Playback

Clouds on the car. Photo by Lalitha Rajan.

Playback was a challenging and enjoyable project with a great team working on it.

It was the culmination of Ankur Productions' "Pangaa Project", a long-term series of events created with young people from all over Glasgow.

I'd first had contact with Ankur while helping out my colleague Kim Beveridge as she designed video for their hugely successful show Roadkill. As one of the pioneering companies developing arts with the Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic communities in Scotland, Ankur's work involves people from all backgrounds and they seek to act as "a bridge between Scotland's various communities".

Test shot of projection on the bridge, with its cladding material still half covered up.

"Playback" was staged in the cavernous back room at The Briggait, the recently re-developed old fishmarket which is now home to many arts organisations, including Ankur.

The roof of the main space, about half of it anyway...

The space wasn't a theatre, and so the production faced huge challenges. Firstly to make it fit for an audience, and after that for the creative team to find a way to use the space, to light everything, to make sure the audience could hear and to project video all over the shop!

One issue which caused a lot of late nights was the lack of any way to blackout the space. Both myself and Lizzie Powell - the Lighting Designer - put in a lot of after-hours work because until the sun set we couldn't see what we were doing.

The vast nature of the space led to the decision to create a promenade show - which also helped the audience keep warm, as it was October, and a cold cold room.

The visual aesthetic of the show, which informed the style of the video, was that of a graphic novel. I was also hugely inspired by the trailer created by Greenlight Creative. So we created frame borders to project around people and things on set, and used captions in a graphic novel style to introduce characters and comment on events.

Cut from the final show, this effect suffered from jaggy edges on the captions. Photo by Lalitha Rajan.

The show began in a relatively small section of the overall space, screened off from the main room by a curtain of strips of yellow plastic. These served both as a way of dividing the space and as a projection surface.

Dancing Members of the Young Company projected onto the yellow material.

The yellow plastic took projection remarkably well and one of my favourite moments was the introduction of the main character Harun - also the first time we made the audience aware that we would use the main space in the venue. Harun is chased around the main space by a gang, and as he passes the far side of the yellow curtain from the audience he freezes in place and bam:

Harun is introduced. Photo by Lalitha Rajan

Set Designer Becky Minto built upon the existing features of the space to bring the streets of Glasgow into the venue. Visible on the floor in the main space was a remnant of a pavement and road. Becky added a huge scaffolding bridge, dividing the larger room into two halves, giving us height to play with and the useful device of asking an audience to walk under the bridge into a new area. Other fun things adorning the space were a real bus shelter, and a real car.

The car being a central plot item it was my job to try and give it a sense of motion with some video effects on and around it. We also wired tiny webcams into the car's interior to allow images of the cast to be projected from inside.

One major video scene happened immediately after the prologue, when Harun is seen running. He gets in the car, and it drives off (with the aid of projection...) and a young woman pops up in the back seat. She is Rhia. To help the audience see the two performers in the car we used a webcam shot framed by a border suggesting the shape of the rearview mirror.

The Car with projections around it suggesting travel, and the live webcam from inside projected onto the wall behind. Photo by Lalitha Rajan. 

A planning diagram showing positions of cameras and projectors. Click for full size image.

My schematic for the video system. Click for full size image.

Other webcams were installed at various places around the space, though these ended up sparsely used. With the invaluable help from David Bernard of Pointless Creations we installed a system with 9 cameras and 4 projectors, giving me a wonderful flexible toolset from which to discover the most effective moments.

We had initially planned to use four video projectors, one of which was dropped when its only planned cue was achieved (much more effectively!) with lighting. Of the three projectors remaining, one was on the floor, back projecting onto the bus shelter. The main effect here was a shattering glass moment. It was also used to project flames in the final moments of the show.

The play ended with a car crash, the death of a major character and the car being set ablaze. When the car was torched we tried to light up as much of the area with flames as possible, and so the bus shelter and yellow plastic sheets were set ‘ablaze’ as well.

The remaining two projectors did the bulk of the work. With the help of Roy Fairhead, the Production Electrician, I installed DMX controlled moveable mirrors onto two Panasonic PT-D5700 projectors (using a moveable mirror was a trick I'd first done in 2009 for the Vox Motus show Bright Black. The mirrors were provided by Rock at War Productions, who is always generous with his time and brainpower in helping plan and equip such endeavours.). Roy provided a Fat Frog lighting desk to fill the dual functions of controlling the mirrors and stopping any sheets of paper we might have from blowing away in any passing breeze.

We rigged one projector at each end of the main space. The moveable mirrors, combined with the ability of the Catalyst software to reshape the distorted images, let me find targets for projection all over the venue, and we ended up with 16 usable positions all around the main space, of which 8 saw use in the final show. Two projectors, two mirrors and Catalyst's re-shaping function gave me the equivalent of 16 projectors, of which I wastefully used only 8. :) 

The action involves a car crash, and then a frozen "out of time" moment, where Harun and Rhia climb out of the car and look back at their own faces frozen on the projection. This involved a well timed live "grab" of a freeze frame by David, who operated the video for the show.

