“Godspell” – Show 3 of 6

This semester at NVCC, we are doing three theatre shows, when we normally only do one. One of these shows, the musical, was initially dreamed up to be more of a revue, overseen by the music department. It has since changed shows and treatments, substantially.

But this is exciting for me. We have ended up with a “gutter punk” version of “Godspell.” The set design was left as just a couple of arches upstage, and a platform with steps in the middle. Just two false prosceniums with clouds painted on them, left over from some show maaaaaany years ago that are to be flown, then cut up and trashed at strike. This saves on work for the shop, since they have to build a big set for “Rumors” as well as the bits they built for “Complete Works of Shakespeare-Abridged” and the detailed painting that went with it.

Having just come off of “Having Our Say” at Long Wharf, I decided that this was too good of an opportunity to pass up and grow my projection mapping skills, while reveling in a punk treatment that I could really enjoy (aside of designing the audio). So, I took point on this, realizing that we’d be pushing the limits of the gear and resources we possess, for this show that was supposed to be a low-key production but clearly was now anything but. I need to deliver and support what the actors have been busting themselves to put on.

So, first up was audio. This show is being put on in our main stage auditorium space, and I remembered all of the work that went into “Hairspray” a year ago. That laid the plan for what I did and did not want to do this time around. I’ve also decided to try and fix some overall sound issues we have in this space, as I am able with what we have. I learned some documentation procedures over the past couple of shows I did at Yale, and I’m looking forward to what the extra legwork will pay back in detail and organization.

Quiet time to tune the new system was last week, which saw me blasting the new Soul Asylum album. 🙂 All of the house music will be a journey through the history of punk rock and themes of change, self identity and realizing potential. I’ll have to publish the song list at some point. It goes pretty deep, and I’m sure some stereotypical older theatre-going folks may not care for it. But I’ve never gone quite this far in assembling playlists for house music before, and I think I’ve established strong moods and foreshadowing as the show shifts.

Now for the set…I’ve been working around the clock to get this thing done. I’ve got everything mapped, and we’re running both front and rear projections. The shop painted the set a light concrete faux finish for me, and we’re projecting onto that and a white scrim. It’s up to me to set the locations, and Jon, my boss and the lighting designer, shot a lot of photography that will be used as textures and scenes. Because of deadlines moving and other things slowing the initial design phase down (and my own running around between shows), I’m designing a lot of the show on the fly. Qlab to the rescue! Instead of rendering a lot of composite videos, I’m really pushing our Mac Pro to do a lot of the work for me on the fly, with text effects and animations. The photo below shows the set covered in many instances of Qlab’s Titling cues, which of course are all animated. In other scenes, flowers bloom out of the brick work, using motion captures I found that I changed into transparent backgrounds.

We open tomorrow night, and it looks like we have 1100 cues in Qlab, spread across two computers that are slaved together.

Luckily, I can photoshop like the wind, so I can create spaces for the actors to work in!  All those years in art departments is really paying off this week. One of the locations is a stereotypical punk rock club, where the back wall is photoshopped with around one hundred stickers of punk rock bands and related brands. In the space of a few weeks, we went from a production that was orphaned to a major production.

-brian