Saturday, September 24, 2011
Making Spider-Man’s Projections
Live Design: Media designer Howard Werner, associate media designer/video technician Jason Lindahl, media programmer Phil Gilbert, and PRG video project manager Jeff Kaye discuss the making of the technical system for Spider-Man: Turn Off The Dark.
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7 comments:
The LED panels are, in my mind, the coolest unit in the show.
One comment that rang true to me, was that they designed a flexible system with a great deal of control. Spiderman may be on a whole different plane of scale, but when introducing media into a production, the scale instantly increases. It's important for media systems of all shows to be flexible in order to help expedite the tech process.
I don't know a whole lot about the media world but it was great to hear what the Designers/Technical team liked about the system. I also loved hearing that the collaboration with PRG was extremely successful and that the company was willing to spend the money and time in order to ultimately make a superior product. They seem to understand the idea of doing a little more work now in order to reap the benefits later. Although a little bit of an ad for PRG I otherwise found the information interesting.
I think the technology used in and developed for Spider Man is astronomical. To take such a simple idea like projecting video on stage and turn it into a production like Spider Man take s a huge team of software developers, technicians, programers, and designers. To see a little bit of the equipment used by the production team was really cool. I can't imagine how many hours of programming it took to create the projection media. It must also take a highly skilled operator to run the show every performance in order to adjust the video streams in the event that a single item is off on stage by fractions of a second, since something like that would be visible to a trained eye in the audience.
It is great to see the degree of support offered by PRG to the Spiderman team particularly in developing new features rapidly and when they were requested by the team. I saw the show twice and as Howard spoke to, everything integrated very seamlessly and the media content seemed fairly simple even though I had some knowledge of the crazy sophisticated technology on the back end I don't think I even to this moment comprehend the complexity of a system that when presented to the audience makes it look like a piece of cake.
While I agree with the comments saying that the technology is amazing, I fear that as this is integrated into more shows it will change the dynamic of storytelling. The current audience of Broadway shows seems to be clamoring for more of these fast paced musicals to match our fast paced lives. It seems to me that this is entertainment for a digital age which is great but will it supplant the slower paced straight shows on the Broadway scale?
It's great to see that PRG is so kind about listening to it's users to change there products to make it even better for our uses. It is also exciting to hear about how the panels all came together and how they got to change and adjust them so easily through a slight turn of a knob on the console, rather than taking an extra long time and having to edit them on an outside source. I would love to get to work on a production that has the same caliber of projection throughout the show.
The important takeaway from this PRG ad is that the system was designed with flexibility specially in mind. I think often when incorporating complex technology into shows, we think of discreet moments or ideas based on initial concept ideas and do not design the system to be flexible enough to accommodate adds and changes late in the process. You must walk a fine line of not asking for extra equipment that you may or may not use (especially in a commercial production), but it is often more expensive to add things late in the process as opposed to padding your supply at the beginning.
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