Shakespearean Sitcoms

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Updated: November 20, 2017

This summer I’m working on three or four shows. But the one I’d really like to mention quickly is “Merry Wives of Windsor.” I’m teaming up once again with my good friend John Regis, whom I started working with on “Wizard of Oz” last Spring. We did “Fiddler on the Roof” with the 8th graders this Spring. But over the summer he does the high school program at Calhoun school in NYC, and he asked me to come and work on Merry Wives for lighting and sound.

The kicker? It is set as a ’70s sitcom. Complete with laugh track. Yup. It’s different and zany, and we’re having fun with it. The end scene, where the whole cast pranks Falstaff…we really pull the full Dumbo, with the trippiness of music, dance, ballet-style dance lights (the entire stage is a thrust, so the audience is getting hit with lights too) and gobos galore. Lots of fun.

My digital prompt book is easier this time around, because John presented me with his whole edited script as a Google doc. I don’t really watch the show – with no SM, I’m bent down scrolling my iPad, my other hand on the Qlab “Go” button, firing lights and all of the laugh track cues. My long train commute is giving me all the programming time I need.

-brian

Hairspray, x2

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Updated: November 20, 2017

This season is just not letting up. I’m getting married this summer, and we are paying for the wedding ourselves. Which means we’re not doing the typical $36,000+ American wedding (we are kind of not into that anyway) and we are trying to pay for it in cash. So I’m…working. A lot.

I am designing/building two totally separate productions of the show “Hairspray”. (If things pan for one of my director friends, I’ll be doing the show a third time, next Spring.) The first show was luckily just an 8th grade production, because I was the technical director and built the set, sound engineer and designer, AND the lighting designer. It almost killed me, but hey, you do what you have to, right? The kids got into building the set, as did their parents. Combined with building “School for Wives” at UNH, I’ve never been covered in so much sawdust!

Teaching junior high kids to paint faux finishes (jail)

Found materials and ripping off another production…I just had to show them how to do it. 🙂

That was the Jr. version of the show, of course. On to the full version, which went into tech two weeks later! This is my first big show in the main stage space at NVCC, so there was a bit of a learning curve in designing the sound system and mixing the live orchestra, to figure out how the normal configuration worked or didn’t for our needs, and growing it from there. Luckily, a bunch of my sound cues were already designed, hahaha!

This version, of course, has the big can of hairspray that explodes at the end of the show. I just bounced down the final version of the sounds for that, and am now firmly in the belief that I need to integrate the sound of depth charges into my designs much more often. I think I found the right frequency that shook the space just right. 🙂

I didn’t work on the set, thank goodness, but here are some photos, for comparison (though there really isn’t any, LOL):

Camera look familiar? 🙂 I got to have some fun doing some voiceover work for the TV news report:

-brian

“School for Wives”

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Updated: November 20, 2017

After the Fairfield University gig wound down, I got a call from the University of New Haven to come in a TD their big spring show: “School for Wives.” This is really the first show I’ve had to oversee and build, on this level, by myself.  Most of my shows are tours, and when I get them, it’s just needing to be hinged and coffin locked together. For “Dancing at Lughnasa,” Mary took lead on the set pieces, and I handled more of the electrics and audio. So this was a big shift, starting with a shop that had a pile of wood covering the floor that was as high as my knees, and having to make sense of that. Here is the before, including a panoramic photo:

This is literally what I walked into on the first day. So, before we could build the show, we had to build a shop! 

Much better! Organizing things is a big part of what I do and offer, and this was a fun challenge.

They already have an adjunct who takes care of the lighting, and, being a school with a very strong music and studio program, a very capable student who takes care of the audio end of things.  

When I first met with the designer, who is a student, I was told that there would be a wall, and towers & scaffolding, grass, and a moving water feature. Well, this has been quite the adventure, and flying a wall that big (well, flying half of it and assembling in the middle, since we don’t have a fly space and we were rigging to the battens for stability) was a chore. But hey, we had towers we could climb to get into positions we could work on the wall from.  

Why yes, that IS mirror fabric you are seeing, and high gloss paint on the deck.  

Great kids, and I was proud to help them along in building their new program!

