Kassan Productions originally produced the Irish/English love story and five years on and it returned to Cork Opera House for a technical preview period before moving to the larger venue in Dublin.
With a miniscule amount of rear projection depth, the original production made inventive use of projection for the main scenic and location elements, dispensing with the need for excessive amounts of backcloths and scenery. Back then Driscoll used Pani large format projectors and slide changers combined with an arsenal of traditional VSFX projectors and luminaires with animation effects.
This time he decided on a combination of high powered video and PIGI large format projection. Driscoll once again turned to XL Video - with whom he's collaborated on many high profile projects including, Our House, Billy Elliot and Rebecca.
The PIGI equipment and the digital output of the imagery onto large format, high definition scroll film was supplied by E/T/C UK. Driscoll is also fulfilling the role of lighting designer. Mark Jonathan originally designed the show but due to commitments abroad he was unavailable on this occaision.
Jonathan's 2000 associate Jason Larcombe was also onboard and they kept faithful to much of Jonathan's original work. Scenic Designer Patrick Murray significantly redesigned the set, this time including several large flown and automated structural pieces, but retaining the simple large blank canvas format of the initial show, leaving space for the projection to fill in the details.
Out front, two doubled Barco R18 projectors beamed across the whole stage and two sets of grey slatted blinds came across the stage to form another projection surface. Onstage XL supplied two Catalyst DL1 moving head projectors, rigged either side of stage behind a special Gerriets BP screen, and in front of that, a black sharks tooth gauze. The DL1s were used for smaller picture-in-picture details like shop windows and abstract images like fire. They also created the moon in the show's signature Ha'penny bridge scene. Some of the DL1 images were carefully masked and 'mapped' into gaps left in the PIGI artwork.The PIGI S 500s were also rigged upstage of the BP screen on a custom designed cantilevered shelf structure, situated between the show's tracking replica of the Ha'penny Bridge. The pair of PIGIs were fitted with double scrollers and Barco wide angle 0.9 lenses to cover the full 12 metre screen width. PIGI control was by DMX 512.The 2005 show's film footage and artwork was created from scratch. Driscoll re-used some of his original 2000 show artwork, cloudscapes and textural stills photography from his own archive, plus some newly shot special effects film sequences. The historical images were sourced from the National Library of Ireland. They were restored digitally, treated in a variety of other programmes and perspective corrected by E/T/C before printing onto large format film or being stored on the media servers.
All video sources were stored on two Catalyst media servers, one located with the R18s at front of house, and the other onstage, feeding the DL1s. XL Video and production chief projectionist Clarke Anderson worked intensively with Driscoll in preparing and loading the Catalysts, operated during the show via the WholeHog II lighting desk. The console was programmed from the outset to control both moving and generic lighting, Catalyst digital projection and PIGI projection was by Steve Parkinson, also from the 2000 production.
Driscoll says: "I find that the combining of lighting and projection design for a production works well if you're surrounded by a great support team. As a designer you are in an extremely exposed po
