FRAY Studio delivers for Frozen on Broadway
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Working with leading media server manufacturer disguise and real-time effects software Notch, FRAY co-founders Finn Ross and Adam Young are taking the animation magic of Disney and rendering it with full integrity in the theatre.
"Frozen is a show about transformation, a spring-time world that moves to a frozen one, a frightened woman to a self-empowered leader," says Young.
To do this, FRAY collaborated with set and costume designer Christopher Oram and Richard Nutbourne Scenic Studio to develop a technique to make scenery look like stone or wood under normal theatre lighting, but then magically transforms into ice through the clever use of LED video mapping.
Ross continues, "We wanted to take the normal world of Arendelle and transform it to a glistening, crystalline, frozen space, in a way that an audience would not expect. Elsa is the centre of creating this world; we were tasked with helping bring her magic and powers to life."
From the show's conception, Ross and Young were set upon using disguise's latest media server, the gx 2, supplied by WorldStage, as their control component.
"We were taking on a lot of new and unique challenges in an incredibly time-sensitive and public arena," explains Ross. "We needed to know we had a media server team behind us 100% and that we had a server powerful enough to handle our workflow.
"The gx 2 has been built purposefully to allow for complex, real-time graphics," says Young. "The component parts inside the gx 2 allow for increased head room for graphics processing. This meant that we could develop the Notch blocks much further than we previously thought we could. It allowed us to fill the block with extra details, grading and a level of finish that we previously wouldn't have been able to achieve on a conventional machine. By using the gx 2 we didn't have to limit the art of the show."
FRAY worked closely with video programmer Zach Peletz and video system designer Jonathon Lyle both of whom were instrumental in integrating the Notch and disguise platforms into the Frozen video workflow. “The importance of Jonathon and Zach’s input in the video aspect was huge, real-time work flow adds an additional layer of complexity for system designers and programmers,” says Ross. “Jonathon designed design a system to allow this and Zach became part programmer part animator making Notch do all we wanted. We couldn’t have done it without a brilliant team.” Weaving throughout the show, across the set's 12m x 9m LED backdrop, is one of the production's most jaw-dropping effects - a constantly shifting, immensely intricate and entirely live rendering of the Aurora Borealis, or Northern Lights. "It was revolutionary for me to see content shift in shape, speed and colour, with no cross-fade and no locking timecode. Being able to instantly respond to an idea in the moment was liberating," says Ross.
(Jim Evans)
