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Compulite Vector Green for RADA
As part of an ongoing sponsorship arrangement Compulite and Fuzion, their UK distributor, have recently upgraded RADA’s Compulite Vector Orange console to a Vector Green.
The console was first used on the production of Little Women staged in the Jerwood Vanbrugh Theatre at the beginning of February. Louisa May Alcott was 35 years old and already a successful author when her publisher Thomas Niles asked her to write “a book for girls”. The result was Little Women and its heroine Jo March. Based on Louisa May Alcott's own family experiences (and novel), Little Women follows the adventures of Jo, Meg, Beth and Amy March as they grow up in Civil War America.
The main design concept for the show was based around Jo’s attic, utilising video, designed by Nigel Sadler from Green Hippo, to transform the set into numerous different locations for the different scenes in the production. Lighting designer Matt Prentice used moving lights as specials to keep the light off the video projection, these included three ETC Source Four Revolutions and six Clay Paky Alpha Halos all supplied by Stage Electrics London, another major RADA sponsor.
Director Geoff Bullen commented: “I went to see a production of Complicite’s ‘A Disappearing Number’ at the Barbican which had breathtaking visuals. I saw the potential of this medium and thought it was something I should explore. We were still in the early stages of design for Little Women and the set seemed ideal for projection. I ran the idea past the designer and we both became keen to explore it further. Matt Prentice suggested we get together with Nigel Sadler to thrash through some ideas of projecting on to 3D surfaces. We duly met and resolved on three types of projection: scenic, pictorial and imaginative.
“With regard to the scenic, the show involved a number of exterior scenes, and, using conventional lighting, it is – of course – very difficult to create an atmospheric outdoor scene as any sort of gobo projection just gets washed out. The high power projectors we used to bathe the whole set in video were amazing. At one point in the show there is mention of rain and I (jokingly!) said to the team I wanted to see it rain. Half an hour later they had tweaked a few things and, and to my delight, raining it was! This remained one of the audience’s favourite moments in the show.
“The pictorial projections were used to pop-up pictures of the family and objects around the set and to generate some lurid melodramatic illustrations – all with the appropriate mid-19th century feel. Only the main character – Jo March – was ‘allowed’ these projections as an extension of her imagination. These rules and concepts kept me on the line and allowed me better to discriminate.
“One point where I did flex the muscle, though, was when I wanted the audience to experience extreme close up in an emotional part of the show. We used a live camera feed fed through to the projectors and it was most effective – if out of period! I was told some of the audience couldn’t work out whether it was real or recorded.
“Though the technical rehearsal was arduous, it always felt we were moving forward, always tweaking and improving. Nigel is a fine artist and a great technician and a warm, committed person to work with: this production owed him so much.”
The Vector was operated by first year lighting student Courtland (Cory) Evje – all RADA technical students operate lighting or sound for a show in their first year as part of their overall theatre training. Cory commented: “Going into the production process for Little Women, the musical, I had never used a Compulite desk before. All my prior experience had been with Strand 500 and ETC Express series desks. I found the learning curve on the Vector to be very fast; the user interface's modularity and level of information went a long way towards making common operations such as grouping as well as more complex processes such as moving light effects much easier and faster to accomplish.
“To say the Vector's software is feature-filled would probably be an understatement; the simplicity with which you can assign colours to scroller frames and speed up the process of scroller colour selection was perhaps my most used, and most loved feature. The speed with which you could store attribute libraries for intelligent lights made my workflow much more efficient, and proceed much more smoothly.
”Between my now increased familiarity with the Vector series of Compulite desks, and the vast number of features built into the software, I would be much more inclined to use a Vector desk in future productions when they are available to me.”
The video was all run from two Hippotizer V3 media servers driving two Panasonic 7000 lumen DLP projectors and one Barco 12k projector, loaned by PSL, to cover the whole stage area.
Matt Prentice, RADA’s head of lighting, commented: “we have a specialist course in stage electrics and lighting design that trains students in the two main areas of production electrics work and lighting design. The production electrics sector covers all areas of the role of a production electrician’s job. Lighting design covers the role of a theatrical lighting designer and through practical exercises and lighting the Academy’s public productions students learn all aspects of this craft. Thanks to Green Hippo and Compulite we can now use Video in our productions very effectively.
We are using increasing numbers of moving lights and media servers on our productions and we needed a console that fully integrated these into the lighting control operation. The Vector is one of the few systems that not only provides a high level of intelligent lighting control, but also automatically downloads thumbnails from the Hippotizer media server on to the Vector picker screens. We always strive to offer our students the very latest in technical equipment and the ease of use of the Vector system and its ability to be adapted to suit the operation style of the user made it the obvious choice. We had operated the Vector Orange for a year, but needed a more powerful console; luckily Fuzion came to the rescue with the Vector Green, which has 16 DMX ports – more than enough for our current productions.’
The specialist lighting students Tom Lightbody, John Maddox and Gabriel Phillips-Sanchez are currently using the Vector for a new Son et Lumière project in the Gielgud theatre where they have to choose a piece of music, design the lighting to suit the music and then run the whole show from time code.
14th March 2008
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