www.avinteractive.com: How do you adapt a blockbuster film franchise such as the Fast & Furious for a live production environment without losing any of the intensity of the iconic scenes? That was the challenge Kate Dawkins Studio and dandelion + burdock faced when they were tasked with using projection mapping to produce ever-changing environments for global arena show, Fast & Furious Live.
4 comments:
When I saw the title of this article the first thing I thought was 1.) Why would they want to make a live action version of these films? They weren’t good to begin with. And 2.) They had actual cars driving on road in the films, how can that be simulated with projection in an arena?. My first question is left unanswered, but my second question was answered within the first couple of paragraphs of this article. The way that they got around replicating the realism of the film is by not even trying to. They decided that to do that just wouldn’t work so they made the live action version its own installation of the film with a new arcade like esthetic. I think that this was a smart move and something that the production probably benefited from as a whole. Sometimes when doing adaptations, you want to stick so close to the original and are afraid to diverge in fear of audience criticism, but in the case of this production, I think the divergence form the original with probably be more pleasing visually to the audience than if they tried to create a hyper realist landscape.
Why Fast and Furious needed to be turned into a theatrical style experience, the world will never know. But what I did learn from this article was super amazing and exciting. The notion of creating modular content to account for the unpredictable nature of driving cars in this way on a stage is so interesting to me. This type of performance is simply impossible to get the same every night because it has too much space for human error.
Hearing about the aesthetic that they applied to the content also really interested me. I was super intrigued by the game imagery that they applied to the show and I would assume that helps separate the experience of seeing the film from the experience of seeing the movie.
This article definitely made me interested in Kate Dawkins's work which I will certainly be following now because her work seems incredibly technologically brilliant.
Wow, this is actually pretty cool. I did not think that an adaptation of an action based piece like Fast and Furious would be able to be adapted for any kind of live experience, but it looks like they were quite successful. I think if they had tried to recreate it exactly, they would have struggled, but giving it its own identity was a good decision. It is crazy to see how far media tech has come recently to allow things like this to take place. Being able to change the apparent physical attributes of a building/space is really impressive. Making an indoor space big enough for full sized cars to drive around in and not be cramped must have been a challenge in the beginning, and it seems like the projection was really able to enhance that. I wonder how they incorporated a storyline along with it with actors. The scale must have been something difficult to get around from the audience. The distance needed to appreciate the cars is way further than that of a live actor.
My first question is why would they try to attempt to create a version of fast and the furious as a live entertainment performance. The crazy action and car crashes in the franchise barely seem attainable sometimes by the multiple takes and cuts that are meticulously performed for months of the production shooting. To mush that all together for one night of action racing scenes and big explosions of cars seems like a very difficult challenge. Relying extensively on media seemed like an appropriate thing to do to create quick scene changes for virtually no cost and to ensure no potential car crashes. The production photos look quite amazing. I am curious how well this looks from different seats in the house and how long it took to set up. Another thing I am curious about is if the media did create quick transitions live, did it ever seem a little jarring to the audience members to be stationary and have the cars go in circles to be somewhat transported to a new location under the same ground space?
-Pablo Anton
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