-brian

Spring, 2015

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Updated: November 20, 2017

After such a difficult Autumn, here I am, doing it again…

This Spring finds me Technical Director for “School for Wives” at University of New Haven, “Hairspray” for a middle school in Fairfield, “Fiddler on the Roof” (and events overall) at a school in NYC, Sound Designer for a different production of “Hairspray” at another college in Waterbury (my NYC school may be doing “Hairspray” next year too…), in addition to the usual litany of smaller projects. This is why I have a separate hard drive for my “design” work – fast Firewire 800 external drive boosts system performance when used as a scratch disc for video or audio. It is also becoming my Audio SFX drive, where I am building quite a little library of sounds. Looking into audio library and database options…

The interesting thing is that I’ll be doing a lot more carpentry this season than I’ve ever done before.  Not quite sure how I feel about that, but it’s an exciting set of skills I am learning…which involves building an 18’x32′ wall.  Go big, or go home!

As a side note, I won a contest last month for having the “worst tour nightmare” as judged by Chamsys, the lighting company that makes MagicQ.  I almost died on tour with my friends on the Pain of Salvation tour a couple of years ago.  For my trouble, I got some new hardware shipped to me from the UK – the ability to run lights via a USB to DMX adapter for my computer.  I can’t wait to learn this and integrate it with my work in Qlab. I already run most of my lighting from Qlab – now to just get that pesky lighting board out of the way!

-brian

It’s the Power of Love

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Updated: November 20, 2017

Happy New Year!  Sadly, I still haven’t gotten to rest. But I just did an awesome gig last night with the Power of Love, a Huey Lewis and the News tribute act, at the Sinclair in Cambridge, MA. My job was directing the lighting while I mixed a video wall on the fly. We had one rehearsal, just before Christmas, and made some content changes.  Below is the result. I used a combination of QLab and VDMX to mix the video, controlled via OSC over a wifi network I brought and my iPad.

This was a challenging gig for me, but worth it. As the band finished their encore, I collapsed into a chair in the control booth, practically panting, I was so exhausted from keeping the show flowing and interesting behind the band. What a rush!

-brian

Surprise! It’s holiday time!

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Updated: November 20, 2017

As posted last time, Fall has been a constant flow and no days off. I figured I would finally get to have a break just after Thanksgiving – finish my corporate gig, come back to Fairfield U for the second show of the season for a week and a half, and then rest. 

70 days straight with no days off…that’s rough no matter how you slice it. 


(That second show at FU was a success, and was the first show the program ever took out to another theatre for a bit of a road show! Not a real tour, but I love touring so I was happy to guide them through the process.)

But then Fairfield Ludlow high school called me, needing a lighting designer for their holiday concert!  So I have been trucking along, still without a break, doing lighting for this show as well as some light video projection. I figured my January 3rd date with Power of Love is coming up fast, so why not use this as a chance to test out some new technology. OSC control over VDMX is what I’m currently playing with.

I’ve been bouncing back and forth between here and FU, which are mercifully only a half mile away from each other, and 15 minutes from my home. Just gotta hold on until Christmas. THEN I can sleep! 

-brian

Putting on our dancing shoes

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Updated: January 24, 2018

This fall is…insane is the only word to sum it up. Mary and I have never been booked so solidly.

Fairfield University called when their Technical Director, my longtime friend Kevin, had to leave for a wonderful opportunity out of state. I had some pending contracts coming up, and wasn’t going to be able to fulfill the whole role, so I have been tag-teaming it with Mary this semester.

September was filled with a video shoot, a rotation of shows my friend Alex was designing, corporate AV gigs in NYC, and a last minute sound/light design job for me with Rocky Hill Community Theatre’s “Blythe Spirit.” The latter show was so last minute, I wasn’t going to be available for one of the performances, so I had to make sure my notes and cues were extremely tight so that I could hand them off to my replacement board op. I also finished tracking and mixing Evan Wahlquist’s album, “Seven Years in Constructive Oblivion.”

Listen to it here on Bandcamp.

In October, I leapt into the world of “Dancing at Lughnasa” as co-technical director with Mary for Theatre Fairfield. The set and effects have come along beautifully.  It has been a great honor to step into the shoes of one of my mentors. I’m working with the student sound designer, and will be teaching her Qlab, so that we can create a more immersive world to compliment the beautiful scenic design – stereo output just isn’t enough and chasing aux faders is more work than it has to be. We’ll already be chasing faders with the mic I’ve hidden on the narrator, so that we can push just the reverb return out the PA, giving his monologues a dream-like quality rather than traditional reinforcement.

