Easter 09: Behind the Scenes

Here’s a video I shot while we were in the middle of our run with a little backstage tour.  (RSS readers, head to the site to see the video)

It seems the biggest question we’ve gotten is how we did the big screens that move. You see a little bit of them in the video above but I’m not one to focus too much on video! However, those screens were THE set element in the day, so there were a lot of resources dedicated to getting it right. Believe it or not, it’s actually really simple to implement.

First, the projector and screen are mounted to a “wagon” of sorts so they always move together and the alignment remains perfect. That wagon rides on two tracks that are drilled into the stage, one at the front under the screen and one at the back under the projector section. The tracks are just long enough to account for how close and far the screens need to be from each other, with just enough break in the center for the drums and keys decks to fit through, and just enough break on the offstage sides for the Megabeats percussion and Slam Grand piano to get on and off stage. We experimented with a few different castor types and means of moving the wagons to find the smoothest option.

Second, each screen/projector wagon is connected to a long bar that is painted black and runs along the floor to off stage. Each wagon has a stage hand dedicated to it, and they pull or push the bar, moving the screens in and out to spiked positions based on calls from the Stage Manager. Obviously it took some practice to get them to be comfortable moving at the same speed.

Third, the screens are 9ft x 12ft. They are each fed an output from the video switcher, allowing us to feed them video content from 2 discreet Doremi Labs Nugget players (one for each screen) or PVP/Powerpoint. All of the “blended” video content was created in Final Cut and then exported as two discreet video feeds that play in sync with each other through the Nugget.

I think that covers it. If there’s something else I missed, ask away!