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Rose Bruford College Gets Catalyst and PixelMAD
These were purchased by the college’s lighting department as part of a new investment in digital scenography, a move co-ordinated by Nick Hunt, lecturer in Lighting Design, and Rob Fowler for PID. The funding came from a ‘Knowledge Transfer’ scheme, designed to encourage partnerships between higher education and industry.
“With the ‘convergence’ of video and lighting becoming increasingly common” states Hunt, “we wanted to start building up a laboratory of kit to enable us and our students to explore this technology.”
Hunt is interested in opening up new opportunities for lighting and stage designers with the digital technology. He thinks the way you can quickly, simply and highly effectively change the nature of a performance space directly from the lighting console and manipulate it in real time is taking the art to new dimensions of creative possibility.
It was a natural choice for Hunt to approach Projected Imaged Digital. The company specialises in all types of digital media from the content and concept point of view. “They are the experts and know their products exceptionally well. They use the technology themselves as well as supplying it.”
They looked at Catalyst and PixelMAD specifically not just because they wanted to use the technology, but also because they wanted to utilise it as a design tool.
Until very recently, video integrated into performance had been the domain of the more avant-garde and fringe theatre productions. The last two or three years has seen it increasingly becoming a mainstream production value and tool of expression. Rose Bruford, being a very vocationally focussed college, is interested generally in the effects of multimedia on all types of performance – conventional and other.
Once the decision had been made to purchase Catalyst and PixelMAD, Projected Image Digital pulled out all the stops to ensure it was delivered in time to be put through its paces by MA student Rachel Nicholson for her final assessed performance piece.
“PID were fantastic,” states Hunt. “As you can imagine, it was a steep learning curve for us, and someone knowledgeable at PID was always on hand to answer technical queries and to generally be helpful.” PID also supplied a selection of Artnet boxes to do the DMX conversions, and Rose Bruford bought their own Macintosh G5 on which to run the Catalyst.
Nicholson’s Masters explores the relationship between performer and projection, the spatial dimensions inhabited by performers onstage and the fact that people can’t ‘enter’ projections in that environment … yet its very presence creates illusionist elements in the space. Projection can almost be another live actor.
Her work ‘Patterns of Chaos’ utilised two small Hewlett Packard 2000 lumen projectors upstage, and a 2000 lumen Sharp XGV10 XL at front of house, which was also arranged by PID, plus a series of reflective material ‘drops’ from ceiling to floor.
She prepared specially created moving and static image content that was stored in the Catalyst and beamed directly over the cloths and the performers in a suggestive mix of movement, colour and imaginative possibility. Augmented with careful offstage lighting including LED ColorBlock fixtures, the lighting of the space (including that created by the projected images) changed dramatically with the nature of the projections as the piece unfolded.
The dancers were American Theatre Arts students from the college, and Nicholson worked closely with them to develop the final 15-minute piece to three sections of music. She allowed the dancers the creative freedom to work and interact with the projected images.
Her content included lots of scientific and natural fractal images, as she became fascinated by the concept of repetition as the work evolved. She used both Catalyst and PixelMAD to effect these repeated shapes – a diverse range of images from cauliflower leaves to cancer cells – “The scientific and the natural cells have similar patterns of repetition. It’s a completely random connection … yet your mind tends to think that there must be some reasoning in it”. She used projection as a tool to repeat images technically throughout the space.
She says one of the most useful Catalyst functions is the way the different layers interact with each other, allowing the projection of completely different images. “You can change the aspect of the content and effectively - virtually - split the projector into many projectors. The Pro system has up to eight layers. “This was particularly useful for me because the material itself formed a key element of the total performance space.”
She also took a live digicam feed of one of the performers and fed this back live via the Catalyst onto the performer as she moved, silhouetted, behind one of the columns of material. She filmed animated effects like a rack of chasing White Light’s digital festoon lights, fed it through PixelMAD and used this to change the colour and texture of the clip before it was used onstage. For control she used a Hog PC – primarily for space reasons in the small studio.
“Being able to manipulate both Catalyst and PixelMAD in real time is brilliant,” states Nicholson. As the operator, it allowed her and the technology to become totally absorbed and integrated into the performance.
In picture: Rachel Nicholson and Nick Hunt.
http://www.projectedimagedigital.com.
5th October 2005
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