Finland - Tony Kushner’s Angels in America continues its sell-out performances at Finland’s National Theatre, with a projection-heavy design driven by a Green Hippo Hippotizer Boreal+ MK2 Media Server.
Staged in the theatre’s Small Stage space, the 292-strong audience each night is drawn to the proscenium opening which is 10m wide and 6m high, where the 15m-wide back wall is turned entirely into a projection surface. On stage, the team has rigged a set that features 13 pillars, ‘ancient’ marble and a piece of statue bulging from the wall, and five portrait-shaped window frames, making projection a challenge.
“The set consists primarily of a single stage image – a ‘too wide’ back wall, which we wanted to turn into a projection surface,” explains Ville Virtanen, head of the lighting and video department at the Finnish National Theatre. “This meant that the standard front-and-centre projector – an Epson EB-PU2216B with ELPLM15 lens – in the Small Stage was insufficient, as the proscenium arch blocked part of the image. Additionally, the 13 pillars on stage had to be worked around to ensure the back wall could be used as a complete video surface without shadows. I also wanted to ensure that when the angel flies on stage, the video projection does not reflect onto her. Therefore, we installed two Epson L735U projectors from both sides of the stage to work around the pillars.”
Throughout the four-hour-long production, adapted and directed by Linda Wallgren, video works in cohesion with the lighting to create sometimes hallucinogenic 1980s New York-inspired cityscapes that play with time and space.
“Hippotizer SHAPE was the core of the whole show,” continues Virtanen. “There are some moving parts on the set, and they overlap each other quite a lot and with SHAPE we could easily separate our projections to different surfaces. And since we are using multiple projectors on multiple surfaces and trying to match all pixels with each other, without SHAPE this would have been near impossible.”
The show consists of approximately 420 lighting and video cues, with around 80 of them controlled via MIDI. Additionally, MIDI commands from the soundboard ensured perfect synchronization between lighting, video, and specific sound effects, such as lightning strikes and musical cues.
“I wanted to incorporate neon lighting and colours reminiscent of New York advertisements from the era,” says Virtanen. “We achieved this with LED strips embedded in the set’s window frames. The production uses a total of approximately 57m of 12 × 25mm Neonflex RGB+W (3000K) 19.2 W/m pixel-mappable LED. The LED strip is controlled by three drivers and three power supplies, as the back wall ‘breaks apart’ into three sections during the play.
“I used a ZooKeeper connection to the Hippotizer Boreal+ MK2 at our grandMA3 console, which allowed for testing before actual programming. Additionally, my computer had an NDI connection to the Hippotizer, making it possible to preview After Effects, Photoshop, and Premiere Pro content directly on the correct surfaces.
“We especially love how easy Hippotizer is to control with a lighting desk, since most of our video operators have experience with programming lights and Hippotizer basically works like a huge moving light. The power of the system is excellent and in Angels in America we haven’t had any hiccups in performance, even though we used quite heavy SHAPE files during rehearsal period before cleaning the CAD models to only the necessary set pieces.”
