I haven’t had an opportunity to do much stagecraft lately so I busied myself and came up with a new business to serve performing artists. I’m on my way back to Las Vegas to launch it and this Patreon campaign is a way that you could help me help them.
Thanks for your time and Attention
-MW
Some early concept art illustrating projection placement and image scale and composition.
2nd storyboard in two days! A considerable improvement over the the original.
Within 24 hours I started and finished a spreadsheet and an Animatic cut to the music. Not bad considering.
I have been offered the opportunity to create a matching video for a prerecorded song to be released on the web as a viral novelty promotion for the CD that the song comes from. The musics genre may be best described as folk and the style is roughly children’s sing-a-long BUT the lyrics are a brutal recitation of the motivating facts of the play Titus Andronicus by William Shakespeare and if you are unfamiliar with them please read the synopsis at wikipedia.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titus_Andronicus
It will be gory and horrific and lovable and funny with a certain probability of popularity if it gets passed around to a variety of folk.
I am producing it and just now story boarding it so I haven’t yet defined the various job titles with descriptions that need to be performed to achieve it. There will be many. Once I do I hope to publicly go through the process in order to demystify it for the interested. I’m not sure if facebook or a blog is the best way to go and welcome your opinion. I am qualified to perform all of the jobs but I hope to be delegating some of them to the interested as assignments they may attempt while mastering the techniques I’ll be describing.
Among other things, this is a test of blogging to see if it can facilitate this kind of collaboration. I’m not going to be too pushy about this at first just to see who notices these early posts but I expect there to be fanfares and bunting after it’s up and running. Care to play?
Schrödinger’s Girlfriend was a watershed project in my career. It was a convergence of three different design responsibilities in one project creating several new hats for me to wear as well. It proved a rewarding challenge in a familiar setting with much history between us. Check out my banner image for a clue how far back it goes. Written by Mathew Wells and directed by Kenn Watt, “Schrödinger’s Girlfriend” was produced at Magic Theatre in October, 2001. It’s a light romantic comedic scientific musical set in 1928 at the time of the emergence of quantum mechanics. I single handedly produced the sound effects, composed and arranged the songs, couched the singers, animated the physics and the surrealistic video effects projections operated the controls by virtually living at the theater for five weeks and developing everything in the space after rehearsals. It was epic. Being that the show was set in 1928 as quantum mechanics was emerging,the set by Kate Boyd was designed to be, among other things, evocative of the Michaelson/Morley Double Slit experiment as well as function as my projection screen. The images include concept art depicting the environment in various states.
Below is a video I cobbled together from the archives illustrating the various techniques followed by a simulation with music of the opening of the play. Modeled in Bryce 3D to allow viewing the stage from any angle or from any seat while simulating live performers within projected environments. Design composition is scaled appropriately to maximum effect while determining projector placement and proactively addressing line of site problems. With an uncanny degree of accuracy, this pre-vis looks remarkably as it did live and helped immeasurably with the music scoring.Sunz of Alien Teknowledgy performing live at La Vals, Berkeley, California, 1995. This was our second live show and our first with the complete lineup. S.P.Q.A. is a song I originally wrote in 1982 for an unfinished punk rock musical. Sadly, the lyrics never seem to be dated.
Bake Sale, written by Ed Gaible and directed by Kenn Watt, is an original work by Fifth Floor, an award winning theater company active in San Francisco in the 1990’s-2000’s and now based in New York. The work is inspired by the event of the Branch Davidian/ATF tragedy at Waco, Texas. The music was written specifically for the dance sequence choreographed by Sommer Ulrickson.
Theater Punk 