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Rosco’s Keystroke is a Masterstroke for Florence Theatre Company
Created to bring a renaissance of theatrical tradition to the city of Florence, the debut season of the Florence International Theatre Company (FITC) has seen it use Rosco’s new Keystroke hardware/software solution to add a translation element to its production of John Pielmeier’s Tony award winning play Agnes of God.
Marrying the techniques of American and Italian theatre, FITC’s aim is to build relationships with the local Tuscan community through productions and outreach programs.
Most of its plays are in English, but for Agnes of God FITC needed to have the English dialogue subtitled by being translated into Italian and then projected on to the set. However, as a small company, having a separate video/projector operator was not possible.
This was an ideal situation for Rosco’s Keystroke, a hardware/software solution perfect for small technical teams, as it allows audio and visual cues to be automatically triggered from the lighting desk.
Available for both PC and Macintosh, Keystroke is a DMX trigger which allows a lighting console to control virtually any software program running on an external computer - for example visual products like PowerPoint, Keynote Quicktime or Windows Media Player and audio playback programs like ProTools, iTunes, Garageband and SFX.
For Agnes of God, FITC programmed the subtitles into a PowerPoint presentation and Keystroke automatically advanced the ‘slides’ on cues from the lighting desk.
The great advantage of Keystroke is that it ensures sound, video and lighting cues are all perfectly synchronised. Yet just one person - the lighting operator - can be in complete control of all the required elements, without having to worry about operating extra faders or buttons.
The Keystroke hardware connects via USB and electronically listens to DMX channels 1 - 512, which are user assigned in the software to the commands that the slave PC is required to execute when Keystroke receives a predefined value at the required DMX channel address.
“Keystroke was a great help in running our slide show for the subtitles,” says Aaron Craig, co-founder of FITC and also the director of Agnes of God. “With over 90 cues on an 80 minute show, you can imagine how important it was for our lighting op to be able to keep both hands on the light board and have everything centrally located.”
He adds: “Next time, we want to plug the sound system in to Keystroke as well and run everything off the lighting board!”
20th June 2007
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