A crucial design moment in this production is the transformation sequence at the end of Act I. The Fairy Godmother turns mice into horses, and a pumpkin into a carriage. This production made use of a white scrim and dance for this sequence. If I manage to get a video of the actual sequence, I will post it here.
We begin with the wagons onstage, and Cinderella with the mice by the fireplace. The puppet mice are all along the mantel and in the corners. The scrim flies in at the proscenium. The lights dim on the stage, as the first video (below) fades up. We led the audience to believe they were seeing the shadows of the puppet mice marching across the stage. Each morphs into the shape of a horse rearing. At that moment, we cross-faded back to the space behind the scrim,. where four dancers playing horses were posed in the exact positions of those projections.
After the horses dance, we switch back to front-projection. An animated pumpkin responds to the Fairy Godmother and her wand. The video below shows it becoming a carriage. The swirling stars matched the spinning gobo effects that the lighting design filled the house with.
During the video, the stage crew behind the scrim was putting the physical carriage into position behind the scrim. As the carriage is completed, the lights fade up behind the scrim, and the projected carriage effectively dissolves into a real carriage, in the same position with the same size.
