VENUE 079
Photo by Paul Kolnik
59 PRODUCTIONS
59 Productions is a film and new media production company which specialises in film making and integrating the moving image into live performance, skills that were used in producing the visual elements of War Horse. The team, which comprises Directors, Mark Grimmer, Leo Warner and Lysander Ashton, as well as Director of Animation, Peter Stenhouse, worked on the original production in the UK, over three years ago. The transfer to New York’s Lincoln Center presented new challenges and new opportunities. Discussing the move to a new venue, Grimmer explained: “Obviously the theatre is a slightly different shape and size from the theatre in London, so that’s thrown ups some logistical questions. But I think the main thing about this is, because we’ve got the opportunity to rework some sections of the show, which we felt could do with updating and improving, we’ve taken that opportunity to move the show forward and to take advantage of new techniques that we’ve developed. And also to work with new collaborators to bring an extra depth to the visual side of the production.” The production has a particular visual feel that evolves as the story develops. Warner said: “War Horse has a very distinct visual aesthetic, which is partly borne from the puppetry, the extraordinary life-sized puppets they have on stage. But Rae Smith, who is the set designer, also produced these extraordinary, original drawings, on which most of the projection is based. It gives it a very distinctive, hand drawn feel. “In the first act, we start in a quite pastoral, quite a comforting world, and as the show develops you kind of sink deep into the hideousness of the war, it becomes very vorticistic, very broken up, very jagged, a quite aggressive aesthetic world.” Certain scenes were more challenging than others. Some demanded prominent video content, whereas others didn’t. Speaking specifically about the ‘tank scene’, Director of Animation, Peter Stenhouse, revealed: “We really wanted to give the impression
of a wave of tanks arriving on a battlefield and impress upon the audience how dramatic and terrifying these things were for people in the First World War.” When the team was re-working the visuals for the Broadway show, they did it with a system built around a Barco Catalyst media server. Control is harnessed using an ETC Eos console, which is, by design, a lighting console. This allowed them to hand the running of the show over to the venue’s lighting department after the technical rehearsal. Three Panasonic PT-DW8300 10K DLP projectors are used, which are connected by DVI over a fibre optic backbone. The content was designed created using Adobe Photoshop and After Effects and Autodesk Maya 3D animation software. Stenhouse continued: “You’re trying to make a digital medium look hand drawn, which isn’t easy. Using, in this case, 3D modelling, computers and technology, it gives us the flexibility that we need to adjust things quickly for changes in timings that we discover in rehearsal or to make changes to scale, camera angles and that sort of thing. Without using 3D there would be no way that we’d have the flexibility that we do.” “We’re actually re-programming the show from scratch,” added Warner. “Partly because we wish we’d done it differently in the first place. But we’re able to make use of a new control system, which allows us to tie the video projection much more closely to the lighting design. “We’re actually re-programming the show from scratch, partly because we wish we’d done it differently in the first place. But we’re able to make use of a new control system, which allows us to tie the video projection much more closely to the lighting design.” Ashton ellaborated: “It’s a complicated system but it allows us to load all the video files in and then they are composited live, within the media server, which means there’s no rendering time for any changes we make, so we can react very quickly. Before this was
www.mondodr.com
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80 |
Page 81 |
Page 82 |
Page 83 |
Page 84 |
Page 85 |
Page 86 |
Page 87 |
Page 88 |
Page 89 |
Page 90 |
Page 91 |
Page 92 |
Page 93 |
Page 94 |
Page 95 |
Page 96 |
Page 97 |
Page 98 |
Page 99 |
Page 100 |
Page 101 |
Page 102 |
Page 103 |
Page 104 |
Page 105 |
Page 106 |
Page 107 |
Page 108 |
Page 109 |
Page 110 |
Page 111 |
Page 112 |
Page 113 |
Page 114 |
Page 115 |
Page 116 |
Page 117 |
Page 118 |
Page 119 |
Page 120 |
Page 121 |
Page 122 |
Page 123 |
Page 124 |
Page 125 |
Page 126 |
Page 127 |
Page 128 |
Page 129 |
Page 130 |
Page 131 |
Page 132 |
Page 133 |
Page 134 |
Page 135 |
Page 136 |
Page 137 |
Page 138 |
Page 139 |
Page 140 |
Page 141 |
Page 142 |
Page 143 |
Page 144 |
Page 145 |
Page 146 |
Page 147 |
Page 148 |
Page 149 |
Page 150 |
Page 151 |
Page 152 |
Page 153 |
Page 154 |
Page 155 |
Page 156 |
Page 157 |
Page 158 |
Page 159 |
Page 160 |
Page 161 |
Page 162 |
Page 163 |
Page 164