Techie Talk: Painting with Light’s Luc Peumans energised a creative team to deliver video content for a striking 3D digital set and lighting design for the highly acclaimed Judas TheaterProducties staging of “Helene Fourment” a new musical centred around Baroque painter Peter Paul Rubens’ young muse, which played at the Fakkeltheater, Antwerp, proving a big hit with both critics and the public.
3 comments:
Creating a set through projection is an interesting idea. Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time did a similar thing with their set, although instead of a wall and columns they box off the stage and project on all the walls. I liked the set through projection idea when I saw Curious Incident but I’m not sure how I fell about it in the context of Helene Fourment. On one hand I think its really cool that they were able to do all of this with project and video. At the same time though, I don’t really like how the scenery looks in the pictures of the show, the pieces that are meant to be paintings look good but the architectural parts don’t quite look right in some of the pictures. Sometimes, especially in the second one they don’t quite look real. I think its certainly a technique that worth further exploring but I don’t think I’d want to use it for a show myself.
While it appears this projection technique was successful in the context of this show I have to wonder about its application to shows with different emphases and scopes. This projection method seems to have benefitted from the almost insular quality of the main character. The feelings evoked by the projections appeared to have meshed well with the show's content. As the opening sequence is described, the projected scene shifts were subtle. I would imagine more sudden scene changes - as might be required in a bigger or simply different show - might be jarring and detract from some of the beauty and finesse of the projections themselves. Furthermore, being so reliant on such a singular, and finicky source to tell so much of the story is risky. Projections and media do not carry the same stability as, say, a traditional set might. For a production so reliant on media, a machine failure would likely be catastrophic.
Cool, I found my dream job. This us exactly why I am so excited CMU invests so much in media design, this is such an incredible platform to transform entertainment. While I agree with Amanda, this is not the solution for other situations or other shows, this is an incredible platform for abstract pieces or realistic pieces being transformed into an abstract world. While the shifts in backdrop could be jarring or sudden and take out the audience, that same quick changing of scenery happens all the time with drops! Or automation! An experienced designer can control the media shifts to be as subtle and fitting as they need it to be.
What excites me about this is the possibilities for the future. As we see huge concerts getting bigger and bigger, television and media moving in the direction of the technologically advanced, and now even traditional theater moving that way as well, we see the real impact of media design. We have grown so accustomed to traditional scenery, this shift into a technological landscape can be scary for some. But for others (like me) it is exciting and fresh. I am tired of what has already been done, please give me the future!!
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