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Thursday, March 26, 2026
UK Theatremakers Petition for New Video Design Category at the Olivier Awards
www.broadwayworld.com: UK desigers have come together to call for a new category at the Olivier Awards acknowledging Video Design. A petition has been signed by over 100 artsist in the UK theatre community.
This is awesome! Why has this not happened already? Video is emerging as one of the most exciting elements of theatre! Its future is very exciting! I am really intrigued to see how future productions use this technology! Pretty much all new productions have some video elements to them, and the artists that are making these things happen deserve to be recognized! This applies for the Tony Awards too. Why are video designers being recognized as scenic? Especially when there are shows like Redwood, where the entire stage is covered in a video wall, there should be some system of recognition. I feel like this is such an exciting medium, because it can change the entire stage with the press of a button in the same way that lighting can. However, so much more information and movement can be included with video! I loved the video effects in Frozen the Musical! My jaw dropped when Elsa started shooting ice, and the video actually interacted with scenic elements and scrims!
I do think that the theater interest rate should start making room for video and media design as it's becoming very popular in every single Broadway show that we see nowadays, and it's only making its way to universities, and then to high schools, and then to children's Theatre. It's becoming a real thing, and I think that started with the inspiration of dear of Evan Hansen with the phones being on stage and us being able to see it. And because it is so popular nowadays, I feel like it would be wrong to discount it because it is an art form, and it is theater in art. As theater rose and has become so many new ways of creating theater, we have to honor growth. This is a way to show honor to the hard workers who are creating this video design and are reinventing the idea of combining technology with live entertainment.
I think this is far overdue at this point. It’s interesting that video design is typically credited in the Scenic design category at the Tony’s, especially since it seems like it would logically be credited under lighting since it is a medium made of light. However, this does make sense since video is often used to create scenic elements. (One could also draw a comparison between video and sound in comparison to lighting, where both of them are time-based mediums capable of using content to tell a narrative whereas lighting is not very well suited to communicating narrative in the absence of other elements.) It doesn’t really seem like there’s a good reason at this point for there to be no video design category, as video is increasingly a part of many productions (especially large scale ones), and while video designers do also often work in other disciplines like lighting and scenic, they are more and more often credited as specifically video designers (and video engineers, etc.)
This is awesome! Why has this not happened already? Video is emerging as one of the most exciting elements of theatre! Its future is very exciting! I am really intrigued to see how future productions use this technology! Pretty much all new productions have some video elements to them, and the artists that are making these things happen deserve to be recognized! This applies for the Tony Awards too. Why are video designers being recognized as scenic? Especially when there are shows like Redwood, where the entire stage is covered in a video wall, there should be some system of recognition. I feel like this is such an exciting medium, because it can change the entire stage with the press of a button in the same way that lighting can. However, so much more information and movement can be included with video! I loved the video effects in Frozen the Musical! My jaw dropped when Elsa started shooting ice, and the video actually interacted with scenic elements and scrims!
ReplyDeleteI do think that the theater interest rate should start making room for video and media design as it's becoming very popular in every single Broadway show that we see nowadays, and it's only making its way to universities, and then to high schools, and then to children's Theatre. It's becoming a real thing, and I think that started with the inspiration of dear of Evan Hansen with the phones being on stage and us being able to see it. And because it is so popular nowadays, I feel like it would be wrong to discount it because it is an art form, and it is theater in art. As theater rose and has become so many new ways of creating theater, we have to honor growth. This is a way to show honor to the hard workers who are creating this video design and are reinventing the idea of combining technology with live entertainment.
ReplyDeleteI think this is far overdue at this point. It’s interesting that video design is typically credited in the Scenic design category at the Tony’s, especially since it seems like it would logically be credited under lighting since it is a medium made of light. However, this does make sense since video is often used to create scenic elements. (One could also draw a comparison between video and sound in comparison to lighting, where both of them are time-based mediums capable of using content to tell a narrative whereas lighting is not very well suited to communicating narrative in the absence of other elements.) It doesn’t really seem like there’s a good reason at this point for there to be no video design category, as video is increasingly a part of many productions (especially large scale ones), and while video designers do also often work in other disciplines like lighting and scenic, they are more and more often credited as specifically video designers (and video engineers, etc.)
ReplyDelete