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Projection designers are sort of, ah, mad scientists of sorts.
Theatre is alchemy. It's costumes, it's scenic elements,
it's lighting, it's performing. It's make-up, it's hair.
it's all these things put together and
each of them individually cannot do the same thing that they do as a group.
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Projection design at its best is augmenting that situation as opposed to
projection design at its worst which is window dressing.
I went college to study biochemistry, pre-med and didn't show up at my bio chemistry midterm.
I had always been designing and directing theater and performing and theater that point,
but I switch my major to theater and I came to New York and saw "Brace Up"
a Wooster Group show, and that show changed my life. You know, I realized that theatre was potentially a much
more complicated and aesthetically driven art form and it really allowed me
to sort of exploded my notion of what theater was.
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I started as a lighting designer and a set designer mostly but had always been
interested in sort of non-linear narrative theater so I studied as a
director in college and went on to do a lot of work and experimental theater
places like The Wooster Group and Richard Foreman and with smaller
companies like the Collapsible Giraffe and Cynthia Hopkins and I sort of took
any job that would come and you know slowly by little by little it just kept
coming in the now it's twenty years later I think the last time I made a
five year plan was 1994
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In a lot of ways projection design
is a young art. It wasn't until very recently, like the last three years maybe,
that there were degrees in projection design and so as a result historically we all
kind of came from other fields. Some came from filmmaking, some came from lighting,
design, some came from scenic design, and so we all sort of have these divergent skills.
I think what I was very fortunate to have was in my background of non-narrative
theater was a sense of the story of the image and the story of the picture
in its own right so I create these, or I try to create narratives within the
image alone separate from whatever sort of linear narrative that might be
existing in the script and so the image that tells a story by itself.
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The first change that happened in my work was I stopped using slide projectors and
we started using video projectors.
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Going to a digital workflow was slow and
tedious and there was a long time that it was still faster to work in analog so
a lot of the early work that I did we were still shooting on tape and having
some computer driven media but the biggest issue with all of that was time
you know you didn't have the time to render media digitally and you know it,
edit it and then re-render. It was just ridiculous. I would rather, you know the,
use the f*ckin [sound effect]. That was much more fun and effective and I was better at it still.
You know, like the little half-inch decks with the wheels and the [sound effect].
You know, that was good. What I find now is that people a lot younger than me who
never really shot to tape or to film. Their concept of a workflow is very
different than mine. A lot of why I came to projection, too, is my interest in
optics and my interest in nineteenth-century magic and how a lot
of nineteenth-century illusion was optical illusion. How you use mirrors and
glass and things like that to transform reality. So I kind of love lenses and I
love making effects with lenses and I love doing things in a very hands-on way
and so if I can ever go out and shoot something I'm gonna do that before I'm
gonna fabricated it in After Effects. I know people now who were
younger than me and they would much rather create clouds, create water, create
smoke in After Effects than than to shoot it, and that's just not how my brain works.
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If you take "Fortress of Solitude" which is a show I am working on right now
it's handmade. And so all of that's essentially silhouette cutouts and then it's gonna be
I just what you would call puppetry animation, some stop, some moving animation,
and some of that is then shot on a green screen and treated looked like it was
made an overhead projector or shadowplay stuff and so the hope is that everything
within the context of that piece sort of has this consistent look to it.
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Computer animation is, it is what it is, you know. It's useful for certain
things. "Bring It On" there's a lot of animation in there that's clearly computer-generated
and in the context of that piece there's nothing wrong with that.
Bad computer animation? Yeah, get it out of here. But unless you're doing a show about
Atari.
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When we started working on the piece, a lot of the storyboards and the mock-ups
that I was making were sort of naive.
They had a sort of like, they were too child-like. Over the course of going through
the different versions of things I remembered that when you are in high school, you don't think you are a child.
Once we kind of figured out that the aesthetic of that piece was not a naive and child-like aesthetic,
the show started to make more sense, you know. In commercial theater it's in a lot of
ways it's the same as anything else. We're all, you know, we're all in there
making theatre so the notion that it is only about making money that's from my
standpoint as a designer. It doesn't matter once you're making the theatre. You're making
it the same way to make any other things.
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Ah! Pin stickin' into the table.
Scratchin' my grandma's table, Simon! I was scratching, I brought the coaster.
[laughter]
I have a thing about coasters.
I think the knowledge that one gains from experience is used to shorten the
gap between understanding what's in your mind
and what happens on the stage. In a lot of ways, especially in projection, the image in
your mind is very, very different than how it exists on stage.
In some senses, I find it really useful to use scale models of the set to start trying things on so
if you can build a model in half-inch, you get a pretty good scale
impression of the stage and you can start working with images and seeing how they work.
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Projection has changed experience. I think by and large, it is changed it to theaters detriment.
My problem with projection designs are when it gets in the way, you know.
Nine times out of ten projection design does not need to be there and I feel
like, it fails the theatrical experience when it becomes a sort of flashy bells and whistles, you know.
There's a term in rock-and-roll design, it's called flash and trash and it's just
like you just putting crap up there to make it flashy. Ultimately our work has
to stand next to a live person and the way that a way that the audience
sees projected image or image on LED walls or on TV's in the context of
a larger frame that has life people, you know. The person will never win. The audience will
always watching screen before they watch a person. I find also that frequently
that means that as a projection designer you sort of have to shut up
visually shut up while the play unfolds before you.
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I think what inspires me, I like people who take objects or ideas that are very common
or very familiar and managed to shift the lens, shift in perspective from what
you're looking at them. In some ways that's what projection design at its
best is. It's the capacity to slightly shift the perspective of a
viewer just enough so that they can see different angle on the story
or different perspective on the world.
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