THE VIRTUALLY ENDLESS POSSIBILITIES OF DIGITAL SCENERY

By Larry Getlen

When reading the script for Caryl Churchill’s harrowing “The Skriker,” a play about-among other things-demons, insanity and the world’s impending doom, some may see the work’s more challenging theatrical elements as virtually unpresentable. In one scene, for example, the script mentions tiny blue mystical creatures that seem almost impossible to stage the way the playwright intended. But when Dr. George Popovich-director of theater arts at Henry Ford Community College in Dearborn, , and the director of the school’s Virtual Theatricality Lab-read the play, he saw an opportunity to create a unique virtual environment using the latest in digital technology.

“When you look at the play, the first thing you say is, how the hell are you going to do this,” says Popovich. “The skrikers have four eyes, wings, tails, their waists are two inches wide, and the creature itself is four inches high. There’s a scene where a family is playing on the beach, and suddenly the beach is ‘covered with blue men.’ How do you do that? Do you have a hundred actors? Do you put a drop-down? I have a hunch that when this play is done in certain places, those scenes are cut.”

But Popovich was up to the challenge. First he designed the show’s scenery using the Lightwave modeling program, creating left and right stage views which he interlaced with an inexpensive program called Stereomaker. Then, using Motion Builder, Popovich had an actor in a motion capture suit spend a week filming 200 poses and positions, allowing Popovich to then project what appeared to be 200 virtual creatures onto the set.

Popovich notes that much of the equipment he used, including the motion capture suit and software, is generally available for rental. But he also says that for smaller houses or theatre companies, purchasing the expensive equipment might be the financially sensible option in the long run.

“Your biggest expense is the video projectors. We used Barcos, which are pretty high-end,” he says. “If you wanted to do one screen, it would cost about $20,000. But how much money do theatres spend on curtains, scenic backdrops, wood for the scene shop-all those tools? That’s where buying is cheaper, because you can use these things again and again, and in different ways.”

Overall, Popovich says he created the effects comparatively cheaply. “There were some big theatres that actually built these puppets, where they cast the bodies of the actors in plaster. Each of these puppets cost $45,000, and there were 20 of them. So do the math. These creatures cost us a couple of hundred bucks apiece, with models and motion capture.”

For companies seeking to bring digital effects to their work, options for easy-to-use equipment are growing in a variety of price points.

“The big advantage is flexibility,” says Scott Blair, director of digital lighting development for High End Systems, of his company’s DL.2, Catalyst and Axon media servers. “With digital content you can go quickly from location to location with little labor in terms of moving or building physical scenery. Transitioning from one scene to another can be as simple as a lighting cue.”

High End’s products are designed for a wide range of budgets, with the Axon coming in at $8,000, the full Catalyst package around $17,000 (with cheaper options available), and the DL.2 at $36,000 (or a rental cost of about $1,100 per week). The DL.2 is an “integrated media server and projector all in a moving head package, so it looks and programs very much like a traditional automated luminaire,” says Blair. “It allows you to control everything with DMX, the way you control a normal moving light. You can load in any image you want, as well as video clips, and it all works through a projector.”

The DL.2 allows the user to blend multiple units with a collage generator-in effect, nullifying the light restrictions of one’s projector. “With DL.2s we could put four units together in a two-by-two-two units wide, two units high-configuration,” says Blair. “Let’s say each unit outputs about 5,000 lumens. You can put four units together, and now you have the equivalent of a 20,000-lumen projector for much less cost.”

The company Rose Brand recently created Panorama Digital Scenic Servers for about $7,000 to buy or $500 per week to rent. According to Jeff Brown, a product manager with Rose Brand, Panorama was created with regional reps and small production houses in mind.

“The nifty thing about Panorama is that it has a very shallow learning curve,” says Brown, who says that all you have to know to work it is “how to run a handle on a lightboard up,” and that this is one of a new class of products giving smaller companies capabilities formerly reserved for arena-scale productions.

“This class of product, media servers, are going to add something to the regional reps,” says Brown. “A couple of years ago, the only guys who had this were Bon Jovi, the Rolling Stones, U2 and the Ford Motor Company. A lot of creative people who don’t have a budget can utilize tools that can really change the nature of the designs on stage.”

