Enever was brought by the show's lighting designer Paule Constable and the National's lighting staff to help realize the large-format projections required as part of the set design. The aim was to use abstract images created by the show's set designer, Giles Cadle, and video projection designer, Thomas Gray of The Gray Circle, to dress the curved black BP screen used as a cyclorama. The difficulty was that, unlike previous shows that Enever has been involved with in the Olivier, including Anything Goes and Love's Labour's Lost, the projectors could not be positioned behind the cyc because of space limitations.
Enever explained: "Instead, they were to be rigged on an overhead lighting bridge, so my first task was to work out the number, exact positioning and lens requirements of the projectors. This led us to use three Pani BP4 Compact projectors with slide changers, with the stage-right projector covering the stage-left section of the screen and the stage-left projector the stage-right side in order to achieve the throw required to fill the whole cyc."
Enever then had to calculate the complex pre-distortions required to make the images fall square. "This was particularly challenging because though the cyc looks curved, it was not actually a regular curve - it had a flat section upstage then a fairly tight bend at either side leading to two flat side sections angled downstage!"
The solution was to build a scale model of the cyc Slides supplied by the show's creative team were scanned into Photoshop and adjusted to blend six scans into three different panoramic skies; other images were supplied as Photoshop files. All of the images were then split into three overlapping sections, scaled to fit on the model where they were then photographed using a five by four inch view camera incorporating the required distortion correction. These images were then output as 10" x 8" Cibachrome masters which were cut and mounted into Pani frames.
Enever produced separate soft-edge overlap slides for use in the Pani's masking gate, requiring him to develop some new tricks, because the overlaps had to fall on the curved sections of the screen, and because the centre projector would have an 11cm lens while the outer two were fitted with 13.5cm lenses and a seamless overlap was required.
The total number of slides produced by DHA Lighting was in the region of 70 to 80, with around 11 sets of slides now used during the two three-hour parts of the show. The show's two parts play at the National until mid-March, and are then scheduled to return for Christmas 2004.
(Sarah Rushton-Read)
