Lighting A Playable Videogame Musical With 4hrs in the venue before opening
Lighting STAGES at Vault Festival 2020 was such an interesting challenge earlier this year that it very much deserved a blog!
The show itself, written by Chris Czornyj, was unlike anything I had ever heard about or come across with a contemporary score and electronic arrangements with visual theming around arcade style video games. Yet the themes it tackled centering around a family of 4 where the essence and heart of the show was about each character processing events, choices, and decisions was a fascinating match.
If things were not distinct enough:
The backdrop was to be a custom, home-made LED wall made out of over 3000 ping pong balls with LEDs inside of them
Its first workshop performance was to take place at Vault Festival where there is 4 hours to setup, program, tech, dress a show before a first performance as the space is shared with other shows!
The show was made playable where the audience could choose at various points what a characters action should be with the resulting scene or song dependent on the choice
A really unusual and interesting challenge and a first piece staged by Adam Lenson Productions that looks to promote artist-driven writing that challenges pre-conceptions and expectations of what musicals might be. STAGES certainly did that and it was a super experience joining a team full of enthusiasm for exploring the possibilities and potential of this piece and knowing however it landed in this initial outing it was truly looking to do something highly original, challenging and interesting.
For Lighting - so many different considerations compared to usual largely influenced by those three distinct aspects of the show!
The Wall
The first most absorbing aspect of production discussions was an incredible Ping Pong ball LED wall built by Chris and with highly effective video content designed in the modular Isadora software by Adam. This allowed many effects that might usually need some assistance from lighting during numbers to be covered by this responsive backdrop. As a result the main purpose of lighting became actor lighting, capturing the mood or the moment on them as best as possible and really allowed the design to be kept as efficient as possible given time constraints…
LED Videowall in rehearsals where it could all be programmed up in advance!
LED Videowall in the venue with Isadora laptop from the tech box (Photo Adam Lenson)
Close up Ping Pong Ball LED diffusers! (Photo Graham Webb)
4 hours In The Venue before opening!
4 hours to set up, tweak programming, and fit in a run through of a musical, allbeit a 1 hour long one, before a first performance is extremely tight - especially one this technically complex. So the amount of pre-planning in all aspects was an organisation odyssey.
For lighting it’s possible to simulate and get a feel for how things eventually might look and play about in a virtual space and experiment with what extra might be needed. For STAGES it became clear that I needed to complicate things from a time point of view further by getting extra lights in as almost nothing available in the fixed rig of the Network Theatre was quite right for catching actors in front of a video wall. As a result the fixed rig backlight and sidelight often reflected an extension of the environment of the video wall sets bringing those bright colours to the stage area and we hired 4 x Pixelline 1044s on side booms. These looked sufficiently retro and matched the wall to be interesting for any effects and their beam angles were just wide enough to work well in lighting actors movements around the stage whilst controlling spill that would have got messy with purely front light or would have been time-consuming if tracking movements with moving lights from the front.
This felt a good base to develop the design from and a very different experience to usual. Instead of designing so much with attention to detail at the forefront in delivering nuance it was appropriate in the script or set up by other creative departments to enhance or mirror - more importantly here - it was about ruthlessly efficiently being able to get all the cues in and looking good having just a couple of hours to set everything up and tweak any levels. Thanks to David Stone’s superb Eos skills and travelling Tardis of lighting pre-programming equipment we were able to program STAGES on the fly after rehearsals, after hours at Carallon, even tweaks in a cafe in-between our 4 hour set-up/programming/tech/dress session had ended and before the opening night!
Compressed Tech Time in Action! Lighting Design in action from within a fishtank. Sound Design in action through the feeding hatch.
Audience Decision Making
An exciting element of STAGES was that at various points the audience made decisions for the characters. This was done by vote with the decision being made from the control box at the back routing the show down the path of the OPPOSITE colour most scene from the back! It might not seem so bad having a choice of just two options, but choices often had an implication in how a scene might play out differently later in the show - requiring a new and different cue stack depending on previous choices made. QLab triggered Isadora to the Wall and the Ion moved us around between different stacks and through different choice options. There was some sequences and lighting that an audience might never see depending on their choice!
Audience Vote: Share or keep to yourself? (Photo Chris Czornyj)
Choice Trees for rehearsal sanity! (Photo Adam Lenson)
Various expressions of processing STAGES timeline permutations: (1) Realisation of a different possibility (2) Realisation this hasn’t been covered by programming (3) Relief when cues matched decision!
A great adventure on an inspiringly original piece - particularly with those three very distinct characteristics in tackling a run and hopefully there will be a V2.0 in the future!
STAGES Production Highlights
STAGES Production Photos
