "webisodes" about the innovative technologies used in the new musical Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark. Each episode includes interviews with the designers and PRG personnel discussing the technology behind this groundbreaking production.
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4 comments:
The spectacle of Spiderman is really and truly amazing as is the scope. 145 automation effects in one show is to me both excessive and exciting. The fact that all of the items are built by PRG and all of the equipment is PRG equipment concerns me. The number of problems documented with this show I would have expected that the vendor was someone with less of a reputation than PRG. As someone who really can not speak to the complexities of what they were tasked with I still would have expected better product reliability from PRG. With the PRG bashing aside I will say that the amount of shop and staff resources that were needed to pull off the effects called for by the show really puts this type of show into the realm of only a few shops. It was kind of interesting that the concepts and processes that they were using for the automation were bastardization of existing technologies from other fields. It makes me wonder if entertainment technology, specifically scenery, will ever be a lucrative and stable enough field that we will be running off of a system that is not just slapped together out of re purposed technologies from other industry. It is very cool that PRG has put these videos up on Youtube, but it would be really cool if they went into a little more depth.
In response to Luke's thoughts on bastardizing industrial technology, isn't that what theatre has done all along, going back hundreds of years with rigging?
The obvious reason for PRG's contract on this show is that Jerry Harris, the show's producer, owns PRG. Because of that, equipment limitations were placed designers, but the end product is a technical marvel.
I watched their lighting video as well, and was most interested in their use of data from the automation system to control automated lighting; as more standard data formats appear and control systems for each technical discipline become more versatile and capable, I expect that we'll see even more impressive cross-department integration.
Some of the information that they showcase is decently interesting and eye opening. I would like them to show more about how they did some of the things that they did. When they said that PRG is an earth braking shop they are somewhat but they did not mention that they had months and months to load in the show and get it working. I understand that it is a show that has a lot of things that are cutting edge but look at vagus they work under similar conditions and they do things that are just as complex. I do understand that they did do this first for Broadway and they may have changed the way it is done. It will take a lot of time for everyone to do the same just because the economy is not doing that well.
I agree with most of America that this show is over mechanized. I DID see it in New York when it was in its last manifestation and the technology over shadowed the "theatre" at every turn. My wife and I were bored between flying effects and the musical numbers seemed filler for the crew to reset for the next flying sequence. The story of Spiderman is epic and it is overshadowed by spectacle. Phantom and Wicked and Mary Poppins and Peter Pan all have spectacular effects but with them, "the play IS the thing".
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