Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/12812
n n n n Projection/Digital Sets dom on his iMac. Bugdom, a third-person ac- tion game developed by Pangea Software, puts bugs in insect-sized grass. “I thought, ‘What if I could take an audience of 1200 people through space, like my son following this cater- pillar?’ ” Dudley says. Te second breakthrough was deciding to project the images on a non-flat surface. “Tat’s the secret,” Dudley says. “Never have the audience look at a flat screen. We’re too used to paintings and film.” Tus, Dudley used the 180-degree curved screens for “Utopia” in 2002, winning a London Critics’ Circle Teatre Award for set design and a Laurence Olivier Award for best set designer of 2002. In 2003, for Terry Johnson’s “Hitchcock Blonde,” he switched to adjacent-angled planes, like the corner curve.” Creating a full 360-degree image would be another stretch. Wrap-around World To wrap the audience for “Peter Pan” in one continuous, curved image, O’Neill and Dud- ley rendered 10,000- by 900-pixel images. To produce those images, the fly-over, Neverland with Captain Hook’s ship in the harbor, under- water scenes, the jungle, and other sequences, London-based Dudley and O’Neill had help from Michael Vance in New York, Janine Pauke in Amsterdam, and Tim Clapham in Australia. O’Neill had met Pauke while work- ing for Maxon, and had interacted with her and Clapham in Internet forums. Te crew communicated over the Internet using Skype, and sent files to O’Neill’s ftp site. flying over, we had to model the insides of courtyards. We couldn’t get away with card- board cutouts as you’d like to do.” To render London’s 200,000 buildings, O’Neill sent the scenes to a service bureau with 200 renderfarm machines. It took two weeks. He then moved the shot into Adobe After Effects, where he split the animated panoramas into 12 pieces, one for each Barco projector. Originally, Dudley had planned to use 10 projectors, but he realized that by turning the 1400 x 1050 pro- jectors on their sides, he could cover more area in the tent. So, he recut the panorama into 12 pieces. Green Hippo’s Hippotizer media server managed the image display. “Te media server synchronizes the 12 pro- jectors,” Dudley says, “but it can also do amaz- ing things with lens distortions. We can project Stage designer William Dudley, technical director Michael O’Neill, and a crew of three created 20 minutes of animated sequences, many of which, like the underwater scene at top left and the jungle at top right, played in loops during the performance. of a room or an open book, and won the Olivier award. “If you link the graphics in the projections architecturally, you get an astonishing feel- ing of 3D,” Dudley says. “[For “Hitchcock Blonde”], I’d have a Greek villa on one side and a vista over the Aegean on the other. When you move the camera toward it, the depth cues are better than with a flat screen. Te audience reads it spatially.” In 2004, for Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “Women in White,” Dudley returned to a curved screen, this one 220 degrees, to move the audience from one location to another. It was O’Neill’s first project with Dudley. “I was brought on as an extra pair of hands to help with the architectural fly-throughs,” O’Neill says. “Te biggest problems we have are always the thousands of kilowatts of stage lighting. So, every image we make is over-contrasty and over-detailed. Otherwise, the details just vanish. It was a big learning 20 June 2010 “Michael did Neverland,” O’Neill says. “When you see the whole island, that’s his work. Tim did the cannon fire and ship sails, and effects like fire, smoke, and cloth. Janine worked on the jungle.” To cake the island in thousands of trees, O’Neill decided to use Cinema 4D’s hair sys- tem. “Rather than drawing a hair, we have it draw a tree instead,” he explains. To fly the children through clouds, he rendered par- ticles using Maxon’s PyroCluster, a volumetric shading system. For the jungle, he repeated a section of 10 trees side by side. All told, the crew created approximately 20 minutes of unique 3D footage. “We used lots of 10-second loops,” O’Neill says. “Te jungle is a 10-second loop that plays for a quarter of an hour.” Te city of London, which had to be fully 3D, was the crew’s most complex task. “You can’t cheat anything,” O’Neill says. “No cuts, no cross-fades. And, because we’re the images at odd angles, and they project un- distorted. We can come in at acute angles, and the audience is convinced it’s rear-projection.” During production, Dudley and O’Neill tested the images with two or three projectors, but weren’t able to see the seamless, doughnut- shaped projection until two weeks before the show opened in London. Knowing that, they made a 3D model of the tent and projected im- ages into this virtual tent instead. “It was scary, though,” O’Neill says. “It had to work the first time. Tere was no opportunity to change.” Tat didn’t mean the director didn’t ask for changes, though. “Tey were asking for new scenes right up until a few weeks before open- ing,” O’Neill says. “Te theater guys are used to getting something in a few days or hours using balsa wood and paint. Tey don’t un- derstand that it could take weeks to fly a mile farther south. So, we tried to plan knowing the changes could go late.” In fact, shortly before the show opened, the director asked for a new sequence that would fly the children home from Neverland. “I’d made scenes for a nighttime flight, and they wanted a flight in full, broad daylight,”