Servers like those made by High End Systems and Rose Brand, plus others such as Martin Professional and Green Hippo, take layering effects that used to be arduous editing tasks and allow them to be constructed in real time. “Things that could take you hours and hours in an editing suite just a couple of years ago can be dealt with from the tech table during tech week,” says Brown. “The director can turn to the designer and say, ‘You know what? I want to see what those trees would look like in fall. Is there any way we can take out the green and start making them reds and oranges and browns?’ In a media server, you can.”

Of course, if you or someone in your company is a real technology wizard, then the options for creative use of technology are endless. Tim Portlock, a visual artist and a professor at New York’s Hunter College, served as lead designer on a 3-D production of “Dracula” put on by Chicago’s Studio Z, a company dedicated to integrating live theatre and digital technology. Utilizing digital effects, says Portlock, made it seem like “I, as the person operating the scenery, was improvising with the actors.”

Portlock used a scripting language called Yggdrasil which was developed at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where he was doing research. Yggdrasil allows for the creation of virtual reality environments. This proprietary program allowed Portlock, using a desktop computer connected to high-lumen projectors, to control aspects of the backdrop such as the amount and intensity of a snowfall based on cues from the director and the actors.

Portlock, who compares the look of 3-D digital scenery to those you’d find in 3-D computer games such as “Unreal” or “Quake,” says that those with the appropriate technological knowledge can use products like Dark Basic or Blitz3D to create 3-D environments, but also have other innovative ways of developing these effects without being privy to proprietary research like he was. “A lot of people who are doing this seriously are modifying things that are intended for other uses. You could use a Playstation 3,” says Portlock. “You could buy a computer game and modify it, taking the content out of the game and putting your own content into it.

Portlock also cites Max/MSP and Jitter, music and graphics programs that he uses together with Blitz3D to create an exciting new way of setting interactive cues. “You can set it up so that the actors themselves trigger events,” says Portlock, “so that an actor walks to one part of the stage, and it triggers certain things to happen. The actors control the environment. It’s all about taking products and figuring out how they can be used in conjunction with other software to get the effects you want.”

Another innovation Portlock mentions is using Second Life, the popular Internet community where users can create their own virtual world. “You can develop several environments in that space that illustrate or express your setting,” says Portlock, who notes that learning to use the site takes just a few hours. “Then, depending on how you want to change the backdrop to reflect the story, you could either walk your character to the new location, or have your character teleport.” Using the site for this purpose would then be like using any other computer backdrop, and you could project it from your computer.

While some of these innovations may seem light years from the mainstream, another cultural factor makes them not only inevitable but also necessary. “New playwrights write like TV or the cinema, with all these scene changes,” notes Popovich, who says it’s not uncommon for him to see a work from a new playwright with up to 25 scenes. “The first thing everybody does is say, ‘We’ll do it the black box way,’ and assume that the playwright meant for them to pare it down to three or four plot points. Well, in none of those plays does it say that. It says, ‘Here’s the bar, here’s the mental institution, here’s the beach.’ What I think is that these playwrights have grown up with TV and movies, and they have their own sort of visual logic. When they write these plays, it’s coming out.”

As such, the ability to change scenes with the click of a mouse, as opposed to the elbow grease of the crew, is a necessary adaptation for what could be a coming sea change in the nature of the theatre itself. George Popovich refers to it as “the ‘new stagecraft’ of the 21st Century.” As the nature of plays changes with the sensibility of a generation, so too will the technological comfort level of the people creating these plays, easing the adaptation to the technological advances needed to accommodate the new mindset. Portlock, therefore, sees artistic and technological roles converging as artists become more and more computer savvy, eventually erasing the line between traditional and digital scenery.

“As the people who grew up with technology start developing theatre companies, it’ll seem like less of a weird mix,” says Portlock. “Younger people will not find it bizarre to have interactive graphics in a theatre. The graphics will get more sophisticated, and as people stop thinking of digital technology as the opposite of traditional theatre, it will become more ubiquitous, so more theatre companies will use it. It’s only a matter of time.”

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