Pre-Visualization in Theater
"Previsualization (also known as previz...) is a function to visualize complex scenes in a movie before filming. It is also a concept in still photography. Previsualization is applied to techniques such as storyboarding, either in the form of charcoal drawn sketches or in digital technology in the planning and conceptualization of movie scenery make up." [wikipedia.org]
Schrödinger's Girlfriend
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The Sex Habits of American Women
Sex Habits of American Women
Director: Michael Dixon Set Designer: Kate Boyd Michael and Kate really challenged me with this design. One projector had to be able to put isolated image boxes in four different places on stage in four different shapes and sizes. The video, featuring Anne Darragh, was provided by Amy Glazer and I functioned as the Video Special Effects Supervisor tasked with stripping the color, correcting Brightness and Contrast to accommodate the limits of the projector against ambient lighting, cropping and placing edited video within masks, tweaking the sync audio and rendering cues for the next rehearsal. The relative ease of my production process allowed us to run a rehearsal at night and share notes after. I'd stay up and make small changes and advance large themes, sleep while they rendered and be ready for the next rehearsal to change it all again. Before the cycle restarted I'd as likely as not be working on some part of the process that needing tuning up and end up making some kind of Art. For a few weeks straight. Just like old times. It ain't a crime to love what you do, as if it had to said. Here are some more attempts and results.
Video Special F/X - Mastectomy
Without going into painstaking detail, this is a story of the painstaking detail required to correct for a misunderstanding between the Director of the video and the F/X team (me).
I had never tried anything like it before but I knew enough about Photoshop and Premiere to know it was possible. I was working at Exploratorium when the digital video revolution began so by the time I was tasked with taking a video of an actress opening her blouse to reveal a mastectomy scar I understood it to be a matter of pushing pixels around. Having been an avid fan of the series Movie Magic in the 1990's I was well aware of the industry standards in special effects with a passing familiarity of the tools and techniques involved. All of them required coordination between the Director (who wanted a specific effect) and the F/X crew (who knew the limits of producing it) to insure that the best possible effect was achieved. Based on what I had seen and deduced, I asked that, for the duration of the F/X shot, the actress be stationary and when she opened her blouse to resist rotating her torso or moving towards or away from the camera. The less her body changed frame to frame the less work I would have to do frame by frame resizing and repositioning the pixel patch I made to cover her exposed breast. Well, I got what I got and did the best I could with it. Naturally I envisioned a Beauty Shot but it served the play and that's the only real requirement of a design. The two clips below are from different stages in the development of the final cue which included the addition of the visible scar over the skin patch. In 2003 who else besides me was doing this level of work on a PC in a theater?
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