Other uses of the live cameras included live feeds of the character DJ Vu, and also of a fight scene, this latter projected onto the central bridge - faced off with some materials discovered by genius Becky Minto. We were delighted to discover that it took projection very well.

Production Manager and Legend Dave Shea holds up some of the wall material for a test.

Looking back I'm proud of Playback on many levels. Some effects weren't as successful as I'd have liked - resolution limitations meant for some jaggy edges, and not all the tricksy effects like hitting handheld targets worked reliably. But I was delighted with the ability to send images to many areas within this huge venue.

It was a slog to programme and involved a lot of very late nights, but I had amazing support from the production team, the creative team and Ankur. I made a friend and hopefully future collaborator in the form of Director Paddy Cuneen, and was left with the utmost admiration for Ankur's Artistic Director Lalitha Rajan as she tirelessly drew everything together for this ambitious show. Lalitha has now moved on from Ankur but has left a thriving company with some wonderful work under its belt.

(Edit: There's a great interview with Lalitha about Ankur and Playback here)

More images below - click the thumbnails for larger versions.

Harun recalls the many sides of his dead Dad's personality. Photo by Lalitha Rajan.Rhia keeps a video diary. Video and sound were layered up for this scene which was a concatenated version of several video diary moments originally planned. Photo by Lalitha Rajan.

The Water Babies

The Water Babies was the Christmas show for The Arches, Glasgow in 2007.

I worked closely with the show's designer Natasha Jiggins to make the animations for the show. I was full of enthusiasm for stop-motion animation after spending a week of my summer with the utterly inspiring Forkbeard Fantasy at one of their summer schools. I'll likely say this quite often, but if you work in the arts go to a Forkbeard Summer School. It was one of the most inspiring and enjoyable weeks of my career. In fact I should do a whole blog post about them.

Planning was important, as it usually is, but here we had to make some key decisions before we could really get started. We needed to establish timings as there was to be some onstage interaction with the animations. Some characters would have dialogue with the main character Tom, and at one point a giant hand would try to grab him - only to be bitten.

Natasha drew out multiple copies of the creatures, the water babies and the hand onto black art card. We then cut them out to be photographed against a light background for compositing. We'd decided to go for a chalky feel and quickly realised that if we wanted the water in the background to be animated at its own pace we'd need to composite on the characters.

So with a camera rostrum mounted in a corner of a basement room of The Arches we spent a few days animating each stage of our planned scenes.

The most straightforward were the sea and river animations, being simply crossfades between frames of chalk textures. Faster for the rushing river, and gentler for the deep sea.

(Click thumbnails for movie files)

River. Crossfades between chalk textures.

Sea. Gentler and subtler now.
Swirly. The scooby-doo moment as the action returns to dry land.

Most scenes needed some characters animated. Some involved the same physical cutout moving, some involved multiple cutouts to allow the characters to change size, shape or gesture.

The Seal swims up and has a conversation (voiced live from the stage) with Tom
The Sunfish was fun, as we designed the scene to create a "reveal" of its true shape

Then I began editing and compositing the images in Final Cut Pro, adding characters to the backgrounds and trying out various speeds - Natasha and I decided to add brief crossfades to each frame to stylise the animations, and give them an underwater dreamy feel.

The Hand tries to grab Tom, who bites back!

The most complex shot of all was the "Toe in the Water" shot, which showed Tom's transition from the real world to the underwater world - from real to animation in our show's visual language.

This involved a friend of Natasha's becoming stunt foot, and a lot of planning and drawing round of feet to match the live action move of the foot to the cutout animation. The join was covered with a bit of digital "mist". I'm quite proud that we managed to have the filthy chimney sweep's foot come out of the water a bit cleaner than it went in, though I doubt that showed up on stage.

Toe in the water. A split screen effect.

The final big reveal of hundreds of Water Babies was composited from five sets of cutouts. Natasha made three or four cutouts for each of five different Water Babies, and we animated these and I composited up the loops of each character in Apple's Motion software. Motion allowed for the adding of the gentle random bobbing motion of each character, so they seem to be moving independently as they would underwater. The render for that movie took about 20 hours as I recall...

The Water Babies emerge, loads of 'em.

The sequences were projected during the show onto the back wall of the set, and formed a part of the overall design alongside Natasha's fantastic wearable puppets for various creatures.

I've collaborated with Natasha again since on Wee Stories' "Treasure Island".

The Planets 2010

The Planets 2010 was a concert at the Usher Hall, Edinburgh in June 2010. The project was led by the wonderful Dave Trouton, with whom I've worked on several shows including Clockwork, One Giant Leap and Arthur.

Dave worked with Edinburgh schoolchildren to re-imagine Holst's "The Planets" and the kids performed their work live onstage at the Usher Hall with each piece - each planet - having a video intro.

For the intros Dave scripted and recorded voiceovers spoken by the pupils, telling the audience some of the history of each planet. I've touched on our approach to this piece further in an article on my personal blog here.

Making the movies was a mixture of raiding the NASA archives, animating still images and finding and animating some stock CG of the planets themselves.

Here are links to each of the intro movies.

Pluto was reclassified as a "dwarf planet" in 2006 and so didn't get its own section, which was something of a relief as this is the best picture of it I could find for One Giant Leap.