This production from 2017 is Merrily We Roll Along, by George Furth and Stephen Sondheim. It was at Plymouth State University. I did the sets and the projections. Nathaniel Vinson designed the lighting.
I love this show because every scene happens earlier in time than the scene before it. The entire plot unfolds by showing you what happened before.
Our set had a full-stage revolve controlled from offstage, and a balcony across the stage backed with projection screens shaped like a cityscape.
The cityscape used four projectors mapped together from a single media server. Hand on though, because this video is going to get very low-tech.
You see, we had studio art majors produce a set of portraits of the characters in the show. The director asked for them to be flown in as a group. They were awesome.
They were added mid-way through tech. Once they were hung, Nathaniel and I found ourselves looking at them conjecturing: how do we get light on these?
It’s easy enough to point a light at them, but no matter where we shoot from, the light is going to go all over the set and all over the screens. The pictures flew out at the top of the show, and came back only for intermission at the end.
We knew a custom gobo would do it – something that only put light on the pictures themselves. A projector could do this, too. We already had projectors in the show.
The system we had in place was four projectors mapped laterally. We were using a media server with four outputs. It could only talk to four projectors. We could add a fifth projector, but that would require a second media server and lots of cable runs. We wanted an easier solution.
I added a boring simple classroom projector in our control booth shooting through the glass. I connected it to a boring simple laptop that could run PowerPoint and I pointed it at the portraits. I then made a really simple slide. It was black.
I copy-pasted a fuzzy black rectangle around so that each picture was getting hit with white light. I made the rectangles fuzzy so that if the pictures were flown in an inch too high or low, it wouldn’t really matter.
So preshow, the PowerPoint painted each painting with white light – and none of that light overshot onto the set. We faded that slide to black, then we brought it back at intermission and post-show. We just let the light board operator press the space bar to run it.
It was quick to set up. It was low-tech, and it worked perfectly.
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