FRAY Studio crafts multiple worlds for Mean Girls
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"I love a gratuitously long fade but this was not the show for those," says Finn Ross, co-founder of FRAY Studio on Mean Girls' insta-fast scene changes. "Casey had an absolute stage vision for the show. He sees the video as part of the choreography, so that content moves and changes to the same beats and counts as the performers. The choreography on stage is very detailed, very fast and Tina Fey's script can change location in a beat. Our design approach had to be one to embrace and enable this speed."
Ross's creative partner and FRAY co-founder Adam Young explains: "During a number in the musical's first act we hurdle between present day, the past, fantasy locations, basements, school corridors, a swimming pool, a party, canteens and English classrooms! Using video, we are able to jump from place to place within a second, without disorientating an audience."
Ross and Young opted to use LED screens for the production's video display rather than projection to preserve the rich colours of the video content. Young explains, "Because the show's set is entirely LED, we could use colours and tones that we haven't been able to achieve with projection. The brightness of the screens can compete with onstage lighting so we could create video content such as dark brown brick or extremely dark blue night skies and moonlit gardens. If this was being done with projection, all of this would have been washed out unless the stage was practically pitch black."
Ross agrees, "It was clear from day one this would be a bright Broadway musical, so projection was never an option, it had to be LED. Scott wanted to clad the set in something pink and he had the idea of using pink-tinted Perspex to cover all of the screens that form the set."
Ross and Young saw an immediate opportunity in the material, "The stage is made up of two huge curved LED screens with various sliding panels and six LED screen legs that go into the wings," says Ross. "We realised that by cladding the screens in specific pink Perspex it would take away the LEDs' harshness in the intimate theatre environment. It would also allow us to run the LED processors at a much higher level, giving us banding-free, rich colour. This ensures that despite the large amount of LED and video, the whole set feels magical and not digital."
(Jim Evans)
