Projectors Lighting up Community Theatre.
Eye-popping projections, common in multi-million dollar professional productions, are now making their mark in community theatre.
A production of Hairspray the Musical staged by one of Victoria’s largest non-professional musical theatre companies, PLOS, provided Melbourne based production company BAAC Light the ideal opportunity to show off its latest product offering for school and community theatre productions.
The BAAC Light team have embraced the convergence of lighting and projection and seamlessly drawn the two mediums together.
For Hairspray, large moveable set pieces constructed from white polystyrene called for a projection and media server solution capable of individually mapping over 90 different projection surfaces, as the set pieces were moved into numerous configurations for each scene.
Given the large number of projection surfaces to be mapped and the large amount of artwork involved, the majority of the surface mapping and media server programming was completed in BAAC Light’s pre-production studio.
Two large TV set pieces positioned on either side of the stage had live camera feeds from on-stage projected onto them during the numerous “TV Studio” scenes as well as pre-show TV commercials from the Hairspray era.
BAAC Light co-founders Brad Alcock (lighting designer) and Andrei Chlebnikowski (projection designer) said the results achieved on a community theatre budget were impressive and were overwhelmed by the response from the sell out audiences.
Two of the most impressive scenes are pictured here.
In one a bed is depicted vertically with some of the artwork projected onto the sheet which was stripped away.
In the other, the level of detail in the scene set in a shop is extraordinary.
For the technically minded here are some details of the equipment used.
The setup for the show consisted of three Arkaos MediaMaster Servers outputting to four high powered projectors. For the first time, the BAAC Light team used the software's new Video Mapping functionality to individually map each projection surface - over 90 in total. As the software was still in beta, the first two servers were a pair of main and backup machines which provided coverage for all the stage elements to be mapped outputting to two projectors.
The third media server was used for the remaining two projectors which covered the abovementioned TV set pieces on either side of stage.
BAAC Light's lighting console was then used to control both the lighting and projection. All projection cues were integrated into the lighting cues which allowed for a single operator to press the GO button for each cue and control both mediums.
Illustrations for the production were drawn by Heath McKenzie and some scenes had animated elements incorporated prepared by Paul Congdon.
For more information on how to incorporate projected sets into your next school or community theatre production, just visit the BAAC Light website www.baaclight.com.aufor more information.
