Well-known Broadway lighting designer Richard Winkler (Evita & Fame - The Musical Tour) is using High End Systems' Catalyst system for the first time. He's also specified a High End rig with eight Studio Spot 575 and four Studio Color 575 automated luminaires, controlled by a Flying Pig Systems Hog 500 console.
"Catalyst is a new tool that will help revolutionize the industry - it will take us to the next level of theatrical presentation," says Winkler. "Sound in the last 10 years has become the major important design element, along with lighting, scenery and costumes - and video is on its way. The advent of the Catalyst will help move things forward at a very rapid pace."
The Catalyst system combines the power of digital media with the creativity of automated effects lighting. In The Little Prince, Catalyst is called into play when a character must draw various images - a sheep, and a rose, for example - which are illustrated in the book. Says video designer Colin Lowery: "The script has little line drawings that one of the characters draws on a sketch pad in the show. So we wanted to have it appear like the audience was seeing what he was drawing in real time. What the original stage directions say is to have an artist backstage with an overhead projector doing the drawings with grease pencils. But instead, we enlarged the drawings from the script so that they would be bigger, put them under the transparency sheet and a Wacom Tablet - that's a pressure-sensitive drawing pad that enables you to draw within Painter and Photoshop. I have a computer that's hooked up to the Wacom Tablet, so I plugged the video out of that computer into a deck so that anything that was happening on the computer screen was also being recorded on a tape."
Lowery's son traced the artwork. "A complicated drawing would probably take three or four minutes and you probably have 30 seconds of on-stage time in which you would see the drawing," Lowery explains, "so we had to speed it up like crazy - in some cases 900 percent. The drawings were white on black, so we'd make changes with the background colour, drawing speed, shape and other parameters and create a new movie. My programmer would just replace the file in Catalyst with the new file."
Of Catalyst, Winkler says: "Catalyst allows phenomenal flexibility as long as you have a video content creator and a lighting programmer who are capable of making the content changes available to you in the theatre," he adds. The speed at which changes can be made is important in the theatre. "We had ideas and we changed and modified images within three minutes in the theatre," Winkler says. "Whereas, without Catalyst, any changes would typically be done out of the theatre, usually overnight and it would be costly and you were never really sure exactly what you were getting until you got it back the next day. So by having Catalyst and Apple's Final Cut Pro software on-site, we could make the changes and load them straight into Catalyst immediately."
(Lee Baldock)
