Tony Awards
The Ask.
Replace building scenery for each performance with LED walls. Previsualize the show programming before load in. Be ready to make adjustments on the fly during the 1 hour of rehearsal each performance is allotted on the rehearsal days. We decided to use content building blocks to add more realism to the digital scenery and to facilitate faster real time editing and timing for transitions.
What I did.
I built the screens Radio City Music Hall and The Beacon Theater models then depending on which year we were in either venue I loaded them into Hippotizer Shape for pre-visualizations programming working with the content team and production designers show decks. Because we used building blocks for all show looks we could replace, reprogram, color correct or tint completely on the fly without re-rendering content. That made it so designers could edit in real time during the short 1 hour rehearsal sessions.
How I did it.
I worked with Green Hippo to developed smooth X Position and Y Position playback by adding two channels for position one for speed and the other for timing. This facilitated super smooth position moves that looked like real scenery on camera. I built content mapping grids that worked by scenes so my custom Grand MA Lighting Desk macro could auto load screens for programming. As well as teaching content team how to load and replace content in the background so we did not have to re-program for any content swaps. I built all the content mapping grids so that the content team could wokr in imperial or metric when trying to build accurately size virtual sets.
What I used to do it.
Grand MA Lighting Desks, Hippotizer Media Servers, After FX and Photoshop. In addition to playback the server signal was routed to the TV truck or timing and color correction before being returned to the screens for playback. This also made it so the Truck could cover our outputs to run show edited packages as needed.
