The Questors Theatre, Ealing, West London
April/May 2002
To design 21 video segments to be shown between and during scenes of Mark Ravenhill's acclaimed and controversial play. Additionally, to present them during the performances.
The play concentrates on the consumer and media obsessed, information gathering world, and the video material sought to reflect these themes, setting the tone and foreshadowing the action of each scene.
A large portion of the source material was gathered from the web; images from online catalogs, adult sites, the web sites of large global companies, Flash animations, drug information sites etc. Some of the material was just downloaded from the images on the page, other material consisted of recorded interactions with the web site.
The web material was interleaved with real images, taken by Nukinetics in London; the excess of Oxford Street and Bond Street, the combined hedonism and filth of Camden, the lush media offices of Soho. More images were taken of everyday objects; tins of beans, bar-codes, expiry dates, credit cards, cash, posters, print adverts.
For audio, either the sound of the material itself was used, distorted by cutting, speeding up, slowing down and layering, or sound from another related source, e.g. for the opening 'shopping' scene, accompanying a rush of images of shopping-basket products, the author went to his local corner shop and recorded the cash register operating, money changing hands and the banter of the customers and staff; this was then cut up into a cacophony of voices, jangling change and beeping and shutting tills.
Each inter-scene segment was on average 15 seconds long, and the motif of information overload was used to load the audience with the ideas present in the next scene. In some sequences, images appeared just once for 4 frames, leaving an impression on the brain, without the audience really being able to see what the image was; this was used effectively to show fairly explicit pornographic images, found on the free parts of adult sites, without dwelling on any individual image long enough to be titillating or erotic.
Five segments were shown during the action of the play, or whilst actors were purposely visible between scenes. For these segments, the display area was uses as a canvas, to position the material in a relevant position, and proportional size to the actors.
The Director and Scenery Designer wanted a very clean, clinical, bleak space; effectively a white box; this lent itself to projecting directly onto the set. The off-white heavy-gauze back-cloth provided a surface with reasonable image contrast; the Lighting Designer very skillfully designed lighting that filled the space, right up to the edges, without throwing light directly onto the back-cloth; the light was also dipped slightly during in-scene video usage.
Two Panasonic NV-DV2000 mini-DV decks were purchased by Nukinetics, together with a Panansonic 4-channel video mixing desk. The material was split between two tapes, one per deck, with 10 seconds of black between each cue, and the cue sheet annotated with the tape number and time-code of each clip. Each clip was then cued from the two decks using the shuttling controls.
The NV-DV2000 decks are not professional equipment, but stand up very well to this kind of usage. The main problem was the latency between pressing play (or un-pausing) and the start of video and audio; starting the cue at least 20 frames before the start of AV material on the tape meant that the audio and video were in sync by the time that the material started; however eliminating 'embarrasing' pauses between the end of a scene and the start of the video required anticipation and practice.
Shuttling the off-line deck whilst a cue was playing on the on-line deck required a good deal of nerve! The DV2000 comes with an infra-red based controller with a shuttle wheel; the IR-channel selection switch on the controller was used to switch operations between decks.
The tightest cue required pausing a playing video sequence (based on a visual cue), then freezing the video using the still frame option of the mixing desk, then cuing forward in the material (whilst the still image is still being shown), to a point further on in the sequence, and then unfreezing the video and resuming play again on a visual cue. This had to be done within a 20 second period. Fun!
One caveat when doing the above kind of operation is that cuing using the shuttle control can occasionally allow sound to play from the video; you have to be careful to always cue whilst the deck's output channel is not selected on the video mixer; even if a freeze-frame or black-matte is covering up the video, the audio may be heard. To perform the above cue, I selected the playing channel on both busses, paused the video, froze the unselected bus, and switched over to it; all before starting to cue. Complicated (and complicated switching back), but safe.
All the material was composited and edited on a Mac running Apple's Final Cut Pro 1.2. Input and Output was via Firewire to mini-DV tape, and this was also used to run the show. The complexity and varying source image size of the sequences meant that rendering times for some of them grew quite large (dual 500MHz PPC), and many hours were spent waiting for previews [newer FCP version's are faster].
The original plan was to run the show from DVD; Nukinetics placed an order for a Pioneer DVR-S201 DVD-R (Authoring) unit; however, after the manufacturer almost doubled their cost overnight, this was abandoned and it was decided to cue from DV tape [this was April 2001, Apple introduced Pioneer's DVR-103/A03 'Super-Drive' about 6 months later...].
Two Panasonic NV-DV2000 mini-DV decks were used for editing and running the show, together with a Panasonic WJ-AVE/55b 4 channel video mixing desk, and a small LCD monitor. S-Video (S-VHS) cable was used for all cable runs, the maximum cable run was about 20 metres.
In addition, a web-camera was linked by USB to a laptop, and that linked from the VGA output to a VGA to Video converter, and then taken via S-Video to the mixing desk. This was set up by an ASM during the break between the last two scenes, and worked in a striking manner for the final scene, when the actors filmed each other against the projection screen which is showing the filmed images (excepting one night when an actor kicked the cable out of the converter unit, bless!).
An Eiki LC-X1A video projector was also purchased by Nukinetics; this is a heavy-duty LCD projector, designed for continuous use, and has an output of 1500 ANSI Lumens. The projector can produce up to a 40 foot wide screen; in this production the projected image was approximately 15 foot wide from a distance of approximately 25 feet. In the small space of the studio, the fan noise from the projector was significant; this was reduced to almost inaudible levels by shielding the equipment using Rockwool on four sides (the sides facing the audience), whilst leaving sufficient space for correct cooling operation (thanks Tim!).
The show ran from 12-26 May 2001.
Thanks to Anthony Shrubsall, Geraldine Hawkins & Melissa Naylor, Tim Heywood, James & Paul, John Rolfe, and the cast.