www.avinteractive.com: Giacomo Puccini‘s last opera, Turandot, which has charmed lovers of classical music for almost 100 years, is the source of the aria “Nessun Dorma” (None shall sleep), which achieved wider fame as the theme music for the FIFA World Cup in Italy in 1990.
8 comments:
I love open air theatre SO MUCH. I’ve been volunteering at an open air theatre company since I was little and I really enjoy how design elements need to both look good and interact well with an uncontrolled environment. Lighting in open air theatre is so hard due to the fact that the lack of walls and roof can affect the way light reflects and fills the stage. From my understanding, you need more lights and you need to cover an area more diligently than usual. It was also so interesting to me that they used live software to adjust lights in real time with performers. This makes sense because the environment is far less controlled than in a regular theatre, but the ability to remotely change lighting from a tent far from the stage is so cool, especially with so many lights to keep track of. I really want to visit this natural open air stage and see a show on it, especially if this is the normal level of production that they reach.
The outside theatre world has become more and more common throughout COVID. I think this article is great at showing that even during COVID people are still trying to make things work. When COVID first hit, the entire entertainment industry was shut down and people really struggled to find work, considering this was their entire living and source of income. This marvel of a production represents the time and skill it takes from so many people to build a show like this from the ground up. Unlike a semi-common stigma that “these aren’t real jobs” or “anybody can do that”, these professionals are essentially engineers that are trained to use specialized software to fit their needs. They are needing to build stages, set up control booths, program entire shows and make sure that everything runs smoothly. This Entire production, not just the projection mapping, goes to show that the people needed to overcome all these challenges can’t be just anyone.
Wow.... this is an absolutely incredible venue, not to mention the candy store of lighting, sound, and video equipment. I know the 30k projectors were the big name in this article (and wow, that must have been incredible), but also, a one hundred and eighteen point d&b sound system with TiMax and a DiGiCo SD series console is...... hot. I can't imagine working with that kind of system in such a monumentally scaled place. I hadn't heard about this quarry before, but I would really like to see something there now (or even better, work on something there). Especially for a romantic era opera like Turandot, I can hardly imagine a better venue, and there's so many interesting ways you could build things in or around the rocks to really tie a performance to the locale. This must have been a very exciting performance to be a part of or to see.
This production looks incredible. The technical specifications absolutely blew my mind – I cannot even begin to imagine how much such a setup would cost. First of all, the set for the piece was absolutely huge. A 60 meter wide stage is at least triple the size of anything I have ever witnessed firsthand. To cover all of the projection surfaces, they implemented ten Panasonic RZ series projectors. I did a little bit of research and learned that these projectors retail around $100,000 each – and this price doesn’t include the lenses. And there were ten of them. Looking into the specs of the projectors, I certainly learned a lot – these things are powerful. I have to wonder – what was the throw distance? How far were the projectors from the stage? I also wonder how they were mapped and with how much overlap? The servers processing the projections must’ve also been pretty ridiculous considering they were handling multiple terabytes of data at once. I don’t even have that much data in all of my files and my external hard drive – I have maybe two terabytes total. To think that the data for just projections for this one show exceeds all of the files I have saved and stored in my laptop for over six years now is mind blowing. I would have loved to see this show – or better yet, have been a part of working the show.
The idea of open air theatre in a quarry honestly makes too much sense. I love the juxtaposition of hewn stone and sleek tech coming together to create something new.
I am continually blown away by the video media side of things. The massive rise of projections in the last decade or so has been incredible to watch. And it's nice that the tech and software is so cheap and accessible for smaller venues. Granted the projectors used in this show are prohibitively expensive, but I've always seen productions of this scale as tests in the cutting edge. I would love to see the bottom line cost of a production like this, as well as their production calendar because surely the coordination of personnel and resources for something of this size is crazy.
The setup of the show seems fantastic. I would love to experience it live. Seeing outdoor theatre designed in such a profound way is so great to see, especially in the time of COVID. It gives audiences a way to experience high budget theatre in safe, open-air way. The projection house is intricate and complex. I would be so curious to see the projector plots. The projectors are powerful, but I am curious what the throw distance would be. I am also curious how they were housed and protected against the elements. I saw the ArtMart show in Downtown Chicago over the summer. The show was projected on a building and viewed from a bridge across the river. The projectors were built in a glass case into the bridge to make the install permanent. That was something I had never seen before. I am also rather interested in the PIXERA technology.
Projection mapping is intense enough as it is, why would somebody add the challenge of mapping out a quarry to that equation? The person who made this suggestion surely has never seen a media designer spend hours upon hours or pull an all nighter mapping out a set. This brings up the old belief that directors/producers should know enough about every department to know when designers, technicians, or shop heads bring something up that sounds too infeasible they will know when to say no. In this case, the designer probably should have been the one to say no, especially if the idea came from the director or the producer who is supposed to have their back. Though the idea of projection mapping a quarry does seem impossible, it seems that with some excellent equipment they were able to accomplish this herculean task. This is certainly a feat for the designer and technicians working on the production, and would definitely be a fun bullet point and conversation starter on a resume.
First off, the set and the location look absolutely incredible. I love the added aesthetic that being placed in a quarry give it as opposed to being on a stage. Being outside adds another layer of challenges due to the elements that don’t really exist indoors, so the solutions around this are always interesting. Not to mention the absolute SCALE of it all. I remember seeing how intense the projection mapping for the show Toruk was, and that production was considerably smaller. I can’t even imagine what it would take to set up and control that many projectors, lights, speakers, etc. I’m not always the biggest fan of projections in shows since sometimes they don’t quite feel like they fit, but the ones used here look really cool. I’d love to see a video of them in action. I know this article was about the projections, but from a TD perspective I think it would be neat building the set in a quarry and dealing with the various new challenges that would bring.
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