The challenges presented to the Aura team, led by LDI Sound Designer of the Year 2002 John A Leonard, were both artistic and technical. They had to gather the archive material demanded by the show, create new content and work out how to replay the video onto the four-way split screen created by the set designer. They also had to ensure that the projection system would work not only at London's Barbican Theatre but also as the show visited the USA and then toured Britain - and create the show's sound design at the same time.
"It was a very steep learning curve, and very hard work,'' recalls Aura's John Leonard. Content for the show was a mixture of painstakingly tracked down archive footage ("when we told many of the places specializing in Indian archive footage what the material was for, the phone would mysteriously go dead," says Leonard) and new material shot with the show's cast prior to rehearsals. "We were fortunate enough to have John Driscoll working with us as director of photography for these shoots," Leonard explains. "He has worked as a theatre lighting designer but now specializes in film and video, so had a perfect combination of knowledge from these separate worlds." These sequences were edited by Richard Overall, then combined with the other material and formatted for the projection screen by John Leonard using Final Cut Pro on a variety of Apple Macintosh computers.
For video replay onto the upstage screen, divided into four projection surfaces, Aura chose to use four Christie L6 5200 ANSI Lumen projectors as back-projectors. "Budget considerations meant that there were discussions about using one projector, but there was so little throw behind the screen that we really had to use four projectors. We chose the Christie units because they were bright and because the people at Christie were very helpful," says Leonard.
For replay they chose the VidShow system from MediaMation, replaying video for the four projectors from one PC. "Scott [Aura’s Scott George] wrote a control panel for the system . . . then pushed it to its limits,'' is how Leonard now describes the show's hectic technical period which saw Aura install wired and wireless ethernet networks around the Barbican's auditorium to allow video data to be moved quickly from editing Macs to replay PCs. George also made use of Richmond Sound Design's E-Show to send MIDI control information from Richmond's ShowMan show control system on a PC at the rear of the auditorium to the video replay computers on stage via Ethernet. He also took a MIDI feed to the show's lighting desk. "We first did this because we fitted scrollers to the video projectors to use as dousers; these were controlled by the lighting desk but we would send it MIDI commands to open or close the scrollers. Then for certain sequences in the show there were just too many things for the stage manager to say at the same time, so we would trigger sound, video and lighting from one cue."
And the result of all this work? The critics have the production a mixed reception but most, led by Germaine Greer on BBC television, seemed to want more of the video footage! And for Aura, Leonard says: "We learnt a lot on the show, but we continue to be fascinated by video and, hopefully, will get