Dancing at Lughnasa dead rooster

Mary built an amazing dead rooster prop for the this show, which you can read more about here.

Dancing at Lughnasa - fire

Another great prop from Mary – a coal fire that did everything but give off heat!

The next month will see me switching gears back to NYC for a corporate AV gig for the entire month, while I use the commute to edit a wedding video with Chris Scalzi of Distilled Minds Studios. I’ll also be compiling footage for a video wall project – next year, Boston’s The Power of Love (a Huey Lewis tribute act) will be playing a string of shows around the Northeast.  My job will be to do lighting and video for the run.  This means I need to gather a few hours of clips of ’80s movies to mashup and project behind the band. This is the next step from the live video feeds I designed for Talking to Walls.

Somewhere in all of this, I also start a contract with Naugatuck Valley Community College for the rest of the semester.

I should be getting a break around Thanksgiving….

-brian

First print design in a couple of years

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Updated: November 20, 2017

I spent a lot of time doing print design in my career. Even when I wasn’t working in show production full time, I was generating all kinds of content for marketing and advertising. Haven’t had to do print in some time; an old friend of mine called me up asking if I’d be up for working on a project with him. It would be quick, and a chance to work with a friend, so I said why not.

Came together fast, and this was the result.

DePaul University Study

-brian

There and back again

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Updated: November 20, 2017

Not much rest here…  After the super intense spring season, I had 3-4 days off, and then Mary and I jumped in the car and drove across the country with our friend Steph and her 2 year old.  Did a little bit of work from the car, designing some digital scenery for Rocky Hill Community Theatre’s “Whistle Down The Wind.”

Being stuck in Seattle for almost a week with car problems meant that Mary and I had to drive back ASAP for gigs back on the east coast.  San Jose, CA to Bridgeport, CT in 70 hours – sleep/drive/switch.  Truly a Cannonball Run.  I was home for about four hours, and then dashed off to NYC for a video shoot that I was Technical Director for.  (Mary was home for a few more hours, and then headed to New London for a couple of weeks of shooting a Lifetime movie.) Special thanks to my buddy RJ Van Deusen of Rodney Productions for covering my absence the first day, as we were still racing through Oklahoma. My good friend Chris Scalzi from Distilled Minds (who has shot Talking to Walls countless times) came in to help us with the videography…and gave me a spot to crash that didn’t involve a 2-hour commute for the rest of the shoot!

Mary and I started buying Christmas lights when they were on sale, in prep for our future wedding. Which means I have a pallet of them! This video shoot was really working off the cuff, so between using dozens of string lights for a diffused lighting effect, we also used my short throw projector to throw up some video and text effects.

Got home from that shoot in time to start Fairfield Teen Theatre’s production of “Shrek, the Musical.” Being stuck in Seattle meant that the week I was to spend designing the lighting in the show and figuring out the rigging of flats was lost, so it felt like the whole production was in catch-up mode. Taught myself Qlab’s custom geometry features for projection hurdles, besides for the preshow look. We had an amazing Darla puppet, and for the final scene where she busts through the window, we went with a video projection instead of her coming back on stage with the puppeteers, due to blocking and cast issues.  So I took the video that had been used for the director’s prior run of the show, and re-cut the audio (I’m a sound guy who just can’t leave well enough alone!) To make up for the loss of the puppet, I really wanted to rumble the subwoofers. My friend Joe was the sound engineer, so he happily gave me a feed, and we were off!

-brian

Video editing highlight reel

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Updated: November 20, 2017

Driving across the country!  Yeah!  That’s my summer.  Mary and I are trying to hit all 50 states (or finish hitting them) in the next couple of years.  Which means I have 9 left after this trip, and she will have 11.  (Helps that we are hitting 26 or so on this trip alone.)

While riding in the back seat, I finally built an editing reel of some of the projects I have worked on over the years.  Bit long, still sorting through and cutting down. I’d rather spend time editing YOUR video. 🙂

Watch my video reel here. (YouTube hasn’t propagated yet, so only a link is available.)

-brian